“You allowed Stephanie to reenter this house at great risk,” I replied. “You cannot disagree that action has helped to bring us here. If you love her even half as well as I do, then I know I can count on you not to gamble with her freedom a second time.”

“Her soul,” said Rastin, at last speaking up. Could I count on him to be the voice of reason? His next words told me no. “If it’s entwined with yours, as you now claim, then it’s too dangerous to do as we had planned before.”

“It is too dangerous not to do as we had planned,” I argued, unlatching my cloak and tossing it off. It unfurled in midair, dissipating to nothing. That’s when I unsheathed Tumult’s wavy-bladed kris dagger, the same weapon with which I’d attacked the boy in the dream. Flipping it in my grip, I now offered it to him, pommel-first.

He blinked at me from behind his glasses, no longer the man I’d faced in the graveyard but the uncertain boy who had first entered Moldavia, an unbeliever of all the truths he had told Stephanie regarding what I was.

“I can’t,” he said, holding up both palms and shaking his head in refusal of the blade. “Not if Stephanie doesn’t want—”

“Stephanie wants what I want,” I snarled at him. “And that is for her and me to be together for all time. She wants this because her heart has been poisoned to want it. My soul overshadows hers. And I have now come to be certain that, if my soul is allowed to shatter, hers will follow suit. Need I remind you, though, that she is alive?”

“You’re saying she’ll die?”

“That will be the least horrific fate to befall her,” I said.

“And the worst?”

“My greatest fear?” he said, shaking his head. “That she could become as I am.”

“If we destroy your heart,” said Rastin, “those two ends are stopped how?”

“Because the rupturing of my heart and its destruction by an outside force are two different things,” I explained.

“You’re saying if we destroy it while Rastin has the portal open, the bond will automatically be severed?” Cheney asked.

“It must be,” Rastin answered for me, his tone turning as bleak as his expression. “His soul, cut free of its anchor, will extract itself from her.”

“Think of a frozen flower,” I told the boy. “Crush it, and it shatters. Remove the ice, though, and—”

“It still won’t live,” he said, his word actually serving to silence me.

And so. It seemed I would have to change tactics.

“You made a promise to me,” I said to him. “One that, for her sake, you must now find the courage to keep.”

He shook his head at me. “She—”

“When Rastin opens the portal, my spirit, so long as it is bound by the curse, will revolt. My incapacitation means that you must do it. Now take the dagger.”

A long stretch of seconds passed. And then, surprising me once again, Mr. Cheney at last accepted Tumult’s blade.