This mask, though—the one who called himself Wrath—was, with his crimson uniform, trailing cloak, and shining silver death’s head mask, perhaps the most arresting of them all.

And the shard of my soul he represented—arguably the most heinous—fit too well with the image he presented.

“Do you hazard a guess?” he asked, dark amusement backing his distorted baritone.

I did not bother to answer. Because I did know—at least in part—what had caused his emergence from the cellar.

In the past, my masks had each had their turn at me. Over the decades, I have worn their various guises and, in so doing, have become the aspect of myself they represented entirely.

Control was what Wrath was after now. The control that, fortunately for the Armands, the mask I wore now—that of Languor—currently enjoyed.

Alternately, however, that meant that I, on some level, must want Wrath to win control also. For, in the same way my thoughts were the masks’, so, too, were the actions and words of the masks my own.

Wrath’s appearance portended all the disaster I hoped to circumvent. For it meant that he already had reason to want to take hold of me and, therefore, the fate of Moldavia’s occupants.

“Leave me,” I snarled at the mask. “Take whatever it is you think you know and go sink back into your hole. Whatever plan you have to ensnare me, it won’t work.”

“Fool. You are ensnared already.”

“I told you to go,” I warned, a dangerous tremble starting in my form.

“My eyes,” Wrath said, that awful voice slicing deeper the gash of my growing anxiety. “To look through them would show you the truth. Should you wish to see it.”

“My wish, monster, is for you to return to your hell and thus leave me to mine.” I swung to face him. He sat upon the pale blue chaise near the parlor’s bay windows. A stag’s antlers crowned his hooded head. Dual pits of nothing watched me through the silver skull.

“That is not your wish,” Wrath whispered, his words soft and supercilious, the collection of syllables akin to the guttering of flame.

I squared my jaw. And regarded him in stubborn silence.

For his presence alone told me he must be right.

“Very well. What is it, then?” I dared to challenge him, my dread of his answer echoing through my chest, that empty space that had once housed both an intact soul and its beating vessel. “Speak, and say what it is we do wish.”

Wrath did not answer. Instead, his nightmarish visage rose to a height that matched my own. Next, he placed a gloved hand over his mask and took it away to reveal a face of nothingness. With the slow and measured steps of a pallbearer, he approached me. I stood my ground in spite of my wariness.

Stopping mere feet from me, he extended one crimson-clad arm and offered with his gloved and ring-lined hand his silver mask of irreverence, malice, and destruction.