It all looked so real. And lacing the air? The faint scents of candlewax and lamp oil, burning firewood, lemon, lavender, and roses.

A moment more passed in which I had to convince myself I really was dreaming.

“Erik?” I asked him.

“Ah, you remembered my name,” he replied, his tone wry, sardonic.

“You,” I said then, almost in a whisper. “You’re . . . dead.”

The words prompted him to scowl at me, though he didn’t look any less gorgeous for it.

“And you, Miss Armand, are still standing. Tell me, shall I invite you to sit again, or is this a conversation for which you will insist upon being as unconventional as ever?”

He spoke like he knew me. Or . . . like he’d been observing me for a while. Something he’d alluded to in the last dream.

“I don’t even know what conversation it is we’re supposed to be having,” I said, taking my turn to be snappish while still reeling from the abruptness of his appearance.

“The young man,” he said with impatience. “We are discussing the young man.”

“Lucas?” I gestured toward the bay windows, which showed only the blackness of night.

“He must not be allowed to return,” Erik said. But I only half heard him, because there was still too much that needed to be cleared up.

“You’re not just a dream . . . are you?” I asked him, not certain yet if I wanted him to be real. Maybe not if the second version of the story Lucas had told us, the one in which Erik had killed his parents and sister, was true.

“I told you previously that I was not,” he said. His surliness. It couldn’t really be all because of Lucas . . .

“You also previously told me I should get out of my own house.” I folded my arms.

“Advice I still stand by,” came yet another acerbic reply. “And even more adamantly now. Because, by inviting that fool over here, you have hastened us all toward what I am certain shall be an unbearable outcome.”

Questions piled behind my lips. First thing first, though.

“So you were listening in?” I asked. “You heard what Lucas told us at dinner . . .”

“I did not murder my family, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, the vehemence in his voice almost covering the barest of trembles. His eyes, filled with indignation—and pain—fastened on to me, until he severed our locked gazes by turning away. “Though I was . . . responsible for their deaths.”

Well. That was vague.

But maybe, with a little push for specifics . . .

“What about the rest of it?” I asked him, because obviously he had been listening in. “The curse.”

“I already informed you there was a curse,” he replied.

“Yeah,” I said, turning slowly in place, fascinated by the grandeur of the room. “But you didn’t tell me what the curse was. He did.”

“He knows nothing of the curse,” snapped Erik, though his words scarcely registered because, by then, I’d spotted the piano.