“Okay,” I said.

“That still doesn’t solve the problem of what happens in the meantime,” Lucas replied.

“In the meantime?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t . . . I’m really not sure how soon this guy will get back to me. I’ve only met him once. It could be right away. But. If it isn’t . . .”

His unspoken question hovered in the air between us. What would we, or at least I, do until then?

“In the meantime, I’ll do what I’ve been doing until now,” I said simply.

“You mean . . . just sit tight?” He folded his arms like it was the last option he himself would have proposed.

But to that, I could only shrug. Because I still wasn’t quite ready to tell him that I also had someone I could, so long as he showed up again, ask for help.

“I don’t like the idea of your going back in there,” he said.

“I don’t think I have any other choice,” came my reply.

“You’ll call me this time,” he said. “If anything else happens. Whenever. Even if it’s the middle of the night?”

“I’ll call you,” I said.

And though I meant the promise, I also hoped I wasn’t going to be given any reason to keep it.

TWENTY-SIX

Zedok

Remaining on my side of Moldavia, I reemerged from the conservatory, making my reverse trek to the rear door of the house, this time with steps that sank into deep snow.

As I approached, I scanned the darkened yet still somehow eyelike windows of the house that once, so long ago, had been a home. An unquiet mausoleum now.

As I crossed the threshold, my hand itched to draw my weapon.

But as I made my way through kitchen and hallway, foyer, and, finally, parlor, I found no single other version of myself lurking in the gloom. After all that had happened, should I not have been beset by them? One at least?

Anyone who knew less about their own deeper nature might have found comfort in such seclusion after so much fear of waylay.

What this ominous solitude brought to me, however, amounted to just the opposite.

Because if no mask appeared to stop me in my plan or even to advise me against it, did that not suggest the plan itself—the only one Valor and thus I had concocted—was somehow . . . faulty?

TWENTY-SEVEN

Stephanie

Roses. Everywhere.

Their aroma, so distinct, pervaded the space, potent enough to make my head spin.

I drew a breath, sharp and short, recognizing my impossible surroundings for what they were. The conservatory. Not the old and ruined one behind our house. Instead, I’d been transported to a replica of its past, one resplendent with greenery and studded with innumerable buds, all different colors, each in various states of unfurling. And my presence here. It could only mean . . .