Though the tension in his frame did not leave him, it did seem to subside slightly with this answer.

“I have never encountered you in this mask before,” he said.

“As well you might not again,” I warned. “Which is why, if we are in agreement, we must act quickly.”

“You would submit yourself willingly to the procedure?” prompted Rastin, at last beginning to believe. To hope. “You would . . . participate?”

“No more questions, Rastin. You will come to finish what you began, or you will not.”

Would he be so cruel as to reduce me to begging?

Rastin, perhaps sensing that I was close, did something he had never before. He took several steps toward me, enough to leave a short space between us. Then he did something even more remarkable than that. He placed a hand, heavy and warm, on my shoulder. Though Rastin was not truly here with me in physical form, his powers were such that he could make it feel as though he was. He squeezed the jutting bones there, an action that stunned me far more than anything he had said or could ever say to me.

“Of course I will come.”

Silence pulsed between us.

Responsibility.

Perhaps that had been the wrong word to describe the nature of our understanding of one another. What was that old saying about the enemy of my enemy?

Though Rastin was not my friend, he was perhaps the closest thing I had ever had to one.

At least before Stephanie . . .

“How soon can you be here?” I asked, new fear creeping over me. For had we not already conspired on too much aloud in the presence of something that could just as easily unravel it all?

That was to say . . . me.

“I am currently far from here,” said Rastin. “Half a world away. But I will leave at first opportunity.”

Gratitude and a small measure of relief coursed through me. And yet I could not thank him. I dared not for fear that, in doing so, I might curse the plan we had made. The one that, in obliterating me, would save her.

“Erik,” Rastin said, channeling my attention to him again with his release of my shoulder.

“What?” I snapped. For maybe now I was Erik again. Maybe she had made me so.

“For this to work, you know you will need—”

“A heart,” I finished for him.

This I did know. And yet I had hoped he would not advise me to implant one.

“Not yet,” I said. “Not until you arrive. I can’t risk its rupturing. Not with the family here.”

“You risk more without one.”

He was right. But wrong as well.

If I put a heart in, it would draw my spirit together and focus it. With the pieces of my soul banished back into my body, my masks would not be free to have at me. Wrath would be relieved of his power to overtake me. Unless of course something caused the heart to break. In which case I would lose control no matter what.