She leaned back, away from him. He noticed that her eyes were greener than they’d been a moment before, her cheeks brighter.

“What is this?” she asked, showing him the object she’d taken from his shelf. “It’s a pretty thing. I might use it for my jewelry.”

It was the engraved silver box containing Antony’s ashes. “Not that one,” Augustus said. “Let me give you something better. Something made of ivory and rubies, to suit your complexion.”

She smiled. Augustus noted a fleck of gold in one of her eyes. Her skin was the color of milk. Her lips were like warmed wine now.

“What shall I do with this, then?” she asked.

“You’ll put it back where you found it,” he said, smiling.

She was a tease, this girl. Augustus thought about the things he would do to her. He had some ropes here, and a whip braided of soft leather, which would leave lovely marks on that pale flesh. His body hummed pleasantly.

“I think I will not,” Chrysate said.

Something changed in her. Her thighs clasped his, and Augustus felt, all at once, as though she were made of iron. The softness of her waist became something live and brutal beneath his palm. Augustus caught a glimpse of her face as she arched her spine, her throat toward the ceiling.

The green of her eyes had been eclipsed by black.

Augustus gasped beneath her, pain coursing through him. His hands scrabbled at her skin.

She opened the box, curled backward and drew her fingernails, almost lazily, along the stone of the floor. With a wrenching sound, a fissure appeared, a trench in the very earth. The priestess poured a measure of ash into the soil.

Augustus watched, horrified and paralyzed.

Chrysate pulled a pin from her braids and stabbed it into her fingertip. She held the finger above the ash for a century-long moment, before a glob of blood formed and fell into the trench.

With her terrifying, dilated pupils, she looked into Augustus’s eyes.

“Watch,” she ordered. “Listen.”

A wailing moan came from deep beneath the house. The floor tilted. The books spilled from the shelves, and Augustus himself fell to the floor, his face inches from the trench. He could not see to the bottom of it.

There were more sounds, shrieks and wails, indistinct calls in unknown languages, sounds of hunger and lust, sounds of despair.

A chill filled the room, and something began to move in the frozen dark down there. A dusky thing, twisting and rising like vapor over a river, a scrap of mist.

“Come,” the witch said to the mist. “Come to me.”

The thing rose, a creature taken from some deep ocean, and reeled into the air.

And then, before them, in Augustus’s chamber, was a man, transparent, strange, his eyes wide and black and terrified. A wound in his stomach, the blood itself transparent.

Augustus could see through his chest and into his motionless heart.

“Tell us your name,” Chrysate said. “Tell us who you are.”