Her voice shook. “It got me.”

Kane squeezed her hand reassuringly. “But you got out.”

Adeline waved her hand around at the stilled reverie. “Did you do this?”

“Kind of. Come on.”

They reached the clearing with the gazebo. Elliot was there, Sophia fastened to his arm. He was breathing hard. “We were running…from the owl, and then…time stopped.”

Adeline pointed at Kane. “He did it.”

“It wasn’t me. It was this whistle.”

“Where’s Ursula?” Elliot asked.

Kane pointed at the spider. Elliot, to his credit, ran toward it and not away, but before he got close an earsplitting frequency fissured the air. It practically cut through them, so harsh it forced everyone to the ground. Kane could feel it in his teeth, in his eye sockets. He fought to hold down vomit and failed.

Was this Helena’s newest twist?

Across the clearing the air dimpled, bending the light into a large, upright rectangle. A swath of the scenery was peeling away, cleanly dissociating like two great doors opening into the reverie.

Kane held his breath. His tongue tasted of blood and bile.

Through the doors floated something completely alien to the rotting reverie—a woman draped in a plush fur coat that was the soft, whipped pink of sunrise on storm clouds. Her wide-brimmed hat and thick-heeled shoes matched as though spun from the same sugary atmosphere, and her octagonal glasses reflected everything in metallic clarity. She fingered the ascot around her neck. On her wrist hung the bracelet thick with charms. The only hardness about her was the muscles of her nude calves and the frown of her glossed lips.

Poesy surveyed the scene. “Oh, what a mess.”

Relief poured through Kane, as thick and sweet as the color of Poesy’s costume. She was power, personified. She would save them all.

Adeline must have felt the opposite. “Who are you?” she shouted.

Poesy smiled but did not answer. She glanced over her shoulder and beckoned something. “Don’t be shy. Come in, my dear.”

There came a sound like the shutter of an old camera, and with a flicker of the moonlight, Poesy was no longer alone. What had joined her in the doorway was a monster unresolved between a horse and a demon. Its twisted body stood upon four elongated legs that ended in hooked hooves. It had no face, only a long, curved beak. It had no eyes or ears, only a pair of spiraling horns. Its skin was glossy obsidian, stretched over sharp bones and an exposed spine. Worst of all was the way it walked, its legs moving with their own, inelegant independence, as though Poesy stood beneath the dark sister of the rose-gold spider.

“Others,” said Poesy, “meet my Dreadmare.”

The Dreadmare curtsied politely.