We picked our way through basement crap until we reached the stairs. Halfway up them, the hairs on my neck rose, five seconds in advance of the damned voice that teased at my memory.

“Going somewhere, Eden?”

“You made your point,” I called. “You’re a badass. We need to take you seriously. We do. But keeping me locked in this building isn’t actually going to accomplish anything. If you want to talk, let’s talk. Otherwise, we really need to go.”

“In a hurry, are you? For what, exactly? There’s no fire to put out, Eden.”

Those words snagged on a memory, the one that insisted I knew who this was, that I’d met her before.

Same voice. Different tenor. Different inflections.

There’s no fire to put out.

No.

Hell, no. That wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t…

I took a deep breath and turned to Gabriel.

“Fire.” That’s all I said, seeing if he’d make the connection. In a heartbeat, he did, his lips forming a name.

I saw that name on his lips, and I tumbled through memory, images flashing. A house, nestled between two tall buildings. A woman, fleeing to a parking garage. Middle-aged with girlish barrettes and a girlish voice. A woman easily dismissed. A woman we had dismissed.

The young woman in the park who’d given Todd the file and set him on Greg Kirkman’s path. I’d recognized her voice there, too, but couldn’t connect it to the fragile whisper of the middle-aged woman with the silly pink barrettes.

There’s one more connection that my mind makes as it tumbles through memories.

The fifth figure in the fun house. The person in charge, the one I couldn’t see, couldn’t even hear.

Just moments ago, Stacey Pasolini talked about “that bitch” who showed them what to do, made them promises for what the killings would bring them.

The same woman.

All the same woman.

Imogen Seale. The “witness” we’d been chasing for six months. An answer we’d been chasing for so much longer, though we never realized it.

Imogen Seale. A powerful sluagh in manifested form. The one the elders had admitted to Cainsville. The woman who’d given Todd a victim to get the Cŵn Annwn involved. When the Cŵn Annwn sought a deal with their “higher powers,” she had answered and given Ioan the names of four killers. Killers she’d counseled to commit the crimes for which they would be executed.

Why so many levels of complication?

I knew.

The Tysons and Eddie Hilton each murdered a couple in the manner the sluagh prescribed. That allowed the sluagh to tell Ioan that my parents must kill in the exact same manner, to make the deaths seem like an extension of the original killings, supposedly done in some random and meaningless ritualistic manner.

Except it wasn’t random. Wasn’t meaningless.

It was a trick.