He slowly stretched out his arm, gaze on hers. She reached down and brushed aside the thick black hairs.

“I did this while you slept, helped along by a sleeping draft.”

As he stared at his arm, I leaned in to see a small red symbol, carefully incised in the skin as if by a razor-thin blade.

“No,” he whispered.

“You’ve been marked for the sluagh.” Her lips curved in a smile. “They’ll come, and they’ll find you convicted of murdering your entire family.”

“But I didn’t.”

She leaned forward in her chair. “The sluagh don’t care.”

Duncan scrambled back so fast he toppled out of his chair as he clawed at the mark on his arm, clawed so hard his skin ran red with blood, as Mary’s laughter echoed through the tiny room.

I turned toward Gabriel and caught only a flash of him before we were pitched into darkness again. When I landed, I heard Duncan screaming. It was the scream of a man running for his life. Except when I looked around, I wasn’t in a forest…or any setting I recognized. I stood on the roof of an impossible house, with a castle balcony and yawning darkness below and spires behind me, jutting at all angles like spikes. Below, the landscape was equally impossible—a river running straight up a perpendicular mountainside, with twisted trees growing at ninety-degree angles. Duncan was trying to climb those trunks as if they were a ladder. Overhead, a rainbow of moons arched across the sky.

“We’re in his dream,” I said.

“This is a dream?”

Duncan screamed anew as a swarm of melltithiwyd dove at him.

“He didn’t do anything,” I said. “He absolutely, beyond a doubt, did not do anything.”

“But he’s marked,” Gabriel said, and I could hear Gwynn’s voice weaving through his again. “If he is marked and the sluagh discover he has been found guilty of crimes, that’s the only excuse they need.”

“Even if they knew he wasn’t guilty?”

“That’s the difference between the Cŵn Annwn and the sluagh. The Huntsmen may not take all factors into consideration, but they know guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. The sluagh don’t care about truth. This isn’t a mission to them.”

“It’s a hunger.”

“And a joy, particularly for the melltithiwyd. They were taken themselves by the sluagh, and the only satisfaction they have in their afterlife…”

“Is condemning others to the same fate.” I shuddered and turned away. “I don’t need to see this.”

“Agreed.” Gabriel put a hand against my shoulder, turning me away as he called, “Patrick? We’re done here.”

“No,” a voice whispered behind us. “I don’t think you are, Gwynn.”

I spun, and that twisting darkness was right there, wrapping around the balcony.

Gabriel’s arms went around me. “They can’t—”