He laughed, a soft sad sound. “Yeah, she definitely would.”

I thrust my hand into my pocket and drew out the little silk jewelry bag I’d shoved the Eye into. After tugging the drawstring loose, I rolled the black stone into my right palm, wrapped my fingers around it, then stepped forward and placed my left hand on Eithne’s stone.

A deep pulse ran through the standing stone. It was a low, somewhat tenuous sensation, not unlike that of a heart struggling for life.

There was a long pause, then another beat, stronger this time.

Energy crawled through the Eye in response, oddly expectant in feel. No images flowed into my mind from its dark surface, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

The deeper pulse continued to gain strength and ramped up my tension and fear. The energy flickering through the Eye deepened, and purple light began to leak between my clenched fingers. I had no immediate sense that the Eye was, in any way, drawing down on my strength, yet my body trembled, and I had the oddest feeling of standing on the edge of a precipice. That I was only one step away from not only the unknown, but something that would change my life in undefined ways.

It was all I could do not to run. Only the knowledge that the key to finding Mom’s killers might well lie in whatever was about to happen kept me still and connected.

As the deep heartbeat grew stronger, warmth began to flood the exterior of the standing stone. Way above my head, the old man’s beard stirred, the dry rustling quickly softening as green flooded the dead branches and buds and leaves appeared along the vines.

“The stone is coming back to life,” Lugh said, in a hushed, almost awestruck tone. “Are you all right, Beth? It’s not harming you in any way?”

I shook my head but didn’t otherwise reply. Couldn’t, in fact, reply. The energy that pulsed through the Eye and echoed through me was now eclipsed by that of the standing stone, and it was a force that dragged me, ever so slowly, toward that unseen, unknown cliff.

Then it dragged me over.

I fell, not physically but metaphorically—spiritually?—through utter blackness and had the oddest feeling that I was also falling through time and space.

When I stopped, I was in a place that held no sound beyond that solitary heartbeat and no light other than the very distant flash of purple lightning that was the Eye. Instinct told me she was my connection to reality and my only means of getting back.

The air was still and close, and I was weightless and ethereal in a place that was connected to the sky and the earth even though it existed in neither.

Then, like distant thunder, a voice said, Who enters my megalith?

The question held such a deep note of authority that terror skittled through me. My name is Bethany Aodhán—