He frowned. Perhaps the stone was mistaken.

It was distracting, in any case, so he covered it with a towel and climbed back into his bed. He waited a moment, closed his eyes, opened them again, closed them a second time. The darkness cloaked him and did not tease. The rat was gone. Questions and answers mixed and faded in the night. He began to drift.

He might have dreamed for a time, then. There were images of unicorns, some black, some white, and the slender, timeless faces of the fairies. There were images of his friends, both past and present, and of the dreams he had envisioned for his kingdom and his life. They ran through his subconscious, and their fluid motion lulled him as the rolling of an endless sea.

Then a curious fire flared to sudden life within his mind, disrupting the flow. Hands reached from out of nothingness, and fingers clasped the chain about his neck—his hands, his fingers. What were they doing?

And suddenly there was an image of Meeks!

The image appeared from out of a black mist, the wizard a tall, skeletal form cloaked in gunmetal blue with a face as rough and hard as raw iron. He loomed over Ben as if he were death come for its latest victim, one sleeve empty, the other a black claw that reached down, down …

Ben jerked awake with a start, kicking back the bedclothes, sweeping blindly at the dark with one hand. He blinked and squinted. A candle’s flame lit one corner of the room, a solitary pinprick of white-gold against a haze of crimson fire given off by Willow’s rune stone as it blazed in frantic warning on the nightstand, the towel that had covered it gone. Ben could feel the presence of the danger it signaled. His breath came in sharp gasps, and it was as if a giant hand pressed down upon his chest. He fought to push it off, but his muscles would not obey. His body seemed locked in place.

Something moved in the dark—something huge.

Ben tried to shout, but the sound was no more than a whisper.

A figure materialized, scarlet light covering it like blood. The figure stood there and, in a voice that sounded of nails on slate, whispered, “We meet again, Mr. Holiday.”

It was Meeks.

Ben could not speak. He could only stare. It was as if the image that had haunted him during his visit to the old world had somehow managed to follow him back into this one. Except that this was no image. He knew it instantly. This was real!

Meeks smiled thinly. He was quite human in appearance now, the predatory look vanished. “What—no clever words of greeting, no brave admonishments, not even a threat? How unlike you, Mr. Holiday. What seems to be the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

The muscles of Ben’s throat and face tightened as he struggled to regain control of himself. He was paralyzed. Meeks’ flat, terrifying eyes bound him with cords he could not break.