The image of her sister’s distraught face—Tanvi’s face—punched through the increasingly raggedy gilt cocoon. We thought you died, it accused.

“You knew whose house that was, didn’t you?” she challenged.

Asha bit her lip, then stroked two fingertips over the back of Tanvi’s hand. “Perhaps I did.”

Even that slight touch made Tanvi’s sensitized skin scream. She ripped her hand away. “Is this a joke to you? You knew, and you still let me go there. Do you even get how awful that is?”

Asha recoiled, her irises sparking. She shifted into a cobra and slithered under the driver’s seat.

Tanvi peeked up front, but luckily, the driver didn’t dare even glance at the rearview mirror. “What are you doing? He could’ve seen you!”

Asha hissed, so faint that only Tanvi could hear it, and her forked tongue darted in and out from beneath the seat.

“Be mad, then. What do I care?” Tanvi leaned her too-heavy head against the window and closed her scratchy eyes. She just wanted to go home. Home to her room in the dream runners’ quarters, where she could sleep and sleep and never dream again.

Tanvi must have dozed off, because the next thing she knew, Asha, in human form again, was helping her out of the car. Asha deposited a gold coin on the empty seat. “Come, Tanvi. We have arrived.”

The relief Tanvi felt at not having dreamed vaporized when she looked up. Instead of Penn’s Landing, what had to be an American high school loomed ahead, one big, ugly hunk of brick and concrete.

Oh, Asha was so dead. Tanvi couldn’t believe her nerve. “What happened to taking us back?”

“It will be but a few minutes,” Asha promised, tapping at her phone, “and then we will leave. You have my word.”

Tanvi toed a crack in the sidewalk. No one else was around, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. All this being out in the daytime was unnatural. Wrong. “You keep saying that. Can’t you see your little boyfriend without me?”

“Soon I will be immersed in wedding preparations and all the duties that follow,” Asha told her phone before tucking it in her pocket. “I would enjoy a chance to say good-bye before being consigned to my royal cage, lovely as it may be.”

Tanvi had expected some glib nonanswer, not this. She turned to look at Asha.

It still hurt to do that, but she made herself examine the sleek contours of Asha’s cheeks and her perfectly smooth skin. All effortless in a way even the best makeup artist could only aspire to. Her lush ponytail, lustrous as a strand of black pearls, could have been cut from the night sky.