“Wonderful marvels,” said Dee. “I have seen spiritual splendors. We have done it, Talbot! We have synthesized the magical and the scientific. We have invoked and conjured an Enochian angel to guide and instruct us. This will return me to my rightful place in the queen’s court. First, we will witness it. Second, reveal it to the world. And third, understand it.”

The brilliant sorcerer’s wide-eyed boasting deeply troubled Blackwood. “Understanding it is third, is it?” he said.

“Marshaling it is fourth.” Dee looked upon his barrister contemptuously. “Do not concern yourself with matters of the spiritual world, barrister. Your world of laws and writs is but a soft candle to the thunderbolt about to strike. I have opened a seam into the mystical world.”

“Or,” said Blackwood, for a moment glimpsing a megalomaniac inside the philosopher’s robes. “Or have you opened a seam into this world from the mystical? How do you know if you have penetrated another realm…or merely allowed another realm to penetrate ours?”

Dee looked at Blackwood a long moment. Blackwood saw that his words injected a bit of doubt into Dee’s bravado…before Dee quickly expelled it. “The riddles of lawyers,” he said. “I am surprised the invocation succeeded in the presence of one so…unworthy.”

“Wormwood,” said Talbot, apparently hosting a separate conversation. “It has bittered our souls…”

Dee sat in a brocaded chair with silver arms, like a wizard usurping a king’s throne. “It was always to be this way,” he said. “Alone shall I navigate into the realm of the mystical. The journey, and the rewards, shall be mine.”

Talbot walked toward him. “You can have it, mage.”

“Leave, then. Leave me to await the angel as it assumes human form.”

Blackwood shook his head at this impertinence, his gaze running along the books of celestial spheres and astral planes, next to tomes of astronomy and cosmology. Had the old wizard conflated the two, the mystical and the scientific, but instead of arriving at a unifying theory, lost his way?

Blackwood looked skyward for a moment, not knowing which way to turn. As he did, he spotted a glowing white form peering down at them from a gabled roof—or perhaps hovering behind it. A human figure in a white bed dress, levitating, black-eyed.

With one last leering look, the apparition slid, soundless, behind the peaked roof, and vanished.

With a shout and audible gasp, Hugo Blackwood fled the observatory, racing through Dee’s wide hallways to the door, out into the chilly, damp night. Almost falling on a patch of muddy turf, Blackwood turned the corner, eyes skyward, searching the roof and all its peaks, seeking out—and simultaneously terrified of finding—the leering apparition.

Forgetting Talbot, even forgetting Dee, Hugo Blackwood took to his horse and raced back to his home.