Half out of his mind, Hugo Blackwood rushed to the door, pausing only to take up the spear again. He raced to his stable, riding to John Dee’s house in a fugue. The sliver moon barely lit the way. He was courting madness; he cared nothing for himself anymore.

He pounded on the door, prepared to smash a window to gain entrance. The lock was thrown inside, the door pushed open a few inches. Edward Talbot peered out, his face shadowed by candlelight.

“Go away, Blackwood,” he said. “Begone.”

“Is she here?” said Blackwood, gripping the door, pulling it from Talbot’s hand, wedging the ash-wood handle of the spear inside the opening.

“She has been here many times,” said the scryer. Quite a turnabout from the scared, haunted man who’d visited Blackwood’s kitchen a few days before.

Blackwood shoved inside past Talbot, sending the older man sprawling, his candle extinguishing upon impact with the stone floor.

Blackwood raced through the wide halls of the dark manse shouting Dee’s name, pole weapon in hand. He turned the corner and slowed, seeing the doors to the great library open.

An eerie green light, the soft, sweet green of parrot feathers, shone out of the doors with enough vibrancy to illuminate the hallway. Blackwood heard a voice speaking in a bizarre language he recognized but did not understand: the Enochian language John Dee had spoken at the initial séance in that very library.

Blackwood started toward the library, but a pair of hands grabbed at him from behind. Talbot restrained him, pulling him back.

“Don’t interrupt the communion—”

Blackwood elbowed Talbot off him, driving him back against the wall with the shaft of his spear up against his throat. Talbot’s skullcap slid off his head, revealing the butchered sides of the forger’s head, the ears Talbot had lost as punishment for his earlier crimes.

The earless scryer looked like any of the heretics and convicts Blackwood would see in shackles in the Old Bailey, on their way to Newgate dungeon. Blackwood threw him aside, turning back to the open doors, entering Dee’s notorious and celebrated library.

The green glow and its weird energy made him throw his arm up to shade his eyes. He saw the philosopher John Dee, his customary white gown and snow-white beard bathed in green, standing across from the spectral image of Orleanna Blackwood, her nightdress and raven-black hair rippling as though from facing a windstorm. Her beautiful face, unnaturally tinged by the liquidy light, glowed with the fullness of wonder.

One hand was outstretched, the crystal orbuculum cupped in her palm, the source of the radiating green light, offering the sphere to John Dee.

Blackwood stared, unable to comprehend. Orleanna had been catatonic, she had seemed hours away from certain death.

Was she dead now? Was this her spirit? Had she ascended to another form?

If so…why did she rush to John Dee?