She spoke to him in a strange low tone, the Enochian language. The idiom of angels. Why was she the one summoned by their invocation? Was she now speaking from the beyond?

Dee’s face was suffused with adoration, engaged in spiritual congress with an astral being. He had achieved the impossible. He had bridged the schism between science and magic.

The spear fell from Blackwood’s hand. He walked to the form of his wife, his Orleanna. Was she real?

“Orleanna!” he cried, over the hum of the weird light.

Dee broke his spell, speaking English. “No, Blackwood! No!”

Blackwood stood before her. Her eyes were lost in the green light swirling in the globe in her hand.

Dee yelled, “The angels have chosen her!” He was enraptured. “She is their messenger! She knows all!”

Blackwood looked at the glowing vision of his wife, his love. Lost to him now. Their life…their home, their future…any hope of children…all gone.

But as he mourned for her there, he sensed that it was not his Orleanna standing before him. He sensed evil, hidden behind a mask of beauty.

He looked away from her face. His eye was drawn to a window. Outside, before the grieving branches of a blighted willow tree, a figure in white, with raven-black hair.

It was his Orleanna, reaching for him as her form retreated into the darkness. Beseeching him. Warning him.

And then she was gone. He looked again at the figure before him.

She was a double. A fetch.

He reached out to her torso, the fabric of her dressing gown. She was insubstantial. His hand went right through.

Dee said, “Get away, barrister! The angel communes with me!”

Blackwood turned in a rage and shoved the old philosopher back against a shelf of books. He took Dee’s place, facing the fetch of his wife, only the glowing orb between them, nearly floating in her palm.

Blackwood gripped the orbuculum. A jolt of power surged through him, something he had never felt before. Pain ran through his joints and up his wrist into his forearm, but he held tight.

The bright-green light changed shades, becoming chartreuse, sickly and sour. The energy it emitted took more violent form, wind swirling around the famed library. A great tempest, knocking over books, ornaments, and occult instruments.

Blackwood saw deeply into the form before him. He saw his wife, the real Orleanna, and felt her suffering. She was not here in this room. She was trapped in some netherworld, banished for his transgression and the dark magic of Edward Talbot and John Dee.

Blackwood saw that she was to be punished for what he had done. In that moment was also revealed to him his solemn fate. His terrible destiny.

Save me, Hugo. Find me and save me.

The true face of the Orleanna fetch before him was revealed. Horribly smooth and nearly featureless, its mouth open in a groan.