The apparition that was Brunela took Isabelle’s hand. Between one heartbeat and the next she found herself in a low room with stone walls. Thick arches held up a barrel-vaulted ceiling. Round windows high up let in streams of warm golden light that strained against the subterranean chill. A young man lay on a small bed between two of the pillars. His arms and legs were tied to the bedposts with silken cords. His glassy eyes rolled in their sockets, and he raved, alternately sobbing and shouting gibberish.

Brunela’s voice was a heavy whisper suffused with pain: “He was a late bloomer, like you. He had been gifted with the vitera of his grandfather, the patriarch of the clan. His elder cousin, enraged at having been passed over for this honor, broke into his room at night and tore the symbiote from his head, perhaps thinking to take it for himself.”

“But it doesn’t work that way,” Isabelle surmised.

“The symbiote had already bonded with this boy, and the Fenice transformation, once begun, cannot stop until it is finished. Without the vitera, there was not enough of the vital reagent to complete the process. It’s like burning charcoal in a closed bottle; the reaction continues until it runs out of lumin vapor and then stops.”

Isabelle’s chest felt hollow. She’d ripped Immacolata’s vitera out of her own head rather than be possessed by her.

“What happened to him?” Isabelle whispered.

Brunela said, “At first he heard the voices of his ancestors gibbering at him, and then he began to see things. Within a few weeks he began to break with reality. He could no longer understand speech or recognize the people around him. He took a fever from no apparent source. His skin turned to gooseflesh and blistered in every follicle where a feather might have come in. For the last week he lay raving, covered in suppurating sores, restrained to his cot so that he would not claw at his crumbling skin.”

The scene shifted slightly, the beams of light on the wall coming in at a different angle. Other ghosts occupied the room now: the boy’s family. Brunela had paid them no heed and remembered them only as solid shadows.

The boy had changed too. Through the lens of Brunela’s memory, Isabelle witnessed the young man’s final hours. His skin sloughed off and what lay underneath resembled little more than a chick that had failed to hatch from its egg: downy feathers, stringy flesh, serum, and blood.

Isabelle’s spirit sank as if into an icy marsh. “Is there nothing that can be done?” Or was she condemned to the same horrific fate?

Brunela’s hesitation spoke volumes. At last she said, “It is such a rare occurrence. The metamorphosis needs the right kind of fuel.”