The dowsing rod tugs me hard and fast. And then, after all of those days I burned up looking for her, those nights I fell asleep with her red curls spilling into my thoughts, I break into a clearing and find a girl moving in a slow, vague circle around the most massive redwood tree I’ve ever seen. It could swallow all of the Grays. It would flatten stars if it fell.

Around the base, sticks have collected in a feral tangle. The thicket is a dark crown of branches, cracked and broken. I remember Lelia’s words — a faerie ring. People thought it was possible to walk around one and find a way into a very different sort of place. A world of mist and trouble.

Another world. An overlapping truth.

Imogen’s feet drag on the ground, caking dirt on her toes, as she walks around the faerie ring. She isn’t traveling the secret inner circle between the tree and the ring. She must have gone in once, though, and wandered out like this. I don’t know why she came back to the tree, leaving Tempest behind. But I do know one thing. This is Imogen’s doorway. She found a way in that had nothing to do with hurting people.

The truth gets both hands around my lungs and squeezes.

The Grays were right.

Imogen didn’t attack them or kill Sebastian or drown Neil in the hermit’s tree so she could reach Emma. But I know her magic troubled the sky, summoned the water.

“Imogen,” I say. “Imogen.”

Her muscles stay slack, the red whorls and eddies of her hair streaked with mud.

“Imogen.” I run to her, the dowsing rod between us, pointed straight at her long white throat. “Imogen, come here. Come back. The Grays need you. I need you.”

Imogen blinks her way to the surface, dark eyes gathering force and personality. She points past me, at a spot behind me. I can’t turn away from her, not while she’s staring at me for the first time, truly seeing me. Pain slides over her face. “Danny. You brought her with you.”

Then she’s gone again.

And I know, completely and truly, that her voice is the one I heard in the vision. The tone was the same, blurry and afraid.

“Danny,” says a second voice, and it’s like someone held up a strange mirror to Imogen’s.

You brought her with you.

I turn and find Haven standing in the negative space between two trees. She is wearing a dark-green hooded sweatshirt that makes her skin look viciously pale. I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen her before. She was walking under the tree I climbed with Sebastian that first night in the woods.