“Anyway,” Diana continued in the strained cheerful voice of a grade school teacher trying to keep her class on subject, “the eggs hatch into fingerlings that stay in the headwaters until they’re mature – we think it takes close to a hundred years – then when they’ve matured into smolts – they begin the downstream journey to the sea.”

“The sea?” I asked. “But we’re hundreds of miles from the sea.”

“Not the Atlantic,” Liz said. “The Faerie Sea. The upper branch of the Undine flows through an underground passage into Faerie before it joins the lower branch.”

“I thought the door in the honeysuckle thicket was the only way into Faerie. You told me it was the last door.”

“It is the last door,” Liz said, “but there’s also an underwater passage to Faerie in these woods … or at least there used to be. It’s been growing narrower over the years, just as all the other passages to Faerie did until they closed. This passage was only big enough for a juvenile undine to slip through the last time they migrated a hundred years ago. We’re afraid that it’s clogged now and when a passage to Faerie clogs it’s like when an artery to the heart closes – smaller veins open up around it. Unfortunately many of these smaller veins lead to the Borderlands instead of Faerie. If they don’t get through to Faerie they’ll die, but if they get stuck in the Borderlands …”

Her voice trailed off and I shivered recalling my dream from last night. To be caught in the Borderlands meant death – or an eternity of suffering.

“So,” Liz continued, “we thought with your doorkeeper powers you might be able to open the passage wide enough for them to get straight through to Faerie without getting lost in the Borderlands.”

“But I have no idea how to open an underwater passage,” I said. This was true, but I was also thinking of the dream. It had started seductively enough, but had ended with my demon lover trying to drown me. He had been angry with me for trapping him in a watery sort of hell. If that were true, I didn’t much like the idea of taking a dip into any body of water that might be connected to the Borderlands.

“Would I have to get in the water?” I asked.

“We don’t think so, dear … Wait … Do you hear that?”

Liz tilted her head and held up a manicured finger. At first all I heard was the buzzing of mosquitoes and flies in the heavy humid air. Even the birds were too tired to sing in the midday heat. I wiped a trickle of sweat away from my eyes and was about to tell Liz I didn’t hear anything when I became aware of a soft burbling beneath the drone of insects. A breeze stirred the heavy underbrush, bringing with it the delicious chill of running water.

“We’re at the headwaters,” Soheila said, sniffing the air and lifting her heavy dark hair off the nape of her neck. “The water bubbles up from a deep natural spring – the coldest, clearest water you’ve ever seen. Not many ever get to see it because it’s carefully hidden.”