I crashed through onto the sidewalk. I fell to my knees, trying to suck down every ounce of air on the Westside, and heard Hellida land beside me. I had just stopped retching when I looked up and saw we had fallen at the feet of the man with the gun. He pointed it at my head, furrowed brow sweating in the heat of the fire, slippery red lips leering, tongue sliding along the gap between his teeth.

“If I may explain—” I said.

“No witnesses,” he growled.

It was then that the shadows began to move.

They surged across the sidewalk, swallowing the light of the flame. They swept over the gunman, blotting him out like black ink spilling across a page, and then they came for me. Ice flowed up my legs, my chest, my heart. My body disappeared. I turned back to see Hellida reaching for me. The cold raced up my face.

I blinked.

When my eyes opened, we were in my dream.

Have you ever seen a photographic negative, where light is dark, and dark is light, and the people look like ghouls? That’s where the shadows had taken us. As strongly as I have ever believed anything, I was certain that the inky world I had been thrown into was some kind of hell.

Hellida was frozen—skin, hair, and eyes the same muddy black, lips a corpse’s gray. Her fingers brushed my skin, but I couldn’t feel her touch. I couldn’t feel anything at all. Behind her, the fire danced white, tossing gray sparks into the gray night sky. I spun around and saw the gunman. He was still clutching his pistol, as desperately as any child ever held a blanket to his chest, but he wasn’t pointing it at me. He stared down the barrel at the woman in the street.

She was dressed for a night out, in a long black gown whose tattered train dragged across the sidewalk. Its fabric ran down her arms, stopping just above the wrists—or where her wrists should be. Instead of hands, there were tendrils of thick white smoke—like that which heralds the selection of a pope—and instead of eyes, she had empty sockets lit by white fire.

She raised her arms, and smoke poured from her dress. It clouded around the gunman’s legs, and he screamed silently. He pulled the trigger. One, two, three jets of soundless white flame shot from his pistol. The bullets punctured her dress, and smoke poured from the wounds, but she did not slow. The fog twisted up his body and poured into his mouth and blotted out his eyes. The pistol fell to the sidewalk, and I took it in my hand.