“Wait a moment,” I said as we got to the door of the room I shared with Jilly.

It took me only a moment to see that her clothes still lay on top of her bag where I’d put them last night. I knew she hadn’t taken her wheelchair, because I’d noticed it before I’d gone downstairs. Now I saw that her canes still leaned in the corner by the head of her bed.

“They got her, too,” I said as I rejoined the others in the hall.

“Now just hold on,” Andy started.

But I ignored him and led the way to Siobhan and Lizzie’s room. I went ahead in, but Siobhan hesitated in the doorway, blocking Andy from entering.

“I know what she has with her on this trip,” Siobhan said from where she stood, “and she didn’t take anything with her. Not her clothes, not her purse, not her fiddle.”

She said the last as though it was the clincher, and for many of us who played the instrument, it was. I couldn’t imagine going anywhere without mine. Downstairs to the restaurant for breakfast, yes, but anywhere further? Not likely.

I took a closer look at the bed. It was hard to tell, but the covers appeared to have been thrown back, or pulled off roughly. Half of them were puddled on the floor.

“She was taken right out of her bed, wasn’t she?”

I turned to see Siobhan standing right behind me. Andy came into the room and looked around.

“It’s not possible, is it?” he said. “Tell me it’s not possible.”

“It shouldn’t be,” I said. “But it is.”

Because I’d been through something too much like this before. Just a couple of years ago, Saskia had been stolen away into the otherworld—not by fairies, exactly, but it wasn’t all that different, really. One moment she was talking to my brother Christy, the next she’d vanished from their apartment, just disappeared, right before his eyes. She wasn’t alone, either. Hundreds of people were taken away from their homes, swallowed into a Web site that had a physical presence in the otherworld.

It was all over the news when it happened—and then it wasn’t. The fact that it had ever taken place was wiped away by the spirits that live in the wires. It’s this thing they have—spirits, fairies, and the like. Everything’s secret, including their existence. It’s an easier pretense to keep up than you’d think, because we help them in how we’ll grasp at any rational explanation to account for whatever supernatural experiences we might have.