It didn’t make sense. He could see the crack that Honey had gone slipping through—was right there with her—but the damned thing slammed shut before he could get through. His impact with the barrier broke his contact with her and was enough to knock him out. Unconscious, he went spiraling through the dark reaches of his own mind, his body dumped back onto the top of the mesa.

When he came to, his face pressed against the stones and dirt, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been out. He sat up, weak and disoriented, his head spinning. He spat out a mouthful of fine grit and brushed the dust from around his eyes. It took him a few moments to catch his bearings, and then it was only because of the medicine twisting up out of the ground he was lying on. Without it, he didn’t know how long he would have been out, and he certainly wouldn’t be recovering as fast as he was.

He stood up finally, waited a moment for his sense of balance to settle, then looked around himself.

He was definitely here by himself.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down. He’d only wanted Honey to point him in the right direction, not take his place in whatever was to come. But he was here and she was gone, following that elusive, half-familiar presence that had cracked the protection surrounding the world Jilly was trapped in.

That presence . . .

His head snapped up when it came to him who it had been.

Geordie.

No wonder it had seemed familiar. But how was that even possible? Of all Jilly’s strange and curious circle of friends, the Riddell brothers were the most human. They had no animal blood. No trace of the old ghosts of fairy haunting their genes. The two of them were forever surrounded by the inhabitants of the otherworld and the world between, but they themselves had no medicine. No magic.

He had to be mistaken. It had to have been someone else.

He sent out his thoughts, searching, searching, but there was no trace of the fiddler left anywhere. Like Jilly, he was gone from all the worlds except—he assumed—for the one that Honey had discovered, the one she said was inside Jilly’s own head. And there was no way he could look into it.

He didn’t need to. Contrary to what he knew about Geordie, that had definitely been the fiddler breaking through into that world, with Honey hard on his heels. The big question was how had he done it?

The last time Joe had seen the fiddler, he’d been in Walker’s company, unable to even travel from one world to another on his own. So either he’d suddenly acquired abilities he’d never shown before, or Walker had—

Walker.