“Justin,” he said with deliberate calm she didn’t believe. She knew what rage looked like—and knew that it was more dangerous when it wore a mask of composure. “Justin cannot hurt you ever again. Justin is dead.”

Oh, how she wished that were true.

“No,” she said. “I just … He was … He was …” She reached up to touch the wound on her neck, this time for reassurance. It hurt—he had just bitten her. She wasn’t wrong. She had proof.

“I just saw him,” she told the seated man. “He was just here—I mean, I was just there. With him.” She remembered the smell of him, could still smell him on her skin, and it made her sick.

“Anna,” the man said, “Justin is dead.” There was finality in his tone. “Can you hear the truth when I speak it?”

She started to shake her head, then realized that she could. That he was not lying, or at least he believed what he said.

“Yes,” she said. But how could Justin be dead? Had whatever magic that transported her to wherever she was now, had that killed him? And how would this man know? Had this stranger teleported her here somehow?

Deep in her gut, something was trying to tell her she had this situation wrong. But she didn’t know how or in what way—and she had to deal with the present danger first. The present danger who was sitting twenty feet away from her, doing the best that he could to look nonthreatening. It wasn’t a good act, but it mattered that he was trying.

The seated man caught and held her gaze again. Instead of scaring her, as all of her previous experience told her it should, for some reason his regard made her feel better, more centered.

“Justin is dead,” he said again. “Leo is dead. They cannot hurt you anymore.”

And from the certainty in his voice, she knew that to be true. Even if she’d just seen Justin, just seen Leo. She knew they were dead because this man told her it was so. How did this stranger know about Justin and Leo?

“I killed Isabelle,” Anna said, her mouth so dry she could barely force the words out. Her head hurt with a sudden, eye-watering pain. She didn’t know where the words had come from.

“Anna?” he said, and she focused on his voice. One true thing in a sea of jumbled events.

“You sang for me,” she whispered, knowing it was true, though not what it meant.

“Yes,” he agreed.

She opened her mouth to say something else, and that flash of pain struck her again.

CHARLES CAUGHT HER before she hit the ground. Doing it when he’d had to start from a sitting position meant he mostly just managed to put himself under her rather than keeping her from falling.