Eliana shook her head slowly back and forth. There seemed to be a weight on her chest, crushing her lungs, stealing her breath.

“What I’m trying to tell you, Ana, is that man who handled me with such care, that man I barely knew who sat with me so patiently, that man who gave me so much comfort at the worst hour of my life is not the kind of man who would plot to kill the father of the woman he loved.”

“He didn’t love me,” said Eliana instantly. “He used me. And you weren’t there. I saw him with the gun in his hand, Mel. I saw him.”

“You saw him shoot your father?” Mel said quietly, looking up at her.

Eliana’s jaw clenched. “I didn’t have to see that.” Color came flooding back to stain her cheeks. “I’m perfectly capable of putting two and two together when I see a…a body on the floor and someone holding a smoking gun. And don’t forget, Silas discovered his plot to take over my father’s reign—”

“Yes,” said Mel bitingly. “Silas. That paragon of virtue.”

“I know you’ve never liked him, but he’s been nothing but helpful, supportive. Even if he is a little”—she paused, remembering his calculated marriage proposal, the way he’d argued for her hand, all logic and no love—“astringent.”

Mel shrugged, but her face was hard as granite. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I do know how he helps your brother with his little…problems, though. And I do know how he looks at you, E.”

Eliana stared at her.

“Like you’re dinner,” she said darkly. “A roasted pig, all trussed up and ready to eat.”

Eliana’s skin crawled. Something about that sounded just right. She walked slowly back to the bed, sat down beside Mel once more, and leaned into her shoulder. Looking at the worn stone floor, the bare, shadowed walls, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? Why tell me now?”

Mel’s sigh was heavy. “Because you’d never have believed me, and I didn’t want it to come between us. What difference would it have made, anyway? Dredging up the past when nothing could change it? You and I have always been so good at leaving the past behind. But,” her voice faltered, and she glanced at Eliana, “now the past is catching up with us, and I think you should consider, really consider, the possibility that nothing is what it seems. And make your choices going forward accordingly.”

Mel had left her after that, sitting alone in the middle of the empty room with memory and confusion a pair of snarling dark monsters inside her skull, one thing repeating itself over and over, relentlessly.

Nothing is what it seems.

To Eliana, that was the most frightening possibility of them all.

This can’t be the right place, thought D, staring at his final destination from across the tree-lined boulevard. It can’t be.

But, according to the dream he’d had, it was.

The gothic Montmartre Cemetery, famous for being the final resting place of such luminaries as Degas, Nijinsky, and Zola, was built below street level in the hollow of an old quarry. The gated entrance to its sprawling twenty-five acres of tended gardens and tombs was on the quiet Avenue Rachel under the overpass of Rue Caulaincourt, where he now stood well hidden from the soft yellow glow of the streetlights in the shadows of a weeping willow. Perplexed, he looked up and down the street, hoping for more clues.

The dream had shown the number two Métro stop at Place Blanche, the peep show hawkers outside the Moulin Rouge, the tiny guard shack beside the cemetery gate where visitors paid an entry fee of six euros to tour the narrow, cobblestoned walkways, gawking at the crypts and carved obelisks and blank-eyed marble statues and elaborate, crumbling monuments to the uncaring dead. In the deepening twilight of the hour past closing time, the guard shack was dark and deserted, the rusted iron gates locked.

It had been just like this in the dream, down to every detail—him standing here under this tree with his hands shoved in his pockets, thin coils of fog snaking around his ankles, the sound of music and laughter from a bistro half a block away warming the quiet cool of the evening. But now that he was here, D had no idea what to do next.

Accustomed to the capricious nature of this particular Gift of his, D decided to wait.

He didn’t wait long.

From down the street rumbled an ancient green Peugeot, belching smoke from its muffler in feathery blue plumes, one headlight flickering sporadically as if signaling in code. It neared and D stepped behind the gnarled trunk of the elm, watching. The car jerked and rattled to a stop at the curb and disgorged four young men, laughing and ribbing each other in expletive-laced French. They carried a strange collection of items: compasses, rubber boots, lumpy backpacks, flashlights, and a map they unfolded on the hood of the car that they began to peruse, arguing in a friendly way about some bet they had going.

“I’m telling you there’s no way you’ll win, dude. You’ll just end up getting bitch-slapped and wetting your frilly pink panties.”

A derisive snort. “Right, like I’m gonna let a girl beat me.”

“That’s what Jules here thought, and he was limping for a week afterward.”

A round of raucous laughter, to which the offended Jules responded, “I did not!”

“Dude, you were totally hobbled.”

“I tripped on a rock!”

“Really? Was that before or after the Butterfly kicked your leg out from under you and slammed you on your ass?”

“That was just a lucky hit.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty lucky that way all right. You guys got your money?”

Murmurs of assent were heard, boots and backpacks were donned, and the map was folded and put away. The men kept chiding one another as they locked the car and headed toward the cemetery, flashlights raking the ground in shaky yellow swaths. One by one, they leapt the low gate and were soon swallowed by darkness.

“Well,” murmured D as he stepped off the curb and followed, “this should be interesting.”

Friday night was fight night in the catacombs, and Eliana wasn’t about to let a little thing like bullet wounds, bruised ribs, and a rapidly deteriorating sense of reality deter her from participating.

After all, she was the star attraction. And she really needed an outlet for the nuclear rage that had been building inside her all day.

She hadn’t been able to find Mel after leaving Silas in the afternoon. The need to discuss what he’d said about her father was overwhelming, a gnawing compulsion that had her heart thrashing like a shark on a chum line inside her chest. Several things Mel had said—and her voice, eyes, and posture when she’d said them—had stuck with her also, irritating as a splinter under skin.

Never missed a thing, your father.

Because he ordered me not to.

Made us swear to never tell a soul.

Why? Eliana circled back to that one question, over and over. Why?

Why had her father insisted Mel keep her marriage a secret?

Why would Demetrius go out of his way to clean and stitch her wounds?

Why were those assassins—who she’d honestly told Silas were not of the Legiones or the Bellatorum—trying to kill her?

Could what Silas said about her father actually be true?

Nothing added up. None of it. Uncertainty slithered, cold and reptilian, under her skin.

By the time she entered the heated, cavernous enclave of New Harmony, she’d worked herself into an epic lather.

The crowd was huge tonight. Bodies pressed against the bare stone walls, against one another, nearly everyone with a drink in hand, many laughing, dancing, shouting to be heard above the thumping bass and electronica music of a DJ who had set up a mobile turntable and speakers in one candlelit corner. It was nights like these—drinking and talking and being with humans—that made her believe all she and her father had dreamed was possible. No, they didn’t know the truth of who and what she was, the gritty details, but most of them seemed to know on some animal, primal level that she was different. That she was Other. They watched her, they moved aside to let her pass, they glanced away when her dark gaze met theirs.