Now she knew, down to the marrow of her bones. Demetrius had Dreamt of Magnus’s death. He’d known it, coming here with her. He’d known it, making love to her. He’d known it all along, and had accepted it willingly.

Gratefully?

Her brain exploded into chaos. She leapt from the chair, hands gripping her head, adrenaline flooding through her veins, making her heart hammer. She couldn’t let it happen. She couldn’t let him die.

“What do I do?” she cried, turning to Gregor. “How can I stop it?”

His face took on an odd, calculating cast. He leaned forward over the table, intent. “You need to find what you came lookin’ for alone, lass. Let him sit this one out. That’s the only way you can save him.”

“But I don’t even know where to start looking! And I could never convince him not to come with me!” She felt dizzy. Nauseated. Heat flashed over her, and she broke out in a sweat.

Gregor stood, rising slowly, pulling himself to his full height to look at her with calm, unblinking eyes. “I told you I’d set up a meetin’ with someone who might know where that prison is you’re lookin’ for, yes?”

Black spots danced in front of Lu’s eyes, and she thought she might throw up. “Yes, yes, but Magnus will be awake any time, he’ll insist on coming to the—”

“He can’t insist if he’s still sleepin’. And as the meetin’ is right now, I think he’ll just have to miss it.”

Lu looked at Gregor, confused. The room wavered in her peripheral vision, and she swayed, gripped by a jolt of vertigo.

From his pocket, he removed a small cell phone. He dialed a number, waited a beat, then said, “All right then, lads. She’s all yours.”

Behind her, a door crashed open. Lu turned, and, as if in slow motion, saw six men running toward her from the opposite end of the large kitchen. They wore white hazmat suits with face shields, gloves, and boots, rifles slung over their backs.

Peace Guards.

Lu whipped her head around, looked at the half-eaten sandwich on the table, stared up at the man who’d fed it to her. Dazed, she breathed, “Gregor MacGregor, you son of a bitch!”

He lifted his shoulders in casual apology or agreement, but his eyes were fierce. As footsteps pounded closer, he said, barely audibly, “D’ya know why a knife needs a sheath, lass? Because the real power of a knife isn’t in the sharpness of its blade, it’s in concealment. Remember that. And gie it laldy.”

Then the men in white suits smashed into her and grabbed her, just as the room slipped sideways, her field of vision narrowing to a swiftly closing circle of black.

THIRTY-TWO

When Magnus awoke alone, he knew with instant, bloodcurdling certainty something was terribly wrong. Lumina wasn’t beside him, but there was more to it than that. He felt her absence as a raw, hollow space inside his chest, as if an organ had been cut out while he’d been sleeping.

On a small table beside the bed lay her golden dragon pendant, its red eye winking in the light.

Magnus dressed, panicked, calling out for her even though he knew she wouldn’t answer, and flew out of the room, the pendant in his shirt pocket.

He searched the entire mansion in minutes. She’d disappeared.

So had Gregor MacGregor.

He stood in the middle of the vast, echoing foyer where they’d first come in, eyes closed, concentrating, trying in vain to still his mind even as his body clamored violently for action. He called for her with his mind, too, but was once more met only with silence.

When he opened his eyes again, Magnus was gone. In his place was a ravaged, monstrous thing born long ago, a thing made of blood and death and darkness that knew it could survive any horror, because it already had.

It was that thing that wrenched open the front door of the deserted mansion, stepping out into the blistering red fury of noon, determined to find the angel that had shown it the way back from hell.

Lu was being carried; by whom she couldn’t see. She couldn’t see because her eyes wouldn’t open. They felt stitched shut.

There was more than one pair of hands carrying her, though. More than one set of arms. More than one voice murmuring in hushed excitement as warm bodies jostled around her, bumping and shoving, reckless in their eagerness to deliver her wherever it was they were headed.

At least they’re not groping my ass.

She smelled cloistered air, heard the shuffle of a dozen boots over dusty stone, tasted an unpleasant, metallic tang on her tongue. With Herculean effort, she cracked open one eye, then closed it again because what she saw made no sense.

An enormous golden crucifix, suspended over an altar. A checkerboard marble floor. Soaring arches and recessed chapels and medieval paintings glowing with gilt.

Drugged. Hallucinating. Screwed.

Lu silently pronounced judgment on her situation, then sank back into darkness.

The Queen of the Ikati dreamt of a comet, soaring high in the icy thin atmosphere, its tail a long, sparking flare of red, shedding a bloody glow over everything on the earth beneath.

She’d dreamt of this particular comet before. Always, it was a harbinger of disaster.

Torn from sleep, Jenna jerked upright in her cot, a strangled scream caught in her throat. It was light, always light in her cell, but something dark lurked in the corners. Something awful rang in her brain, echoing. Calling.

She raised her nose, scenting the air, then froze in disbelief. In recognition. A cry of anguish slipped from her lips. “No,” she whispered. “No!”

Jenna leapt from her cot, stood in the middle of her cell, and began to scream.

Sebastian Thorne’s mind tended to run on a hamster wheel when he lay down to try to sleep, so he’d developed chronic insomnia. It was stubbornly resistant to the drugs he’d developed to combat it, though they worked like a charm on every other person suffering from sleepless nights. If he’d been a superstitious man, he might have found some unease in that, but he wasn’t superstitious, ascribing that kind of whimsy to those of lesser intellect.

So he was awake during the middle of the day when the rest of the world was at rest. At the moment the call came, he was standing in front of his bathroom mirror, considering his reflection, pleased with how well the new drug to combat hair loss was working.

The green light on the phone on the wall began to blink, indicating an incoming call. He pressed the answer button.

“Yes.”

“Sir! It’s Three!”

Thorne frowned at the phone. Three sounded unusually breathless. Excited, even. “Yes, Three, what is it?”

There was a moment of heavy breathing, then the wet sound of gulping. “Sir . . . sir . . .”