She took it. We touched, just for an instant, and I had to fight not to jerk my hand back. Touching her was touching something far, far colder than the coldest winter ice.

She held the huldra in her right hand. Black talons emerged from her fingers, a tiny drop of venom glistening at the tip of each. She squeezed her hand, and one by one her talons penetrated the black wax that sealed the false huldra’s tortoise shell.

When her talons were buried in the wax, she closed her eyes, threw back her head, and howled, writhing like a devil right out of the Book.

“Damn,” said Mama, summing up my emotions quite well.

It straightened, opened its eyes, and pushed the huldra back toward me, its talons withdrawn. I thought about the venom and snatched up a discarded linen napkin and shoved the damned thing back in my pocket.

About us, men rendered mad by a walking corpse’s touch, screamed. Dancers in the grip of a deadly spell moved, pirouetting and spinning and swaying, their eyes wide with terror. Gunshots rang out sporadically-pop pop pop-and I heard wood splinter off in the dark.

“I believe I shall retire for the evening,” said the Regent. He offered his creature his arm, and she took it, still smiling that deadly small smile.

They walked through the dancers, untouched.

Stitches pulled me and Darla away from the music box.

I am unable to determine its method of selection, she began. But given time-

Screams arose from our right, and a small band of revelers who had taken refuge behind a makeshift barricade of tables and gambling machines broke into sudden panicked flight past us.

Mama cussed and raised her cleaver. Stitches spun her staff, causing it to shine a bright blood red and emit a high-pitched whine.

Evis moved to stand at my side. He held an enormous double-barreled rifle, to which a light was attached. He aimed it toward the far wall.

I squinted, but saw nothing save for shadow.

Mama Hog followed the light too, and cussed.

“Don’t look,” she shrieked. “Don’t nobody look!”

I looked. It was just a shadow in a roomful of shadows. Darker, perhaps.

Deeper.

My mother appeared, in the same threadbare apron she’d worn, I supposed, every day of her life.

She waved and smiled. I’d taken a step before I realized what I was doing, before I remembered burying Mom in a poor man’s boneyard on a rainy day in winter.

Mama stamped hard on my foot.

“Dammit, I told you not to look!”

I turned away, more angry than afraid.

Darla turned to face me, tears in her eyes. I’ve never asked who she saw. She’s never told.

Screams sounded. I glanced that way, saw a man in an old Army dress uniform being dragged into the shadow by a dozen pairs of emaciated hands.

When he reached the place where the wall should have been, his screams simply ceased, and we faced nothing but shadow once again.

An ethereal interface, said Stitches. One born of blood sacrifice.

“What the hell? I don’t see any corpses.”

I too am puzzled. But I estimate at least ten deaths would be required to commence the process.

I groaned. “Would they have to take place all at once?”

No. But we have not had ten fatalities all evening, by my count.

“The accidents during the Queen’s construction. The curse. Damned if it wasn’t a curse after all.”

Our internal investigation revealed no foul play in any of the accidents.

“We can ponder that later.” Evis motioned toward the shadow. “If it’s what I think it is, where does it lead?”

“Leads to Hell itself,” muttered Mama. She charged suddenly toward the shadow, tackling a woman in waiter’s garb before she could get close.

I joined her, dragging the woman back though she fought and begged.

Darla threw a glass of water in the woman’s face when we wrestled her back to the stage. Evis ordered a pair of halfdead to take her to her room.

“The other corpse,” I managed, winded after my struggle with the woman. “She’ll probably rise too.”

“Already has,” replied Evis, who kept his eyes on the shadow. “Guards heard her banging around in the closet where they’d stashed the body.”

“They go nuts too?”

Evis shook his head. “Hardly. They nailed the door shut without opening it. They knew dead when they saw it.”

“Bright lads.”

Evis nodded. “What do you think would happen if I laid this rifle barrel right against that music box and pulled the trigger?”

“Not a damned thing.”

Evis sighed. “I hate it when you’re right, Markhat. Didn’t scratch the thing. Got any ideas?”

“One crisis at a time.” I gestured toward the shadow. “What about putting a dozen of your men in a half circle around that with their backs to it? To keep people from wandering too close?”

He barked orders. Halfdead took their places, horror at their backs. If any of them were fearful they didn’t let it show.

One drunk wobbled up, shouting to someone only he could see and trying to sidle past. He got a rifle butt to his face for his trouble. A waiter grabbed him by one leg and dragged him off to safety.

I caught Darla staring at the shadowed place again. “No,” she said before I could ask the question. “I’m not looking into it. Just at it. And honey, I believe it’s getting larger, by the minute.”

Evis glanced at Stitches. “Is it?”

Stitches aimed her glass staff that way. The metal vanes whirled.

Yes. Its boundaries are moving. I may be able to slow it down. But I cannot halt its expansion entirely.

A bony hand emerged from the dark, groping blindly about. Another joined it, grasping at empty air with fingers that dropped flakes of desiccated flesh.

Stitches hurled a sizzling arc of crackling light full into the shadow, right over the heads of the Avalante soldiers. The skeletal hands withdrew but the darkness remained.

One of Evis’s halfdead soldiers broke from his post about the shadow, walking jerkily toward us, as though injured or ill. His rifle fell from his grasp as he drew near.

“Damn,” said Mama. “Didn’t think I’d see no halfdead get called to dance.”

Evis opened his mouth to protest, but the halfdead brushed past us, his dead eyes wide and dry, his mouth open as if trying to speak.

He took his place amid the other dancers, and began to spin and turn.

“That isn’t possible,” said Evis.

I beg to differ. Stitches stared, eyes moving back and forth like those of a dreamer, behind her tight-sewn eyelids.

The capture of dancers is increasing in frequency, at a rate that appears commensurate with the expansion of the shadow.

“So we can either be grabbed by whatever is in the dark, or be forced to dance until our legs wear down to stumps, is that it?”

Not entirely. That which lies beyond the shadow is beginning to emerge. In doing so, it is inducing small but fundamental changes to the nature of reality within the Queen’s shield.

“The air feels funny,” agreed Mama with a frown. “So somethin’ is aimin’ to choke us out?”

It appears so. If I am correct, the changes exerted by the shadow will soon render our reality compatible with that which lies beyond.

“Which lets them just stroll out and snack on the dancers,” I said.

Stitches nodded. Unless I collapse the shield.

“Doing that leaves us open to an ambush by Hag Mary and her pals,” said Evis. “Someone has thought of everything.”

A new pair of skeletal hands appeared from the growing shadow. Evis barked a command, and his ring of foot soldiers turned and fired.

Finger-bones shattered and flew.

Something in the dark howled with laughter.

A door slammed. I heard shouts, arguing, a man’s voiced, raised and furious, and a woman’s, soft but stern.

Lady Rondalee herself took the stage.