His mouth went tight and he let out a tired-sounding sigh.

I picked at another piece of grass. I wasn't going to go through all this with him again. I knew what he was going to saythat he was trying to protect me, that I didn't understandand I didn't want to hear any of it.

"Chloe?" he asked, and then waited, like it was my turn to speak.

"What do you want me to say, Piers? You want me to thank you for treating me like I can't take care of myself? I'm not going to." My voice came out more tired than angry. "I understand you're worried, but I feel like you aren't even trying to hear what I'm saying. I get that you want to keep me safe from Thisbe, but you can't protect me from my own life."

"Thisbe isn't your life, Chloe."

I looked up with him then. "She's my momma. You said so yourself, and I can't just set that fact down and walk away from it." I glanced away. "Like it or not, she made me. I'm her flesh and blood, and I need to be part of what happens to her."

"You're not your mother, Chloe," he said, and his voice was so kind and gentle it made my teeth hurt.

"I know that," I told him. "But sometimes I wonder if you know that, Piers. Sometimes when you look at me, I get the sense that you're seeing her."

A muscle in his jaw clenched. "That's not true," he said, but the words sounded hollow, like he didn't believe them himself.

"Isn't it? I see how you look at me sometimes, like you're waiting for her voice to come out my mouth again. But trying to protect me from all this ain't gonna stop the fact that I'm still her daughter. What happened might not have been my fault, but that don't mean I don't bear some of the guilt just the same. Whatever happens next, I need to be part of making it right."

Piers only shook his head, like he didn't want to listen to what I was telling him, much less really hear it.

I took a breath and got myself ready for what I needed to tell him. "You've been trying to keep me away from anything and everything involved with Thisbe, but you don't seem to want to even consider that my connection to her might be able to help us stop all this if we use it. I need to be there, Piers. I need to touch that charm again so I can know for sure."

His jaw was tight. "I can't," he said finally.

I shook my head. "More like you won't," I told him, and I started past him.

He snagged my arm gently to stop me from going. "Don't be like that, Chloe."

I let out a hollow laugh as I jerked away. "You lost any right to tell me how I should be when you stopped believing in who I am."

The frustration vibrating between us felt like some kind of runaway train, and I didn't know how to stop it without getting broken up myself.

He studied me with those dark, soulful eyes of his, and then let out a great, frustrated sigh. "Okay then." He stepped forward, finally breaching the spaced we'd kept between us. "Maybe you're right. Maybe we need a little distance and me leaving for a few days will be a good thing, so we can both get our heads back on straight."

I didn't like the way he said thatlike he was talking more about me than himselfbut I didn't argue. I'd had enough of fighting with him for one day.

When I didn't disagree, he took my head gentle-like, cupping the sides of my face in his hands, and placed a kiss, warm and soft, square in the middle of my forehead. Then he stepped back, and the distance was there between us again.

"I'll call you when I get to Nashville. We'll figure everything out when I get back."

My throat had gotten so tight-feeling by that point, I couldn't hardly swallow. So I couldn't have said anything to stop him from walking away even if I'd wanted to. All I could think was no, but I wasn't sure if I meant no to him calling me later or no to him leaving. And before I figured it out, he was already gone.

Eight.

That night, I avoided everything and everyone. I went straight back to that sterile little guest room and sat with myself until I couldn't stand my own thoughts anymore. Eventually, I sent Piers a text telling him that I was sorry for how we'd left things and asking him if he got in okay, but I didn't get a reply before I finally drifted off to sleep.

I woke in the thick grove of pines again. The night was as cool and dark as it had been before, and through the thick canopy of trees, the sky was clear and the stars looked like salt spilled on a dark table.

The world felt like an empty place, and that emptiness crept along my skin, up my spine, and made the nape of my neck go tight. I could feel that emptiness more than anything elsemore than the air around me, more than the rhythm of my own breath, more even than the cold that had my muscles shivering for warmth.

I needed to be free of that silence and that cold and the stars that were looking down like they were laughing at my foolishness, so I started walking. But like before, the grove of pines never ended. No matter how far or long I walked, I never reached the end of them. Still, I felt boxed in. Trapped, like there was no way out.

Exhausted and still cold despite the good sweat I'd worked up, I stopped and waited. I didn't know what I was waiting for, exactly, but the longer I waited, the more I felt like I was there in that endless place for a reason.

Then, just as I couldn't stand it no more, right about the time I felt like I would scream from the frustration and the fear, a figure appeared in the darkness a ways off. He was cloaked in the shadows and moving slowly and carefully through the trees, creeping his way closer to me with every step he took.

My every instinct screamed for me to run, but I'd done that already and hadn't gotten anywhere. So I forced myself to be still and wait until the figure got close enough that I could see it was only a man.

He was tall and broad, and he had a way of walking that marked him as a man who knew what he was, who knew what he always would be. When he stepped into a shaft of moonlight, my heart leaped straight up into my throat, because for a moment, I thought it was Piers.

Before I could stop myself, I stepped forward, too. Because even with all we'd said to each other, I missed him and regretted the distance that had grown between us. Because relief shot through me to know he'd come back, even with everything that was keeping us apart. Now that he was there, we had a chance to make everything right between us again.

But when the figure turned to me, the glow of the moonlight lit up the planes of his face and I realized my mistake.

Not Piers. Not Piers at all.

It was the man I'd seen in the visionthe sleeping man that Thisbe had kissed after she'd sliced open his hand. Just like in that vision, I felt a sense of rightness, or possessiveness, when I looked him. Even knowing it wasn't Piers, something about him pulled at me, made me want to move closer. But I forced myself to ignore that pull, and I held my ground.

After what felt like an endless moment, the man took a step toward me. His face was so steady and determined that I could barely think much less move. I was stuck, paralyzed with something that felt like a cross between fear and want.

He smiled then, a flash of straight, white teeth that had my heart thundering in my chest. His eyes glinted like obsidian as he took another slow, steady step. And then another. He was only two steps away by the time I could finally make myself move, and I stumbled back on the uneven ground as he reached for me.

But he didn't grab me.

He didn't even touch me.

One second he was in front of me, reaching with his broad, callused hands, and the next second, he was through me.

Through me.

Like I wasn't even there.

Like I didn't even exist.

I felt the warmth of him as every cell in my body vibrated from the violation of being passed through, like I was nothing more than a ghost. I turned, and he was still therestill walking, but I saw then that it hadn't been me he'd been reaching for after all.

A girl stood in the clearing behind me with sharp cheekbones and hair that pillowed out around her face, settling about her shoulders like a dark cloud. Her broad mouth was curved up in a smile as welcoming as the warmth in her eyes as she lifted her arms to the man, and there was something in the curve of that smile that reminded me of my mother.

Augustine, I heard a voice say in my head.

The world flashed warm, like the heat of the summer was washing over me when his lips settled onto hers, and I had to look away. But even looking away, I could still feel their kissthe want, the need, the desperation and love all mixed up together.

I woke up, my skin cold to the touch and my body shaking from the fear and adrenaline. Flushed and uncomfortable from the intensity of the dream.

He hadn't been all that much more than a boy, I realized then. Tall, yes. Broad, most definitely, but now that I thought back on it, there had been something about him that seemed young and untouched despite his strength. He must have been a few years younger than he was in that other visionhe couldn't have been older than nineteen or twenty.

"It was just a dream," I said out loud, needing to hear a human voice after the deafening silence of the pines. But hearing it didn't make it feel like the truth, and even though I could feel the warmth of the covers over me, I couldn't stop shaking.

Nine.

Most of Lucy's family was still sleeping in their beds when I went into the kitchen to get something to eat and found Dr. Aimes already sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper open wide in front of him.

"Morning, Chloe. Did you sleep well?" he asked, barely looking up over his paper.

"Well enough," I said, skirting the truth.

I poured myself a glass of juice and made some toast before I sat down at the table with him. Wordlessly, he offered me a section of the paper, but I waved him off. I still couldn't shake the memory of the dreamI couldn't stop thinking about that cold place or the voice that called to the man named Augustine.

"Dr. Aimes?"

He looked up over the paper and raised his brows. "Yes?"

"You don't know if anyone who lived on the plantation was named Augustine, do you?"

Folding the paper, he frowned as he considered my question. "I don't know off the top of my head that I've heard that name before. It definitely didn't belong to any of Roman or Josephine's children. They only had two girls, and neither made it to adulthood."

"What about a slave, maybe?"

"That I couldn't tell you offhand. Byron would know better." He leveled a serious gaze at me. "Why do you ask?"

"Uh ... "

"Hey, Chloe." We both turned to find Lucy coming through the door of the kitchen. "Morning, Dad," she said, giving him a kiss on the top of his head.

"You're up early," he said, smiling at her. Then he turned back to his paper, apparently forgetting all about the last question he'd asked me.

"Hey," I said to Lucy, relieved that her appearance had provided a welcome distraction.

Her mess of hair was a fiery nest on top her head, and she looked barely awake as she walked over to the coffee pot and poured what was left into a mug. She started doctoring it up with cream and sugar, and then turned to me like she'd thought of something. "You already got some, right?"

"I'm fine," I said, lifting my glass of juice in a small salute.

"Did you ever hear whether Piers got in okay last night?" she asked after she took a sip. Her voice was casual enough, but I knew she was really asking if I'd heard anything about Mama Legba and the charm.

I frowned, realizing suddenly that Piers hadn't called me. "Actually, I didn't hear from him," I said. I pulled out my phone to check my messages and felt a little better when I saw a short text that had come in sometime early in the morning. "He must have gotten in pretty late."

"He didn't say anything about the trip?" she asked, giving me a pointed expression over the top of her dad's head.

I shook my head, glancing at Dr. Aimes. I didn't think he was paying any attention to the silent conversation we were having, but it wasn't worth the chance. "Just that he got in and he'd talk to me later." I shot him a quick good morning text, but I didn't get an immediate reply. "If he was driving late, he's probably still asleep. I'm sure he'll call later." If he wasn't still mad about how we'd left things.

Lucy frowned as she sat down with her coffee. She gave her dad an impatient look as he took his good time reading his paper.

"I was thinking that I'd take a drive into town and see Mama Legba this morning," she said in a too-casual voice. "I thought you might like to come. Especially if you didn't hear from Piers?"

"Sure," I said. We needed to find out what they might have learned about the charmand why no one had contacted us about it. "I want to stop by and talk to Byron first, if you don't mind?"

Lucy's brows shot up. I knew she didn't have much love for the guy, but I sent her a silent look, hoping that she'd understand that I would explain later.

The meeting with Byron was a total bust. He was in a doubly foul and less than helpful mood because he had to deal with all of the museum interns on his own for the next couple of days. Piers had been handling most of that for him, but Piers was in Nashville.

Byron had less than no interest in digging out the old plantation registers for us. He said we didn't have the right training in archival preservation to handle them without supervision and sent us away without even telling us where they were.

"So you really think this Augustine person could be linked to Le Ciel?" Lucy asked as we drove into the city.

"I don't know," I told her. "But you see the past in your dreams, so maybe." I shrugged.

"But I see my own past."

I shrugged. "I guess I hoped there might be something in them that could help us."

Lucy frowned, but she didn't say anything more.

It was early enough that it didn't take us long to find a parking spot near Mama Legba's shop. But when we got to the door, it was clear something was wrongthe sign hadn't been turned to open yet and the lights were all off.

"She's usually open by now," I said as I peered through the windows at the empty shop.

Lucy turned the knob of the door, and I think we were both surprised when it clicked open. We glanced apprehensively at one another. "Do you think we should go in?" Lucy asked.

"I doubt she'd leave the door open if she wasn't in there," I said, but I had an uneasy feeling about it.

We walked into the dark shop and waited as the bell fell silent behind us, but Mama Legba didn't come out to greet us like she usually did.

"What do you think's up?" Lucy whispered.

"I don't know. Something." Then I called out, "Mama Legba? You here?"

There was a shuffling from the rooms beyond the hallway that had us exchanging nervous looks, but then we heard Mama Legba's voice call out for us to come on back.

When we got to her private rooms, Mama Legba was sitting on the low couch, her face in her hands. She looked to me like one of those ancient statues that lasts through wars and earthquakes and everything going wrong, but somehow survives.

All around her, the room was in chaos. Chairs were overturned, their stuffing spilling out of knife-slashed slits. Cupboards were torn open, their contents shattered on the floor like jagged-edged puzzles that wouldn't ever go back together. The back door's frame was splintered and busted, and it stood wide open, spilling light into room.