"To Thomas the Rhymer."

The name belonged to a character in a ballad about fairies. Finn sighed. "You're not going to betray us again, are you?"

"Sylph Dragonfly threatened to turn me into a fur coat for her next lover if I did. So, no-also, I'm scared of your boyfriend. The Rhymer is a friend of yours, isn't he?"

"I don't know." Finn looked over at Jack, who rode with a leggy fox knight. When his eyes flashed silver, Finn's heart ached; now that they had left the Wolf's house, Jack's mortality had fallen away and the Dragonfly's spell was taking root again and becoming a reality.

AS DUSK CRIMSONED THE SKY, the fox knights' motorcycles curved onto a street of deserted-looking mansions untouched by age or neglect-a Ghostlands suburbs, as silent and perfect as a painting. They halted in front of a large oak door set in one of the ten-foot-high hedges lining the avenue, and Sionnach said, "You've got a key, Finn Sullivan. Don't you? I saw it."

She lifted the dragonfly key on its chain around her neck and gazed at it doubtfully. "Will it work here?"

"I'm sure it will. It has the Dubh Deamhais's scent all over it."

"My friend died," Finn told him, her voice tight. "The one who gave this to me."

"I know." Sionnach Ri was somber. "I scented the death on it as well."

Jack glanced at the fox knight. "Don't think this makes up for you and your tribe handing Finn over to the Mockingbirds."

Sionnach nervously tugged at a gold hoop in his ear.

Finn climbed from the motorcycle, stepped forward, and jammed the dragonfly key into the lock of the door in the hedge. When the door swung open, she breathed out and felt like crying.

Beyond was a Mediterranean garden of fig and olive trees, with a townhouse of pale stone rising in the center, its large windows depicting stained-glass scenes of fairy-tale menace: a knight in thorns; a girl in a red coat, with a beast's shadow; two lovers, heads bowed, holding a bleeding apple between them.

"Go on in." Sionnach nodded to Finn. "The house door's open."

With a little shiver of apprehension and relief, she handed him the helmet he'd let her borrow. "Thanks."

Sionnach glanced at Moth, who was frowning, his face shadowed by the hood of his jacket. Then Sionnach smiled at Finn. "Any girl who can make Jack Daw grow a heart deserves my undying loyalty."

"That so? And how is your heart doing?"

"Fine." He put the helmet on. "Now that you've got time to breathe, maybe you and your man can go madly for the zippers, eh?"

"Good-bye, Sionnach." She waited until he and his knights had sped away, before turning and entering the garden with her companions. She said to Jack, "Thomas the Rhymer?"

"You know him as the dean of HallowHeart." Jack opened the townhouse door.

They stepped into a modern parlor illuminated by a chandelier of orange crystal. A wall of shelves held books with true-world titles. Antique furniture circled a fireplace carved with the image of an oak tree. Another wall was hung with green man masks spouting leaves and ivy.

"Welcome. At last." Rowan Cruithnear entered the parlor and he looked as aristocratic as ever in a Brooks Brothers suit, his hair seeming more silver than before. "Miss Sullivan, Christopher Hart and Sylvia Whitethorn have returned safely to the true world. Hopefully, you'll not be more than an hour later."

"But we can't go all the way back to that station-"

"You won't. I've arranged another way. It'll be a bit tricky."

Of course. Finn straightened when what she really wanted to do was fall onto the sofa. "Who are you, really?"

Jack answered, "This is Thomas the Rhymer, Thomas Learmont, whom I'm sure you've read about, your father being what he is. He's the only true love of the biggest, baddest fairy queen who ever lived-Titania-who gifted him with immortality."

"'Gifted,'" Rowan Cruithnear said wryly, "is a matter of opinion."

"You're like the Black Scissors?"

"Not quite, Miss Sullivan. I don't hate the Fatas as he does. And I have a conscience." Rowan Cruithnear turned to Moth and Leander. His gaze fell upon Lily and his smile faded. He whispered, "Lily Rose."

Lily stood silently, looking as if she'd stepped out of a Rackham illustration. She frowned at Cruithnear. Jack moved to stand in front of her, as if to protect her from Cruithnear's shocked gaze. "We're taking her home."

"Jack"-Cruithnear seemed about to voice an objection, then apparently changed his mind. He glanced at Leander and Moth. "This is Leander Cyrus, I presume? I've met . . . Moth."

Jack said, with that dangerous calm, "We need to get home before the Wolf figures out a way to come back at us out of the shadows."

"I think you first need to rest and replenish-I've real food. Afterwards, you'll be heading home."

"How did you get here?" Moth spoke coldly.

"Our key is working again-the Ghostlands, young man, is my second home." Rowan Cruithnear's response was stern. "I arrived the way Finn and Jack were supposed to. The key we gave you was set to bring you to the Green Road Station, not far from here. And I fear it was one of my people, not Phouka's, who hexed the key. It certainly wasn't Lulu."

"Then one of the professors is a traitor," Finn said grimly, "who sent us to the Wolf."

THE BOYS DIDN'T SEEM TO MIND being grungy and sweaty, but Lily and Finn headed for the bathroom on the second floor after Rowan Cruithnear gave them clothes that belonged to occasional guests of his. Finn wondered what kind of lady friend wore cocktail dresses and elegant coats.

Waiting for her sister outside the bathroom, seated on the floor in the hall, Finn shattered.

Quiet sobs racked her. Jack was suddenly crouched before her, pulling her against him. She pressed her face into his bloody shirt as he stroked her back, whispering, "Finn. Your sister is safe-"

"Don't leave me." She knotted her fingers in his shirt. "Okay? Just don't."

He didn't say anything. He didn't reassure her. And that should have warned her.

WHILE JACK SPOKE with Rowan Cruithnear in the parlor and Moth brooded in the kitchen over a cup of tea, Finn went to check on her sister, who had left to take a nap. When she knocked on the bedroom door, Leander called out, "Come in," and she stepped into a room where lilacs in a vase cast a soothing fragrance into the air and curtains drifted around an open window through which could be seen a picturesque view of the hedge maze.

Leander sat in a chair, his head in his hands. Lily was curled on the bed, asleep. Jack's coat and her Converses were neatly set on an ivory trunk.

"She was crying out before, in her sleep." Leander didn't look up as Finn sat on the bed, gently lifting the dark hair from her sister's face.

"Tell me how you met her."

Leander gazed at Lily with such longing, it made Finn ache for him. "I had just joined Lot's court, ten years ago, because I was alone and desperate. I didn't know what Lot was. He seemed solid. I saw Lily in Golden Gate Park. She was sitting on a fountain and she was in sneakers and a hoodie and a black ballet costume, like some delinquent ballerina."

"She is a delinquent ballerina."

"Her hair was in her face and she was smoking." He sat back, and a smile tugged at a corner of his mouth. "She told me to fuck off when I tried to talk to her. I wanted to take her picture."

"When did she find out what you were?"

"Well, pretty soon afterwards. I mean, she only saw me between dusk and dawn and I didn't have a heartbeat. She asked me, point-blank, if I was a vampire. She told me, if I was, she'd stake me with a wooden spear your dad owned. I wondered what kind of girl has a dad who owns spears."

"That's my sister. No sense of romance whatsoever. The ballet thing was eccentric." She hesitated. "How did . . . why did Seth Lot want her?"

"The Wolf"-Leander's voice shook-"found the darkness in her, the part that raged because of your mom's accident. Lily had always seen things when she was a kid. It's my fault for opening that door, for revealing myself. All the Wolf had to do was promise her a place at his side as a queen of shadows."

Finn had known her sister hadn't been happy-all those late nights and sneaking out and coming home through the window with the bite of alcohol on her breath. Finn knew her sister's flaws; Lily was not some brave, adventurous hero-but rather selfish, reckless, and angry with the world.

But in Lot's house, Finn suspected with a glimmering of unease, Lily had become something else.

Leander said quietly, "Finn, Lily can't leave the Ghostlands."

Although she'd heard it before, the shock of this statement made her cold. She told him, "I know you're worried Seth Lot will follow her. But we've got friends back home, people who can protect us. We'll be safe." She changed the subject. "How did you become a Jack?"

The rosy light haloed his tangled hair. His short fingernails were grimed and his suit was still grubby. He looked so beaten, she regretted the cruelty of her question.

Then he answered it: "It was in 1987. In San Francisco. I found one of their places. I met a girl. Her name . . . can you believe I've forgotten it? She was a Jill." He hesitated as if trying to find his way around gruesome details. "She didn't understand what she was doing. The Fatas . . . they're drawn to the lost and lonely like sharks to blood."

"She fell in love with you. The Jill."

"I loved her. But the Fata who made her-that name I remember-it was Amphitrite. She was a sea witch and she wasn't happy that I was taking away her Jill. As twisted as she was, Amphitrite saw her Jacks and Jills as her children. So I made a deal with Amphitrite. My girl was returned to almost human, enough to forget what she'd been and go home. And I drowned."

"Returned her to almost human?" Finn didn't want to comment on his drowning.

He nodded. "A spell. She was still a Jill, physically, but the illusion of being human would keep anyone, even physicians, from noticing. And she believed it." He continued, gently, "Like what happened to Jack after the Teind. He believed he was mortal."

"But"-Finn spoke with bitter realization-"he wasn't."

Lily twisted in her sleep, cried out, and pushed at the air with one hand. Finn curled beside her and put her arms around her.

Leander came and stretched out on Lily's other side and, together, they cradled the stolen-away girl they both loved.

ROWAN CRUITHNEAR WOULD LEND THEM his car in the morning. He'd given Jack directions to a train station not used by the Fatas anymore-one unknown to Seth Lot.

"Then we're almost home." In the second-floor room Cruithnear had given her and Jack for the night, Finn sat on the bed. Outside was a deep forest of evergreens-a completely different view from the hedge maze in the front of the house. She'd changed into the summer dress of silver silk Cruithnear had given her. She'd put on a fur hunter's cap and wrapped herself in a fur jacket because she wanted the terrace doors open. Jack had started a fire in the hearth, but the cold air felt good-it cleared her head. "It's beginning to snow."

Jack sat beside her. He'd changed out of his bloody clothes into a black jersey and jeans-Cruithnear apparently had many visitors who left clothing.

Finn thought of Lily Rose in the house of the Wolf and pictured Leander drowning to give a girl back her life. She thought of Hester disintegrating, never to be seen again. She curled her fingers in the fur coat. Her jaw clenched.

"Do you see those lights flickering through the trees?" Jack's voice soothed the prickly sorrow of her thoughts.

"Are they pixies? Will-o'-the-wisps?"

"Those are the souls of the dead passing through the Ghostlands. Don't ask me where they're going, but that's what they are."

"They're beautiful." She watched them and wondered if she knew any of them.

"You wouldn't think a river of human blood ran beneath that beautiful world out there, would you? Or that a beast disguised as a man stitches up the young with magic. Finn, the train we're going to take . . . to get back to the true world, we'll be passing along the border."

"What border?"

"The one between the land of the living and the land of the dead."

"Oh." She didn't say anything else because she figured the two of them had been walking that border for some time now.

As Jack kept his gaze on the forest outside the window, she studied his profile and felt a shiver of fear for him, the uncertainty of his place in her world. His fingers tightened around hers as he said, "A few days ago, I wondered if I'd lost you forever. There is silver in your eyes, Finn Sullivan, and your shadow hasn't returned. What's with the outfit?"

He flicked the fur hunter's cap she wore, and she snugged the flaps over her ears. "It was a gift from Rowan Cruithnear. My ears were cold. The dress belonged to a lady friend of his. And what about you, rocking the gangster look at the Mockingbirds?"

"I was trying to play the role." He sprawled back on the bed, propped up on his elbows. "You know, that dress kind of looks like something Phouka would wear."

"You think Cruithnear and Phouka . . . ?" She raised her eyebrows. "How scandalous. What about the young menswear he has on hand?"

"To each his own. You look very fetching."

"Oh. Here." She unclasped the phoenix pendant from around her neck.

He sat up and tugged her onto his lap and she fastened the pendant's leather thong around his neck. She twined her fingers in his hair as her lips sought his in a sensual, openmouthed kiss. He twisted and she was beneath him, cradled by him, protected by him.

"I'm a Jack again, Finn." His eyes were dark, troubled.

But his skin was warm. She drew him down against her, and his sinewy strength and the softness of the bed became the safest place in the world. He slid the coat from her, his beautiful eyes hidden by his lashes. She arched, pressed her face between his neck and shoulder, tasted his skin. His mouth found hers again, hungrily. For a moment, her existence was only skin and heat and tangled limbs and breath. He groaned as she slipped her hands beneath his black jersey. When she touched his shoulder where Lot's sword had gone through, she felt only a rough seam. It's safer for him this way, she thought sadly. Not being like me.

He yanked the jersey off over his head and curved above her with a vinelike grace, the golden phoenix brushing against her lips as he whispered, "I missed you-"

She dragged him down against her again, sighing as his skin kissed hers, as his mouth touched her throat, as his fingertips drifted across her thigh. She felt as fragile as glass containing fiery butterflies. He reminded her of what he'd been transformed into at the Teind: an eagle, a python, fire, water- Her foot knocked her backpack from the bed. Things clattered across the floor. Remembering one object in particular, she scrambled up in a panic.

Jack saw it before she could lunge for it. He moved with inhuman grace as she jumped to her feet. He was already crouched at the foot of the bed, holding the wooden box gilded with the shapes of jackals, staring at its contents strewn across the floor. He said, his voice ragged, "I remember this . . ."

"Don't." She knelt helplessly amid the scattered contents of the box.

"Where did you find this?"

"Orsini's Books."

He dropped the box, shoved his hands through his hair. "Did you think that these were innocent things I had collected? Finn?"

"Some of them." Her voice was faint.

"The box was my mother's." He reached out and traced the golden jackals on the lid. "She was Romany before she was Irish. And it was brought, by her ancestors, from Egypt. She gave it to my father, so that he could keep his amulets and talismans in it."

His father had been a coachman from Hungary, but also an exorcist. She watched as Jack picked up a ring shaped like a serpent. He said, "Most of these are trophies."

"Were they Fatas?" She carefully coaxed him back from the past. "The ones you took these things from?"

"Seven." He closed his fist over the ring. "I got away with each kill here. They were Reiko's enemies. Some were Lot's. Not all of them were bad."

Finn watched him set the serpent ring on the floor.

"This ring belonged to a Fata named Evan-on-the-Hill. He was a Redcap but hadn't yet begun to turn poisonous. I prevented him from becoming anything."