She reluctantly lifted a fan of ivory parchment painted with images that seemed to move. "And this?"

"She was called Ban Beache, the White Bee. She fed on mortals as they dreamed."

Finn lifted another object, and another, and, in this way, lanced an infection that had been festering within him for far too long. He told the story of each trophy. As he spoke each Fata name, Finn flung the objects into the fire. When it was done, she handed the jackal box back to him. Silently, they watched the flames. He said in a raw, quiet way, "Have you thought of finding someone real?"

"Real? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

His gaze didn't leave the fire. "I'm old, Finn."

"Two hundred years of arrested development isn't old."

"Bloody Peter Pan. It's influenced all you bookish girls."

"I'm not book-well, a little. Anyway, this conversation is over, because it's a waste of time." She pushed to her feet and walked to stand before the open terrace doors.

He came to her side, settling her fur jacket back over her shoulders, and she whispered, "I don't see your shadow anymore."

"That's the least of our worries, beloved."

"No, Jack. Not the least of mine."

"Finn . . . Lot knew the Mockingbirds would try for us, to recruit us. He expected us to do to the Mockingbirds what we did to Reiko. He used you and me to eliminate an enemy. He isn't underestimating us."

"He'll come after us."

"Yes. I had to tell Rowan about Hester Kierney. He says that'll end it between the Fatas and the blessed-it'll leak out, to other places where the Fatas have lodged themselves. It's not good for either side."

"They won't even have a body to bury. Her family." Finn felt fatigue creeping up on her. Hester . . .

"What are the odds," Jack said darkly, "that that key would end up just where we needed it, in Lot's house? In Hester's hand?"

Finn closed her eyes.

"Christie said he and Sylvie were swept through the Way when they came here, that the key was left behind in StarDust Studios. What made Hester find it and step through into the arms of Seth Lot? Someone set her up, Finn."

Finn pressed a fist against her midriff. "Someone sacrificed Hester, to save us."

"Yes."

They were quiet then, watching the snow and the shimmering orbs of the dead drift over the forest.

JACK SLID FROM THE BED where he and Finn had fallen asleep-regretfully, their passion had been somewhat subdued by the realization that Hester's death might have been the result of an ally's manipulations. He moved out into the hall, down the stairs. With the exception of a grandfather clock ticking, the house was silent.

As he slipped out the back door and into the garden, he heard a voice. "What are you doing, Jack?"

He turned. Moth was hunched forward in a chair on the back veranda, his face shadowed.

A chill swept through the garden, which had transformed from Mediterranean Zen to a wintery, English courtyard of red roses and blackberry bushes. Jack said, "I'm making certain Lily Rose is able to accompany us back to the world."

Moth's voice was hard. "I know what you're going to do. I know what Lily Rose is. You can't. It'll break Finn."

Jack looked toward the darkest part of the garden. "There's no other way. And you've got to admit"-he smiled as his heart began to beat faster-"it's a perfect way to set things right."

Moth said nothing.

Jack walked deeper into the garden, toward the dark figure waiting for him, the one Rowan Cruithnear had reluctantly summoned, the one whose shadow stilled the air around it and withered any living thing close by.

FINN WOKE IN DARKNESS, an image from her last dream still vivid in her head-a white umbrella planted in the snowy ground, its stem blossoming with mistletoe.

Jack was gone.

She rose from the bed, then grabbed her coat and Doc Martens. Hopping into the hall while pulling them on, she glanced at Lily and Leander's door, heard them talking, and was reassured.

Finn hurried down the stairs. A blue lamp glowed in the parlor redolent of leather-bound books and burnt wood. Their backpacks and equipment had been placed against a wall. She knelt down and carefully sorted some of their belongings: the jackal-handled walking stick with the sword; the Grindylow's compass heart; the dragonfly key; the Tamasgi'po in its vial shaped like a sphinx; Eve Avaline's silver dagger.

Poisoning, pinning, and decapitation.

"What," she whispered to the air, "will really kill the Wolf?"

She rose as Moth entered the parlor. When he saw her, he halted, looking as if he'd been caught at something. "Finn."

"Have you seen Jack?"

"He's in the garden, I believe."

"What's he doing in the garden?" She began to move past him, but Moth gently caught her arm and said, "Don't go out there . . . he needs to put his mind together."

The grave look in Moth's eyes made her sink onto the sofa instead. Finn said, "He knows he's turning back. Into a Jack."

He sat beside her. "He does."

She'd rescued her sister from the Wolf, but she was helpless against Jack's transformation. "If we hadn't come here-"

"You wouldn't have your sister."

"He'll hate himself again."

"He has you."

What can I do? she thought. Love him enough to keep him with blood, heart, and breath?

"Finn, I want to show you something."

He rose. She watched as he closed his eyes. He began to shimmer. "Moth-"

When he burst into sheets of gossamer light, she gasped and scrambled back. A luna moth spiraled from the glow. She jumped up.

The moth shimmered again, changing into a mass of light and shadow, and Moth crouched in the middle of the room. He raised his head, triumphant. "I've been practicing."

It hadn't shaken her, what had just transpired. It should have. She smiled. "You might be our best chance against the Wolf."

DUSK BLED ACROSS THE SKY as Jack drove Cruithnear's Lincoln town car down a crooked road lined with graffiti-painted warehouses and giant, lightning-blasted oaks. Finn sat in the back with Lily, who had her head on Leander's shoulder. Moth was in the passenger seat up front, glaring out the window as if expecting an army to descend.

Jack had been suspiciously optimistic at the breakfast Cruithnear had made for them. As they'd sat in the blue-and-white kitchen, surrounded by porcelain painted with ethereal blue shepherdesses and windmills, Cruithnear, pouring coffee, had informed them he'd soon return to Fair Hollow after he cleared up some things here.

Finn, watching the Ghostlands pass by, realized that she was going to miss it. Maybe it was the elixir. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome.

"So what's wrong with this station?" Finn could tell Moth was scowling even though she could only see the back of him.

"The MossHeart Station. It's old. It's broken. Something bad happened there a long time ago." It was Lily who spoke.

Warily, Finn asked, "What bad something?"

"A love story." Lily gazed out the window.

"And how did you learn about this story?" Jack sounded interested.

"I had my sources. People wanted favors in Lot's court-I took information in exchange."

Finn stared at her sister. So did Leander. Moth slowly turned his head to regard Lily with wary respect. Jack didn't take his attention from the road. Lily straightened. "The guardian of MossHeart Station was a Lham Dearg, a Bloody Hand-a Fata who feeds off murders."

"So far, I don't like this story." Finn's brows pinched.

"He fell in love with a mortal girl, a girl who could speak with the dead. She came close to his territory in the true world and he noticed her. He became curious and began following her. She was in love with a mortal boy. So he sent his spies to watch them, to learn. He began to neglect his duties as a spirit who shadowed murderers. He worked for Seth Lot."

Lily continued blithely, "The Bloody Hand, BatSong, appeared to the mortal girl, spoke to her, pretended to be harmless. But she saw what he was-she was an oracle. And she wasn't afraid. She felt sorry for him. That was her downfall. One evening, as she and her boy were kissing in a field filled with dragonflies, they were set upon by bats, who became the Lham Dearg. He ordered the girl to come with him or he would kill her lover. But her mortal lover was from one of the blessed families, and this caused a conflict between Seth Lot and the Fata queen who looked after the boy's family. Seth Lot didn't like that the girl knew things. He gave the Lham Dearg a choice: murder the mortal girl or Lot would do it himself-and you can imagine how that fucking bastard would have done it. BatSong couldn't do it, so, instead, he turned the girl into a tree, because he had Redcap blood and he thought that was the only way to keep her safe . . . until he could find a way to destroy Seth Lot."

"So they're both there now, at the station?" Finn glanced out the window as if she could glimpse MossHeart Station through the forest. "BatSong and the tree girl?"

"They're both there now," Lily finished.

Finn felt the elixir like cold electricity within her, glimpsed her eyes silvering slightly in the rearview mirror.

JACK TURNED OFF THE ROAD and stopped in front of an octagonal building of green marble scrawled with more graffiti and nestled in creepers and giant ferns. Rusting railroad tracks snaked around it into a wilderness of redwoods and fir trees. The station's stained-glass windows were grimed with so much lichen, they looked black. Scarlet fungus streaked the walls like an infection.

As they stepped out of the car, Lily reached out and gripped Finn's hand. Jack began walking toward the building. Leander and Moth flanked the sisters as Jack led the way up the stairs to the metal door engraved with stylized images of bats. He tried the handle, brushed his fingertips across the rusting lock.

"We don't need to get in, do we? All we need to do is wait for the train." Finn's voice faded when Jack shook his head and stepped back.

"At this little-used place, we'll need to summon the guardian. You have a key."

Finn lifted the dragonfly key Hester Kierney had given her from its chain around her neck. She studied it and uneasily remembered that the Black Scissors created keys from living things. She moved to Jack's side, inserted the key into the lock. Apprehension swept over her as the door opened.

They stepped into a high-ceilinged lobby littered with leaf wrack and the bones of tiny animals. Wooden benches sagged beneath colonies of toadstools. Lamps of black metal rusted on walls painted with faded murals of Victorian advertisements for soap and bicycles and typewriters. In the center grew a tree, black even to its leaves, its roots cracking the marble floor, its branches strung with hundreds of red and green glass beads that glowed in the dusky light.

"That's it?" Finn breathed. "An elder tree . . ."

As she and Jack approached the tree, the glass beads became incandescent. Finn curled her hands to keep from reaching out and touching one of the beads. Her skin began to warm in the glow from the tree as threads of light ebbed outward. Jack, studying the tree with concern, said, "She's become a guardian between the lands of the living and the dead."

"We are caught between mortal and not." Lily moved forward. "And getting back is not as easy as arriving."

In Finn's hand, the dragonfly key whirred to life, a silvery thing that shot forward into the darkness beyond the tree. In that dark, Finn thought she glimpsed a young man's white face and long black hair-she remembered the photo of Thomas Luneht on Sylvie's wall.

The tree continued to exude tendrils of ruby and emerald light, but the only sound was the whirr of the dragonfly's wings in the dark. Watching the jeweled tree shimmer to life, Finn became aware of a thundering pulse beneath their feet and remembered Jack telling her about the river of blood that ran beneath this land, blood from all the mortal battles on earth.

A voice whispered: You are not welcome here.

A sudden vacuum of hostile cold struck Finn down to her bones. No, she thought. Not when we're so close.

"Ialtag Amrhan." Jack spoke the guardian's name. "We are here to return to the true world."

The shadows birthed a statuesque young man in a sleeveless robe of inky fur, his hair a mane of tangled black, his eyes an acid green. His arms were gloved to the elbow in red.

"And what does that have to do with me?" The guardian bared curved teeth. "Why do any of you want to enter the mortal world?" His gaze slid over each of them. "Is there a mortal among you that I can't scent?"

Moth idly reached for the knives hidden in his hoodie. Jack rubbed the back of his neck, his hand in close proximity to the grip of the jackal walking stick/sword strapped across his back.

When Finn stepped forward, Lily grabbed for her hand and Moth swore beneath his breath. Finn said, "What was her name?"

No one moved. The guardian was as still as a statue. He slowly looked at the tree. His voice scraped out, "Miriam."

"We're going to kill Seth Lot," Finn told him. "Let us back to the true world. The Wolf will follow, eventually, and we'll kill him there." She glanced at the whispering tree. "And you'll be able to free her."

She returned her attention to the guardian and flinched-his bloody hands were cupping an object made out of twigs, moss, and red creepers.

"Take it," he whispered. "My heart. Break it, and you'll summon the train that runs between the borders."

She moved toward the Fata and placed her hands over his bloody ones. Carefully, she accepted the fragile object, stepped back. She didn't take her gaze from him as she snapped the Fata heart in two.

There was a sound like a glacier cracking. The air became sweet with ivy, clover, and berries. The tree's black leaves lightened to emerald and the beads of glass began to tremble.

As a sigh drifted through the air, the guardian vanished and the dragonfly whirred from the shadows and out the door.

The whistle of a train shattered the silence. They ran onto the platform.

A train as derelict as the station, laced with rust, forged from black metal tinged with ivy-green and streaked with the red light of a Ghostlands day, was thundering down the tracks. It was the most gorgeous thing Finn had ever seen.

"The dragonfly," she said faintly. "Thomas Luneht was the lover of BatSong's mortal girl."

Jack, watching the train approach, reached out and clasped one of her hands. "I always wondered why Reiko and Lot split in the '70s. Lot ordered Caliban to murder Thomas Luneht, one of her blessed."

Finn pictured a smiling Thomas Luneht and a black-haired girl kissing in a field dancing with dragonflies. She felt snarly.

The train creaked and groaned and halted with a terrible screech like a dying dragon. The singed air stung her nostrils. The doors slammed open and a few bolts and screws clattered to the tracks.

Lily whispered, "We're going home."

Finn gripped one of Lily's hands. "Yes."