"That's good to hear, Micah." He looked around the theatre. "This is an extraordinary building. Some parts of it mirror the Kymri temples I've been to."

"I'd like to see those one day."

"You should. Everyone should travel the world if they can. Open their eyes to different cultures and ways of life. I feel like a changed man after my time abroad."

"Maybe someday," I said, "we'll do a touring show."

He nodded. "So you plan to stay in show business?"

"I never plan anything for forever. Too much has shifted beneath my feet in the past for that. But for now, this is where I belong."

Doctor Pozzi nodded. "I am glad for you."

"And will you be staying in Imachara long?" I asked, wondering how long I'd have to worry about him looking over my shoulder.

"It depends on a myriad of factors. There's been an interesting birth in Kymri I'd like to investigate a the child can cause his bottle to float to him when he's hungry, which has scared his parents half to death a but I do believe my brief travels are over. I am the Royal Physician, and the young Royal is my charge."

Something in the phrasing reminded me of how Anisa spoke of her charges. Someone who knew Pozzi hailed him from across the room, and he made his excuses to me and ambled over. I watched him go, wishing I could have the measure of the man.

When Cyan and Maske returned, they both beamed brighter than glass globes, Maske with his arm tight around her.

Have things gone well? I ventured, looking over to Pozzi. He did not seem to notice how we spoke, or if he did, he gave no sign.

He had no idea, but he doesn't deny he was with my mother around that time. It's still a little bizarre and awkward, but he's happy. And I'm happy.

She laughed in my mind.

I smiled.

30.

THE WOMAN IN THE RED DRESS.

"But the spirits show me visions. I see a girl, no, a woman, in a wine-red dress. Her child is ill, eaten from the inside. I see figures on a stage, playing their parts, the audience applauding as magic surrounds them. I see great feathered wings flapping against the night sky. A demon with green skin drips blood onto a white floor. A man checks his pocket watch, and I hear a clock ticking, counting the time."

The words spoken to Micah Grey at the seance.

The peace did not last.

A week later, Anisa woke me up.

It's time, she whispered in my mind.

"Hmm?" I asked aloud, still half asleep.

I had a vision. You must go to that place where you saw the woman with the ill child. I think something has happened. Something impossible.

I sighed, rolling out of bed. "Alright, alright," I muttered, tugging on my shoes I rubbed my gritty eyes. My muscles hurt. I yawned.

What about Cyan and Drystan? I asked.

No need to trouble them with this.

My mouth twisted. I'm at least asking Drystan if he wants to come. We promised each other a no secrets.

Hurry, then.

I shook Drystan awake, and whispered what had happened. He clambered out of bed and dressed, stumbling to the washroom to splash water on his face. We left. The air was warmer today. I barely needed my coat and left it unbuttoned. All of my clothes were nice and new. Seance requests were flowing in thick and fast, the Collective of Magic had assigned us a manager, and we had plenty of bookings in Imachara and other cities along the coasts and in the Emerald Bowl. We had enough money to flee Ellada five times over, but neither of us had brought up the possibility of leaving Maske, Cyan, and the Kymri Theatre.

We trudged through the city, still yawning. It was so early we doubted we'd see the woman pushing her child about for a stroll. I wanted to ask Anisa for more information, but I figured I would learn soon enough.

"So who's this woman again?" Drystan asked me as I walked.

"In my first vision at the seance, Maske mentioned her. For a time I thought she was the second client of the Shadow, but that was Pozzi. Something about her or that child is important. I can feel it, but I can't explain it more than that."

"Time to find out, it seems."

I nodded.

The cafe across from the building where the woman lived had just opened. We ordered a strong pot of coffee.

Now what, Anisa?

We wait. She will come here.

She fell silent in my mind. I stirred sugar and milk into the coffee, my hands shaking. I was scared. Anisa's master plan was meant to be a vague event in the future. This was the first step, and I did not know where it would lead. I wished Cyan could tell the future, but she only had that dream about the lion. The one that Anisa sent.

The door of the building across the way opened. A woman came out pushing the wicker wheelchair. I sat up straight, and Drystan followed my gaze. She pushed the chair across the cobbled street, her bonneted head ducked low. When she came closer, I peered into the chair, but a cover hid the child from view.

Before entering the cafe, the woman came around and told the boy off for removing his scarf and she wrapped him up again. It was only when she turned around that I saw her face.

It was Lily Verre.

"Styx," I swore. She hadn't seen us. Quickly, I grabbed a newspaper on the empty table next to it and unfolded it, feeling ridiculously conspicuous.

"It can't be," Drystan whispered to me. "That's Lily. What's going on?"

I rubbed my forehead, and my fingers came away damp with sweat. "I don't know. She said she didn't have any children." I peeked around the newspaper. Lily was at the till. She kept glancing back at the boy in the wicker chair.

"Two coffees and two chocolate pastries to take away," she said to the woman behind the till, and I reeled again. Gone were her flighty voice and her rough mannerisms. She spoke with the smooth, educated voice of the nobility of Imachara.

"Oh, Lord and Lady," I breathed. "We've been had."

She'd been waiting for us at Twisting the Aces. She'd just joined the week before. But how had she known to lie in wait? I searched my memory... and the first night we went to Maske's, there had been a woman walking down the street. I remember the sound of her heels echoing on the cobblestones. Had it been her?

The woman you saw matches her height and weight. I believe she shadowed Shadow Elwood, Anisa said. I can see it now. She followed him the last night you were in the circus and knew where you went. I didn't know if I believed her. What if Anisa had known this all along?

I didn't. Oftentimes what I see does not make sense until many other pieces fall into place.

Lily waited impatiently for the coffees and the pastries.

I went back through every memory with Lily, trying to see her ploy. When I went to Twisting the Aces and I'd had a vision: was she to blame? On the second visit, she dropped something, a glass in a frame. My breath hitched. I had been blind and foolish. That purple glass with the motley frame. Take away the gaudy flame, and wipe off a sheen of thin red paint, and it could have been a Mirror of Moirai. It was the same size, and when she'd wiped off my fingerprints with a cloth, she'd taken care not to touch it herself. She could have known where we were the entire time.

She wasn't the second client of the Shadow. She was a second Shadow.

When the coffees arrived, Lily put them on the small shelf below the chair and pushed it back onto the street. We waited for her to leave and then dashed up to the till and paid for our unfinished coffee. I put extra coins into the tip jar to make up for the tea I had stolen months ago.

Lily disappeared around the corner. She wore her wine-colored dress. I nodded to a drainpipe and we made our way up to the roof. As we climbed, I felt a little dizzy. Why hadn't she turned us in after our actions resulted in the death of Shadow Elwood? What did she want from us?

Poor Maske.

She made her way through the streets. She gave one of the pastries to the boy and we finally had a clear view of the boy in the wicker basket.

Despite the mild weather, the child, who must have been around eight, wore a coat, a hat, and a thick scarf that covered most of his face. But the child used his weak arms to tug at the scarf and managed to disengage himself from it so he could eat his pastry. I stared, my mouth falling open slightly. The boy's face was peeling badly, and patches had fallen away. Beneath, the skin was dark green, like the back of a beetle. Beneath the hat, I saw two small protrusions.

Horns.

Like Ahti.

Of course, Anisa breathed in my mind. I should have seen it. This is why the world is in danger. If someone hurts or frightens this little Chimaera, then all is lost. She sounded so sad. Once he finishes his change, he will look identical to Ahti.

Drystan was staring at the boy as well. "Did I just see what I think I saw?"

"Yeah. That's a true Chimaera. A Theri."

Lily drew the covering back again, surveying the street. But she didn't look up. We followed her as she made her way to the nicest part of town, passing the palace. She paused at the gates, and for a moment I thought she would enter.

Instead, she gazed through the bars and continued onto Ruby Street, to press the buzzer for Doctor Samuel Pozzi's apartments.

She was let in immediately.

Drystan and I froze in shock. The woman who joked and comforted us, helped tidy the theatre and had supposedly fallen in love with Maske was all smoke and mirrors, like any of our illusions. I shivered again, but it was not from cold. I felt very warm. I loosened my coat, sweating. Drystan peered at me.

"Micah, are you alright? You're pale." He put his palm on my forehead. "Styx, you have a fever."

"A fever?" I asked him thickly. "Is this what a fever feels like? It's terrible. I don't like it."

"Come on, let's get you home. There's nothing more we can do here."

It was so difficult to climb back down the drainpipe and trudge home. I kept having to pause to catch my breath. My eyes felt like they were cooking in my skull, and I'd never been so weak.

Drystan didn't seem unduly concerned. "It's just a fever, Micah. You'll take a cool bath, get some soup and liquids, and you'll be fine in a day or two."

In response, I stumbled to an alleyway and retched up my coffee. The bile burned my throat.

In all that happened, it turned out I still kept one secret from him. That if I became ill, it could be the sign of something being very wrong.

Are you going to go see Doctor Pozzi? Anisa asked me as we made our way home again.

Looks like I don't have much of a choice.

"Come on, Micah," Drystan urged. "We're almost there. I'll take care of you. You'll be fine."

I opened my mouth to answer, but my eyes rolled up into my head and I fell into his arms. I had just enough time to be annoyed before I fainted yet again.

31.

THE DREAM, THE NIGHTMARE.

"A fever may burn a man alive. Some of the old wise men who called themselves seers would bring on a fever. They said the fever dreams showed them their fate, and the fate of those who followed them."

"Mystics and Seers" from A History of Ellada and its Colonies, Professor Caed Cedar, Royal Snakewood University.

Part of me knew it was a fever dream. That didn't make it any less frightening.

I was not me. Anisa was flying, or falling, through skies on fire. All was red, orange, black and gold. I reached out my hands and they burned to nothing. There was no pain. I closed my eyes.

I woke up and I was no longer myself. My body was human, my skin the peach and cream of a newborn. No swirling silver markings of my family. No dragonfly wings rose from my back. I was clipped. Earthbound. I skulked through the streets of this strange new city of Imachara, keeping to the shadows. I came to the market square before the palace, with a large stage set up in the middle, but no audience. Storm clouds rumbled overhead.

The phantoms, the parts in this play to come, walked across the stage. The woman in the red dress whose son was eaten from the inside. My new charge knew who she was now, and what she had done. Things might still fall into place the way I thought a hoped a they would. The way the world whispers to me that it might.

The doctor with the clockwork hand appeared onstage, smiling that self-satisfied grin, though he was as ignorant as all the rest. He did not even know what he wore against the stump of his arm. The ones who side with him float around him, waiting in the wings. The young girl with the lie around her neck. The one who was Matla, young Cyan, her powers just beginning to unfurl. The boy Drystan, who despite his lack of power could destroy everything. And my little Kedi, my newest charge, the one called Micah, or Gene, or Sam a my last and greatest hope.

The stage lights extinguished, leaving me in the night. My lungs burned with the memory of smoke and soot. I was alone in the darkness. No one called me forth.

A door in the darkness opened, and the boy Ahti came toward me. But as I reached my arms to him, he fell, his shriveled legs unable to support him, his skin gray and green. He wailed, covering his eyes with his hands. He wasn't my Ahti. A flash of bright blue light. A dull roar. A young girl, screaming. Micah Grey, the one meant to help, to save everything, crying out. A flash of blinding blue.

They were all dead and gone, and the world dead and gone with them.

Darkness fell.

I knew what I needed to do to stop it, but how could I commit that evil, too?

I knew where they were, those two little discs that held the loves of my life. My Relean. My little Kedi, Dev. They had survived the years, just as I have, even if Ahti was gone.

I would do anything to be with them again.