I didn’t want to let go of Maeve, but I had to search Corbin’s library. Blake and I exchanged a glance, and I slipped away from her as he moved in. Maeve didn’t object as Blake wrapped his arms around her and murmured something secret to her in his deep, melodic voice. Her eyes swiveled to him, caught in his otherworldly magnetism.

With Flynn occupied questioning Greg on every aspect of the rebuild, and Arthur having run away to be angry, I slipped away and crept up the staircase, avoiding the piles of debris and the sparking cable dangling from the ceiling. My stomach churned. I swirled my gaze up to the chandelier to count the wrought-iron leaves, but the chandelier had been torn down. And if I looked down I was going to be sick.

Stop it. I tried to force the anxiety back. You’ve got to do this.

But anxiety never listened to reason, especially not when I stood in the middle of the ruin of my life. Soot clung to every surface. The carpets squelched under my feet. Several of the paintings had been torn from the walls. I paused at the library door. My gaze flicked to the shelf on the right – the one I always counted before I entered the room. Someone had flung all the books on the floor.

If you can’t count, you can’t enter, my body screamed.

My stomach tightened. A sharp pain stabbed between my shoulder blades. I gripped the edge of the doorframe, trying to force my feet forward.

A tremor shook my whole body as the familiar scents slammed into me. Parchment and old leather furniture. The whiff of whiskey from the bottles stored in the globe bar. Dust and old things. And beneath it all, Corbin’s unique scent.

“Give me strength,” I whispered. Corbin believed I could do anything. I needed that belief magic now.

I wrote it all down for you.

If Corbin really was somehow still… alive, still able to be brought back, then the answers were in this room. I lifted a shaking foot and placed it on the rug in front of me. My body howled in protest. My mind rebelled, certain that entering the room without finishing my ritual would result in some horrible consequence.

What could be more horrible than losing Corbin?

I dragged my other foot across the rug, my eyes flicking over the shelves. Apart from the books strewn across the floor and the priest hole door swinging free on its hinges, the library had remained remarkably intact.

The desk. Get to the desk.

Another step. Another stab in my heart. My vision wobbled. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to go back.

I balled up my courage and surged forward, grabbing the edge of the desk. I was there! I did it! A swell of triumph momentarily beat back the anxiety, and I held that triumph against my heart, hoping it would last as long as I needed.

I slid into Corbin’s chair, drawing strength from his lingering scent and the familiar shape his body had scooped out of the cushion. As usual, he left his laptop off to one side and piled a wall of books around him, the same way I yanked my hair in front of my face when I didn’t want to face the world.

I pulled the first book on the stack toward me. It was the grimoire Clara brought us, the one that once belonged to the Soho coven. She didn’t seem to be as big a fan of Post-it notes and scribbled margins as Corbin, which meant that the five colored bits of paper sticking out of the leaves had been placed there by my lover in the last couple of days.

I wrote it all down for you.

I flipped the book to the first Post-it note, expecting to see a personal message. I skimmed over the scrawling diary entry from the book’s original owner. On his note, Corbin’s jagged writing noted some features of the belief magic story Clara told us. Nothing about bringing him back from the dead. I flipped to the next note. This marked an alchemical diagram – probably the arrangement of a ritual – that Corbin had redrawn with different letters at the cardinal points. I snapped a picture of the page on my phone and stuffed the note into my pocket, in case it was important.

On the third page, a towering pile of skulls grinned back at me. A demon danced on top of the pile, tossing a skull in the air like some fairground amusement. A crown of bones and horns circled his head.

The spell beneath was in Latin, but Corbin had translated it across three Post-its.

A spell for entering the world of the dead.

My heart hammered against my chest. This is it. This is what he did.

Corbin, you sneaky, lying, glorious, beautiful bastard.

I grabbed the Post-it notes, snapped a picture of the page, and slammed the book shut. The full weight of my discovery soared in my veins. If we could figure out the spell Corbin had performed, we could reverse it and bring him back, the way Maeve brought Aline back from the between-world in the painting.

I swiveled in the chair to look out the window behind the desk. Corbin had a sweet view from here over the grounds, from the topiary maze across to where Flynn’s workshop used to stand, right down the sloping lawn into the orchard. I jumped as a figure moved between the apple trees, spinning and lunging at an invisible foe.

Arthur. His sword caught the light as he moved through his wards. I couldn’t make out his face, but the set of his shoulders and ferocity of his movements betrayed his fury. I glanced away, feeling ashamed to be watching him, like I was intruding on something private.

Corbin could see down into the kitchen gardens. A delicious shiver ran up my spine as I looked down into my walled garden, which miraculously had survived the attack on the castle intact. Corbin could have watched me gardening from up here. If he wanted to see what was going on elsewhere in the castle, he had a tall window on the other side of the library looking into the courtyard.

My eye caught a weird movement in the orchard. I searched the trees for Arthur. At first I couldn’t see him, but then I spotted him lying on the ground, his face to the sky. His sword lay a couple of feet from his body.

Cold fingers clenched my heart.

Even from this distance, I could see the blood pooling from his arm, spreading in a dark puddle across his shirt.

Not Arthur. Not him too.

I rose to my feet, my legs trembling. I used the edge of the desk to support me as I stumbled from the library and lurched toward the staircase. “Maeve? Flynn? Call an ambulance,” I gasped against the rising panic. “Arthur’s in the orchard and he’s bleeding real bad.”