I woke up coughing, my mouth filled with dust. My stomach lurched and I doubled over, hacking up my lungs.

I rubbed at my stinging eyes, struggling to see through the gloom. For a moment I imagined myself to be back at Briarwood, and the villagers had returned to raze the place to the ground with me inside. Clouds of dust swirled around me, punctuated by flickering lights, like the campfires Andrew and I used to make out in the desert during our astronomy monitoring sessions.

A dark figure moved through the dust, obscuring the light so it was a silhouette in the gloom. A strong hand reached down and hauled me to my feet.

“Maeve?” Corbin’s velvet voice caressed my ears. His hand on mine was warm, living flesh.

“Corbin… I… you…”

He stifled my words with his mouth, claiming me in a deep kiss. I clung to him and drank in the warmth of his embrace, the softness of his tongue against mine, the scent of old leather and parchment rolling off him. Everything about him was exactly as he always was. Alive. But how—

Something tugged against my abdomen, causing a bolt of pain to shoot through me. Corbin’s eyes widened. He pulled away, his mouth dropping open in horror. His hand flew to the knife handle sticking out of his side.

I looked down, shocked to see a similar handle poking out of my own chest. The memories flooded back to me, along with a dull pain in my chest, as though I’d run into the corner of a piece of furniture. I remembered the black tendrils crawled from Liah’s wound and encircling my arm. I remembered Liah holding my hand and thrusting the knife between my ribs.

Corbin’s jaw set. He strode forward and yanked the handle. A knife blade slid out of my chest with a gurgling noise, like water going down the sink. I closed my eyes, expecting blood to gush from the wound and the pain to finally hit, but the dull ache of the wound never changed. I barely felt a thing.

I blinked, staring down at my chest. The knife was back inside me.

“It wasn’t supposed to go like this! You weren’t supposed to die to come after me!” Corbin yelled, shaking my shoulders so hard my head jerked back. “Bloody hell, Maeve, why do you have to be so stubborn? Why couldn’t you have just accepted the dreams?”

“Liah brought me here,” I whispered. “You mean the dreams were…”

“You’re a dreamwalker, Maeve. You should know by now you don’t have an ordinary subconscious.” Corbin crushed me against his chest, his knife handle scraping my side while mine bent out to the side. “If I didn’t love you so much I swear I would kill you myself, but it looks like Liah’s done that for me. I told her to help you find me, but I meant in your dreams. She could have put you to sleep and—”

“Well, I’m here now.” My fingers clasped around the metal object around his neck. “The guys and I have just figured out about the ampulla and the mysteries of Lazarus. They’re putting the pieces together. We defeated the Slaugh, and now they’ll bring us back.”

“They’d better act quickly,” Corbin gestured down the dark hallway, like a guide about to give a tour. “Because if what I’ve seen comes to pass, we could end up stuck here, and the Slaugh are going to be the least of our worries.”