CHAPTER NINETEEN

I knew what every structure on the Villa’s grounds had been, no matter what its condition. Inside the house? Inside I found only endless empty rooms, with the occasional rotting chair or moldering carpet.

Legend had it that when Mills discovered his bride’s body in the pool, he’d walked up the stairs, through the house, out the front door . . . and never returned. He’d ordered everything to stay exactly as it was, allowing priceless antiques to rot. My father had told me a different version. He’d heard that Mills had ordered his men to sneak in and spirit off the most valuable of the furnishings, so he could maintain the romantic fiction while recouping the most significant losses.

Judging by the wall of broken windows, I’d just entered the conservatory. Brisk lake air blasted through. I jogged to the next room, but I could see no sign of Gabriel. I called, “Gabriel? I’m apologizing, okay? I was being bullheaded, and while I don’t think I’m the only one, I want to talk about this.”

No answer. As I walked to the far doorway, I made tracks in the dust on the floor. One set crossing the room. None at the doorway, meaning Gabriel hadn’t come this way.

Was there another exit from the conservatory? I took three steps back the way I’d come and then heard an impatient, “Olivia,” from the opposite direction. I hurried into a long, narrow room with two fireplaces . . . and a half-dozen doors.

“Shit,” I said.

“Where am I?” a voice demanded. “What the hell is going on?”

The voice seemed to come from all corners, booming, oddly distorted, like speakers turned up too loud. Not Gabriel. Yet it seemed familiar.

“I know you’re here,” the voice continued. “Damn you, come out and face me.”

I turned and there was Nathaniel Mills. He was older, bloated and unkempt, a flask in one hand as he staggered toward me.

“Do you think I can’t hear you?” he shouted at the empty room. “Whispering, laughing, taunting? Do you think I don’t know what you did, you ungodly sons of bitches? Come out and face me!”

He stormed around the room, kicking at invisible debris, shoving aside invisible furniture. Then he stopped dead. He seemed to move around something, carefully, and then let out a cry as he dropped to his knees.

“Letty! It can’t be. You’re wet. So wet. And your poor face. Your beautiful face. What have they—?”

He stopped abruptly again and staggered up. “No, you’re not real. You’re dead and buried.” He wheeled, shouting, “Damn you all back to the hell you came from. You—”

His gaze lit on me. “You.”

I took a slow step back.

“Do you think I can’t see you?” His figure pulsed, shimmering as he moved, and then it wasn’t Mills coming at me. It was James. He stopped short and wavered there, his eyes wide. “Liv? What’s going on? Where am I?”

“James?”

I reached for him, but he vanished. The little girl’s voice whispered at my ear, “Gabriel was right. You need to go.”

“But Gabriel’s here,” I said.

As if on cue, I heard his voice, snapping with impatience.

“Olivia? I do not have time for this.”

I took one step his way and then stopped.

That’s not Gabriel.

It sounded like his impatience, his diction. But if Gabriel thought I was in danger, would he really storm off? I might lose my temper and do such a thing. Gabriel was ice, exact and calculated. He’d freeze me out, but he would never walk away if he thought I was in trouble.

That’s why I hadn’t seen his footprints. Because he hadn’t really gone into the house. It was like that alley near the prison when we tried to follow the Huntsman. I’d turned my back and then stumbled into a vision that I mistook for reality.

I jogged back the way I’d come and ended up in an unfamiliar room. I retreated, and tried the door to the left of it, then the one on the right. Neither returned me to anyplace vaguely familiar.

Okay, I’m hallucinating. No big deal.

I sputtered a laugh at that. I suppose it was a sign of progress that the thought I was going crazy didn’t even cross my mind.

The question was: Which was the hallucination? The house now, as I tried to get out, or earlier, as I was coming in? Either way, there were plenty of exits—both doors and broken windows.

In the next room, I found the younger Nathaniel Mills, at a desk, telling his foreman his plans for burning out the fae.

They both looked up as I stepped in.

“Yes?” Mills snapped. “What do you want?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

I backed away . . . and tripped over Letitia, lying in her soaked party dress, tributaries of bloody water creeping across the floor. When I retreated, she lifted her head. Her face was crushed—nose smashed flat, blood streaming from her mouth, one eye bulging, the other a dark pit.

“You didn’t save me,” she rasped through broken teeth.

“I couldn’t.”

“You can’t save anyone. You ruin everything you touch. Mallt-y-Nos?” She spat blood and broken teeth. “They should have left you as you were. Crippled and useless.”

Her cold hand wrapped around my ankle. I broke free and raced through the next doorway. It was a library.

“Liv?”

James stood at a shelf, fingering the moldering books. When he saw me, his face lit up. He started my way and then faltered, his smile evaporating in a look of despair.

“I—I don’t know what happened, Liv,” he said. “All I wanted was to get you back. He said he’d help and then . . . it went wrong, and I don’t understand how. I know I hurt you, frightened you, and I don’t understand that, either. It seemed so simple. You were in danger, and I had to save you, and nothing else mattered.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

Another smile, this one wry and sad. “No, it’s not. I can see that. It’s clear now. Everything’s clear.” He looked at me. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“I’m fine. I’m—” I inhaled deeply. I’m lost in a house of visions, and I’m talking to one of you, which is not fine at all.

He looked over his shoulder. “I need to go. I just . . . I saw you and I wanted to say I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t.” That wry smile again. “But do you forgive me anyway?”

“Of course. And I’m sorry that I—”

He put his hands behind my head and I felt them, just the barest whisper brushing aside my hair, and then his lips against mine. My eyes closed, and when they opened, I was alone in the room.

“James?”

I felt stupid calling for him, but he’d given me what I wanted—an explanation—and I couldn’t help wishing that we really could say our apologies and part with a kiss, hanging on to those memories of something that had been good, once upon a time.

But I knew James was in Chicago, at work. So what did seeing him here mean? That these weren’t visions at all, but figments of my imagination? Overactive daydreams—things I imagined and things I wished for?

I needed to get out of here.

I stepped through the next doorway into an absolutely empty room. I breathed a sigh of relief and strode forward—

The wallpaper rippled. I pushed myself to continue, but I couldn’t look away from that bubbling wallpaper. Then a line of blue fire ripped through it, curling and smoldering and blackening it in its wake. The fire flashed out, leaving burned words.

There is no freedom from the prison of the mind.

I’d seen the same message at the abandoned psych hospital, when Tristan set me up to “rescue” Macy Shaw. And I understood it no better now than I had then.

I turned away quickly, only to see another message burned on the opposite wall.

We are imprisoned by the truth we dare not see.

We are imprisoned by the questions we dare not ask.

“I’m asking!” I shouted. “I’m asking and asking and asking, and all I get are riddles and useless visions. What else do you want me to do?”

The answer came in a flash of blue fire that spelled out one word in foot-high block letters clear across one wall: Understand. Then, in a blink, it all vanished, and I was left staring at moldy and tattered wallpaper.

I ran through the next doorway, then stumbled over something. I looked down to see an arm on the floor.

Not real, not real, not real. None of it is real.

I tore across the room . . . to find myself facing three blank walls. There was no other way out. I turned, keeping my eyes away from the body on the floor.

Not real, not real.

But I’d caught a flash of the arm. An arm wearing a watch.

I know that watch.

No, I don’t. It cannot possibly be the watch I think it is, because that watch is on the wrist of—

I looked down.

There it was: that watch.

“It was my dad’s,” I’d told James when I’d given it to him.

“I know.”

“I don’t expect you to wear it. It’s just a keepsake. Something to say thanks. For getting me through . . .” My voice caught, the grief surging fresh.

His arms wrapped around me, and when I pulled back, the watch was on his wrist. And from then on, it was always on his wrist.

Now I was seeing my father’s watch . . . on a bare arm, lying on the floor of an abandoned house, blood congealed in a pool—

No, not him.

You know it is. You know that arm. Look.

No, I won’t. I—

I looked.

It was James. Lying on his stomach, head turned to one side, his back bloodied, his face and shoulders battered, his lips split, his eye black. His eye . . . open. Staring. Empty. Dead.