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I twist enough to duck my head into the hollow of Sion’s shoulder, letting loose a keen of my own.

He wraps steadfast arms more tightly around me as his voice attempts to soothe. “Not flesh. Not bone. Shadow. Spirit. Soul.”

I find the courage to raise my eyes to the tower and watch three more wraiths step into oblivion and end as viscous misery dripping into the river.

Sion drones in a monotone, repeating the same words over and over as the souls are destroyed. “Purity. Mercy. Humanity. Humility. Diligence. Sacrifice. Compassion.”

The weight of the soulfall’s despair infuses my blood. I slide from Sion’s arms to collapse into a heap on the spongy ground, unable to watch any longer. After a time, the wailing from above stops. A pillow of damp grass revives me. I push up with my arms.

Sion isn’t here.

How could he force me to watch the decimation of souls and then abandon me? Máthair’s warning of Faerie paths and crossing wits with powers too great to understand falls like a weight across my shoulders.

The weight turns out to be Sion’s peacock blue jacket. He’s moved a few feet away, giving me space. Sionnach, the fox-man, hugs his knees to his chest as he burrows against the curve of a dense bush.

I pull his jacket tight around me. “Where did you go?”

“Not far.” His green glass eyes stare at the tower. Buttery candlelight no longer wavers in the window. It’s a black smudge against gray stones.

Sion’s expression breaks my heart. Sadness wraps in layers across his face like a shroud. He’s stretched as thin as dough for a delicate pastry and bruised from being dredged through depths of unnamed despair.

I slide close enough to wrap his jacket around both our shoulders. He fits himself against my side and pulls his knees in tighter. “It’s them I’ve failed.”

“I don’t understand. Why did everyone but the little girl—” I have no sensitive term for a soul turning to rancid goo and splattering all over a rock. “Where did she go?”

“Heaven, I suspect.” His eyes glaze as he stares into the wood across the river. “They each yearn to go to the place where light calls them.” He tilts his head but doesn’t make eye contact. A hollow opens in my middle. I don’t want to go back to Sion Loho keeping his green gaze with its golden circle away from me. This force that has begun to connect us is confusing, but not something I’m ready to let go of. “It’s a question of faith. Heaven for most, especially Catholics like me. Tír na nÓg for others.”

The gravity of his words roots me to the earth like the half-buried stones surrounding us. “Those places are real?”

To my relief, his reassuring gaze finds mine once again. “I hope so.”

“Why am I here, Sion?”

He nods to the tower. “For them. For me. I told you this was my last chance. Theirs too. It’s my job to do what needs to be done to guide them out of the soulfall and up to the light. If I don’t free their spirits by Beltane, they’ll be trapped in this soulfall forever.”

“Do what needs to be done?” I drop my head onto my knees. “Why do you think I can do anything?”

His arm slides around my back, pressing us closer together. A series of noises pop and skid in his throat as he searches for words. “Because you already have. You saved the girl. I lost count of how many times I’ve tried to find her key, and you found it on the first go.”

“Key?”

“An artifact from their lives that reminds and reconnects a soul with the virtue they’ve lost. Seven souls in a soulfall. Seven lost virtues, one for each. Purity. Mercy. Humanity. Humility. Diligence. Sacrifice. Compassion. Artifacts are the keys to help them move beyond this passage of misery they’re trapped in.”

My lifetime of Catholicism gives me a shot at decoding. “Purgatory?”

Sion’s derisive grunt joins the conversation. “Wandering through purgatory seems a might better than dropping from a tower to break onto rocks.”

Thoughts braid and unbraid themselves in my head, trying to connect the scant bits of information Sion offers and make sense of them. Lessons from religious ed. class shove their way to the front of the line. “You were chanting the seven virtues as they fell.”

“Virtues that need restoring, like I said. If a person dies with all seven virtues intact, you’ll not be finding them in a soulfall.”

Frustration grinds my molars against one another. “You’ve done a fair job convincing me to change my stance on the supernatural, but—” I raise a finger when he tries to interrupt. “Where exactly do I fit in with dimension-travelling foxes, girl ghosts, prism walls, moons that change phase on the same night, and shades of people falling from a tower?”

Sion starts giving off waves of heat as he gets excited. “You’re clever. It’s their keys you’ll be helping me find. The way you did with the doll.” He leaps to his feet, shrugs back into his jacket, then holds out a hand.

I take it, and he pulls me up. “The doll was lying there. I didn’t do anything.”

He rests his hands on my shoulders. All this touching, this closeness to a man I barely know, would usually put my defenses on high alert, but not with Sion. If anything, I find myself drawn to him the way people sharing a secret forge a bond.