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I startle at the Bargainer’s smooth voice. He sits in a chair next to the bed, his steepled hands pressed to his lips. On the bedside table next to him sits an empty tumbler.

“Where am I?” I ask.

“We’re in my room—back on earth,” Des says. His arms drop away from me.

His room. The one he hadn’t been willing to show me before now. My eyes sweep over my surroundings, over the framed photo of Douglas Café, and another of Peel Castle. Across the room, a golden orrery sits on a circular table, the metal and marble planets in our solar system hanging suspended around the golden sun in the middle.

There’s nothing about his bedroom that seems worth hiding from me.

And then, amongst my musings, my trip to the Otherworld all comes back to me.

Air hisses in between my teeth, and my gaze snaps back to the Bargainer. “Thosechildren.”

Des grabs his empty tumbler and heads to a wet bar on the opposite end of the room, pouring himself a drink. He throws it back quickly, hissing at the burn of alcohol.

He looks at his glass. “I understand why you crave the stuff,” he says. Carefully he sets the glass back down, leaning against the bar.

“Gods,” he runs a hand down his face. “I’ve never wanted to throttle children so badly as I did when I saw them grab ahold of you. Their fangs came out; they’d been ready to drink you.”

I put a hand to my throat. They were going to drink from me? All I remember are strange, nightmarish images I saw when they touched me

I swallow at the thought of those images. Were these the prophecies that Gaelia had mentioned?

I slide out of his bed. “Des, they showed me things,” I say.

I rub the skin where they touched me, noticing the beginnings of several bruises. “I saw cages of women, a throne, a forest, and a man with antlers.”

“A man with antlers,” the Bargainer repeats, his face grim.

“Does that help?” I ask.

“Unfortunately, cherub,” he says, “it does.”

He will find you.

He always finds the ones he wants.

He’s already begun the hunt.

He’ll make you his, just like our mothers.

I sit inside Des’s guestroom, my eyes absently staring out the window at the dark night.

What have I done? I thought I’d been helping Des—and Gaelia—by interviewing those kids. A part of me had been proud of the fact that they’d talked to me when the Bargainer had been so sure they wouldn’t.

But now … like Gaelia, I felt deep in my bones that the children’s’ words hadn’t been empty. That, irrational though it might be, I’d just caught the attention of whateverthingDes has been hunting.

Only now it’s hunting me.

I draw in a deep, stuttering breath.

I need to leave this place—thishouse—with all of its connections to the Otherworld. Hell, there’s a portal a few doors down from my room. It doesn’t matter if the creature lives in another realm; so long as it knows how to manipulate ley lines, it would only take an instant for it to come crawling to earth.

I begin changing into the now dry—if salt encrusted—clothes I wore here, and swipe up the few items that I came with.

I can feel the same paranoia that claimed the royal nursemaid now crawling up my spine.

I’m hooking in my earring when I hear the door to my room open and feel an ominous presence at my back.