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Ignoring it, I reach forward, sliding my palm across cold glass until it gives and I can press through. Instantly I flip to the other side, emerging like a monster through a mirror.

But the sluagh is already there, crouched in front of me, head cocked. “Cathy. I can be Cathy.”

“You’re not her,” I growl. I run past it, along a helix-shaped corridor where the floor eventually becomes the left wall and the left wall turns into the ceiling.

Parts of the corridor are transparent; others are glossy black.

I bruise myself against them more than once, but I keep going because I can feel heat traveling along the line now.

I’m getting closer to her, to Cathy’s live, fresh soul.

“ Warmer ,” hisses the sluagh. “Warmer, warmer.” It somersaults in front of me and makes a grab for my face, but I swat it away and keep going.

These things only have power if you give it to them.

The more annoyed with it I get, the more solid it becomes—and if I start hitting it, the sluagh will return the aggression with interest.

The Vague quakes—or maybe the tremor isn’t from the Vague but from the living world. Possibly thunder. While my spirit is hunting in the Vague, my physical body is still kneeling in the graveyard, being drenched by a freezing October rain, while I try to bring my dead girlfriend back.

No, not girlfriend. She’s more than that. She’s my actual life, my fucking soul. I can’t live without my soul.

Faster, I follow the line, hand over hand. It’s getting hot now, starting to glow red.

I risk one more bellow into the shimmering, shifting kaleidoscope of the Vague. “Cathy!”

“Cathycathycathycathycathy,” pants the sluagh.

But from somewhere ahead, and down, and to the right, I hear a reply. A real reply, in a familiar voice, half-amazed, half-doubtful. “Heathcliff?”

I step forward and nearly tumble off the edge of what I thought was glass but is really a downward slope studded with tiny, iridescent crystals. Cautiously, I slide down it. Some of the crystals shatter as I go, releasing a tinkling, chiming sound into the stagnant air.

My spiritual self is wearing the same clothes as my real body, and normally sharp pieces of crystal would tear up a pair of jeans…

but they’re perfectly fine because this place has no logic.

No physics. I’ve long since quit trying to figure it out, and now I just go along with the weirdness.

I keep sliding, one hand on the line and the other on the slope, until my feet hit a cold, smooth surface.

A wall of glass, thicker this time, and darker.

The line is red-hot now. It leads right through the smoky wall.

I peer through. “Cathy?”

A small, white hand slams against the glass, and I jump. Cathy’s face is a milky blur, her hair a murky cloud. “Heathcliff?” Her voice is muffled, like it’s coming from underwater. “Let me in!”

“Hang on!” I shout. I can feel my heartbeat racing higher—the heart I’ve left behind in my real body. The fast pulse—that’s okay. It’s when my heart slows down that we have a problem.

I scan the wall, moving a little farther to the right until the dark tint of the glass fades and I can see through it better.

Cathy isn’t in the mirror maze, where the souls usually stay for the first twenty-four hours or so after death. She’s floating in a vast chasm, her hair streaming and her pale body wreathed in smoke.

It looks like the wall separating us ends farther on, so I climb over giant wedges of glass, heading for the place where it melts into air.

Cathy does the same, and the glowing line that connects us follows, seeming to phase through the glass.

But when we get to that empty space and reach for each other’s hands, the transparent wall materializes between us again, solid and impenetrable.

Whoever set this up did something to keep me from getting to her.

A spell or a curse most likely. I’ve never met a supernatural who can actually cast spells or curses—Meemaw says that gift died out decades ago.

People who swear they can do it are just fooling themselves or others.

But this sure looks like a curse. I’ve heard about something like it before, with one of Hindley’s clients.

Real classy woman, lived in this big house full of artifacts.

Someone broke in and killed her before she made it to her safe room.

Stole a rare talisman, she told us after she woke up.

She was fucking hard to resurrect. Hindley said he found her deep in the Vague, in a glass box covered with runes, with something called an “impossible riddle” etched on it.

He read it aloud to her, and she solved it within minutes.

Apparently the intruders had wedged a curse totem into her throat to make sure she’d stay dead.

But even in death, she was too smart for them.

I don’t know why Cathy is behind this wall, but it’s gonna make it that much tougher for me to bring her back.

“I’ll get you, I promise,” I call to her. “Just give me a second to think.”

In the case of the woman in the box, a necromancer had to come for her, but she also had to do part of the work. She had to save herself through something she possessed—her cleverness.

Cathy is smart, but she’s got another gift, too. Her nature as a banshee: a scream that can shatter glass.

She’s floating a little farther away now, her eyes mournful, her voice soft and faint. “Heathcliff? Why won’t you let me in?”

“You’re drifting, Cathy. Come on, baby, focus on me. Here, see my hand?” I press it to the wall between us.

She blinks and reaches out, laying her palm against the thick glass, opposite mine.

I plead with her, my voice a hoarse echo. “Cathy, I want to save you, but you have to save yourself first. You have to scream.”

“Scream?” She shakes her head slowly. “That’s not me anymore. I don’t wail for death. I swim in death. Death is a part of me, as it always was—as it is. As it ever shall be.”

She’s going vague on me way faster than souls usually do. I’ve got to connect her back to her humanity, to the emotions that link her to life.

“Cathy, I need you to think, to focus. Look at me. You remember the first time we fucked?”

A spark ignites in her eyes—the ghost of a smile plays across her mouth. “Yes.”

“Good. Think about that. Think about how I stalked you afterward. That made you mad, right? Pissed you off. Remember how that felt?”

“Yes.” Her eyes are a shade brighter now, clearer.

“Yeah. You were mad at me. I saw that fire in you from day one. Don’t tell me that fire’s gone out ’cause of some little thing called death? You’re still Catherine fucking Earnshaw. You’re that bitch.”

She narrows her eyes at the word bitch , so I say it again.

“You’re the bitch who loves life…really loves it…

but you barely had a chance to enjoy it.

You didn’t get to travel, to dine at fancy-ass restaurants, to see the wonders of the world.

You didn’t get to leave Wicklow with me. How does that make you feel?”

Her small fists clench. “Angry.”

“That’s right. You get fucking angry.” I ram my fist against the glass. “Because you don’t belong here, Cathy Earnshaw. You belong in the living world with me. You are a banshee. You announce death, you scream for it, but you do not fucking yield to it, do you understand me?”

“Do not go gentle into that good night,” she says.

“What?”

“It’s a poem. Dylan Thomas. I memorized it because I liked it so much and because it was short.

‘Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day—rage, rage against the dying of the light.’” Her voice rises, stronger, shriller.

“Wild women ’who caught and sang the sun in flight, and learned, too late, they grieved it on its way, do not go gentle into that good night! ’”

I’m beside myself, my chest swelling with her rage, with my love, my fists beating on the glass. The sluagh who followed me has been joined by several more, but they don’t speak. They cluster in silence, watching without eyes, listening without ears.

“I am a wild woman,” Cathy says, eyes flaming, her hair billowing around her. “I sang under the sun, I grieved under the moon, and I refuse—I refuse to go gently into the dark!”

And she screams.

She screams with such power, I slam both hands over my ears, as if it would make a difference, as if the earth-shattering power of her scream could reach right into the living world and burst both my eardrums. Maybe it could.

The sluaghs flee, shrieking, into the maze. Cathy’s voice shrills higher, louder, filling the entirety of the Vague. The thick glass of the wall between us splits, forked cracks spreading wide before it explodes in fireworks of colored glass.

The bits of glass freeze in midair, and Cathy passes through them, untouched by a single shard.

I reach for her, pull her in. Clasp her. Mine, in my arms. My heartbeat stutters, and at first I think it’s joy, but then I realize we’re out of time. My body is failing, and I must get her back to hers.

As I turn to follow the line back to its source, a heavy, booming thunder reverberates through the maze. It’s as deep as the void in which Cathy was floating, immense as a mountain. It’s the rumble of something awakened.

Everything trembles.

This isn’t thunder from the living world. This is happening in the Vague.

Cathy’s clutching me, her arms wound around my neck. I’m facing the chasm, where something is shifting in the dark. Something so huge, the sight of it nearly shuts down my brain.

Antlers. Antlers branching out as wide as the entire length of a mountain range. Rising higher.

I don’t want to see the head they’re attached to, so I turn, with Cathy in my arms, and I run.

Boom . Another reverberation through the Vague. Boom. Boom. The slow pounding of my heart when it should be fast. Fuck—I’m not going to make it.

I’m stumbling along faceted boulders, sliding down slopes and then somehow sliding up . Clawing my way through shivering ropes of crystal. Climbing, running, while the maze shakes and mirrors shatter intermittently around us.

Cathy’s soul weighs next to nothing. If she were corporeal, there’s no way I could make it back.

But I’m almost at the root of the line, where it disappears into a mirror that isn’t a mirror, because through it I can see my corporeal self, kneeling in the dreary graveyard with my palms on the matching tattoos.

My spirit is slowing, shuddering. Each step more sluggish than the last.

Just a little farther…

But my feet are rooted, my mind paralyzed. Buckland warned me about this. He saw it happen once—a Lockwood overextended herself, and she died along with the soul she was supposed to save.

“Heathcliff.” Cathy pats my face frantically. “Heathcliff.” Her voice shrills suddenly, the frenzy of pure terror. “Heathcliff, behind you!”

Her shriek stirs me, propels me forward again. I don’t look back to see what she sees. I only stumble forward.

As I take the final step toward the mirror, a hideous sense of wrongness floods my consciousness. There’s a drag on our spirit forms, a sodden weight that shouldn’t be there. Like something trying to pull us back.

Lunging forward, I leap through the mirror. And as I do, I realize that the dragging force isn’t trying to keep us in the Vague—it’s trying to come along.

With a lurch, I tumble back into myself, and I drop Cathy’s soul into her body.

Air like knives, sharp with cold, stabbing my skin. But the rain has stopped.

Mud cakes my knees, layered over Rockford’s blood. I’m shivering, weakness hollowing out my limbs. I’m unnaturally strong, but two resurrections in a row has destroyed me.

At least the dragging weight on my spirit is gone. Maybe I imagined it. And if not, I’m too exhausted to worry about what it was, or what it means.

My overtaxed body pitches forward, nearly collapsing on top of Cathy—but I manage to haul myself upright, keeping my palms on both tattoos. I have to heal that slash across Cathy’s throat. A small wound, thankfully—it closes in a few seconds, taking the last wisp of my energy.

Cathy’s lashes blink apart, and she stares up at me wonderingly. “Heathcliff?”

“Princess,” I rasp.

“You brought me back.” She sits up, touching her throat. “You…fixed me. You’re a…”

“Necromancer.” The word feels heavy on my tongue.

“Thank fuck,” she breathes, and I can’t help smiling. “They sacrificed me, Heathcliff,” she exclaims, betrayal and fear in her eyes. “They took away my phone and poisoned me, and then the church sacrificed me so my blood would seal the god away forever.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I mutter. “Sacrifice always strengthens the gods. If the Lockwoods ever got through the barrier, that’s where they planned to start—lots of blood sacrifices.”

“Well…that’s what Edgar said. That my death would lock the god away for good.

It was horrible.” She blinks, gives a broken sob, and brushes away the tears flooding her eyes.

But more tears are spilling out, and she sobs again.

“I’m—I’m so upset about it, but it’s not just that.

It’s…something else… Oh god, it’s…god, I keep hearing your name in my head, and it makes me want to cry…

” Her gaze flashes up to mine, realization fracturing her eyes.

“Heathcliff Lockwood, you fucking idiot. You’re dying. ”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she says savagely. “I’m a banshee. I know . How could you do this to yourself? How could you? I hate you! I fucking hate you!”

She grips the slick fabric of my shirt, hauls me close, claws me to herself. Her thin fingers arch against my back, nails digging into my flesh as if she could keep me here by sheer force of will. We’re shivering, dripping, wrapped together in a mess of slick, cold limbs and chattering teeth.

I want to kiss her, but my body is too heavy for me to hold up anymore. I’m sinking, slipping from her arms, collapsing to the ground beside her.

“You moron,” she gasps between sobs. “You wretched, wretched man. You killed yourself saving me. Don’t you realize how fucking stupid that is?”

“I’m so…fucking…stupid,” I agree. My eyes are closing. I wish they wouldn’t. I want to see her. “You’ll be all right,” I manage.

“I will not . Don’t you do this, Heathcliff. Don’t you give me everything like some—damn—movie—hero!” She’s pounding my chest in sync with her words. “I won’t let you.” Her voice cracks. “I fucking love you.”

At first I think those words will be the last thing I hear. But as my mind dissolves, I hear one more sound.

A wild, primal wail of grief soaring from Cathy’s throat into the night.