That night I dreamed of Iris.

It wasn’t the usual dream. This time, there was no Susannah. No flash of red hair melting into black, no sly curving smile. There was no swirl of snow, and no taunting words that hissed through the air. Her back was to me, one hand lifted before her. She turned, slowly, pressing a finger to her lips. Her face was shadowed. I couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t tell if they were the milk-white of a Harrower, or the dusty St. Croix gold.

Audrey, she said.

We were standing on a street again. At first, I thought it was Minneapolis. Downtown. The area was familiar. I saw the rise of the skyline around us, yellow lights against a dark backdrop of sky. But then the lights began to fade. The world grew dim and gray. Shapes twisted before me: streetlights bending, cars that were mangled and gone to rust. Decay crept up everywhere. The pavement underfoot was warped and scarred. Our shadows fell before us, the warm, rich color of blood.

We were Beneath. We had been here before.

Audrey, Iris said, her long hair whipping out. Listen.

But there was no sound inside the dream. I knew her words; I didn’t hear them. The void swallowed up all other noise: my footfalls, the beat of my heart.

Iris stepped toward me and reached for my hand. I recoiled, flinching backward. I turned to flee.

The dream fragmented, rearranging itself. The street spun. The sky shifted, horizon sliding down and city rising up until all the buildings lay horizontal. Everything was abstract, made up of angles. I stood on solid emptiness. A flock of crows swept up around me, their wings shaking the air. And then they were not crows. They were paper cranes folded, falling, burning from beneath. Little flames that leaped.

At my side, Iris had altered as well. Her hair floated upward around her. All the black had bled out of it. What remained was bone-white, brittle, turning to smoke at the ends. Audrey. Listen. Wait, she said.

I waited.

We’re not alone.

And finally there was noise.

A high, thin sound. Far away. Beginning to swell.

Now the change in the dream became a change in me. My flesh flaked off, revealing the cold silver of scales up and down my arms. My fingers curved into claws, red and cutting.

I cried out, voiceless.

I woke with my hands clenched into fists, so tight it was painful to uncurl them. When I did, I found my nails had bitten into my skin. Little crescent moons etched upon my palms, wet with blood.

The Drought and Deluge was dark when I arrived. The sign in the window declared it closed, but I knocked lightly on the glass, peering inside. The daylight spilling in revealed part of the interior—the chairs stacked onto tables, the edge of the bar—but the far corners remained in shadow. I hesitated a moment, listening for some sound from within. I wasn’t certain my dream had been a Knowing, but by now I knew better than to chance it. And if I wanted to find out whether or not Iris might be alive—and near—there was only one person I could ask. Thankfully, getting my driver’s license meant I no longer had to rely on Leon or Gideon to take me places. It also made it considerably easier to meet with demons in secret.

I tested the door. Closed apparently didn’t mean locked. I pushed it open and stepped inside.

“Shane?” I called. Silence answered. Dust motes hung in the air, turning gold in the light. The faint smell of alcohol drifted to me.

I moved forward slowly, feeling a sudden lump in my throat. My footsteps were loud in the stillness. I hadn’t been in the club since the fight with Susannah, and now I had to suppress the urge to retreat. The walls had been recently painted, I noticed—a dark blue that turned black where the sun didn’t touch it. The broken furniture had been replaced and the carpet looked new, but the very air felt heavy, full of memory. My gaze skimmed along the walls, across the tables and booths, and my thoughts slid down dark paths. For a second I could almost see the scene replay, burned like an afterimage. There. There was where my mother had been shot. There she’d lain bleeding.

There was where Drew had fallen. Drew, who had hunted Susannah from San Diego to the Cities—to fight her, to face her, to die for his charge. There he’d released his last breath.

“I’ve been thinking I ought to have sent your Kin a bill. I had to redo the entire place. Bloodstains didn’t do much for my decor.”

I turned toward his voice. “Shane?”

I found him near the back of the room, seated at the edge of a table. He was facing the mural of the Beneath he’d painted. I gazed at it as I approached him: the Minneapolis skyline, bleak gray and white shapes below a canopy of bloodred stars. Parts of it appeared to be fresh. There were broad, haphazard brushstrokes at the bottom edge of the mural, long gashes of red that seeped toward the ground. I could smell the paint, and now that I looked closer, I could see a trace of it on his hands.

When he didn’t speak, I asked again, “Shane?”

“I heard you the first time, sweetheart. I simply neglected to respond.”

“Uh…are you okay?” It seemed an odd question to ask a Harrower—by definition, they weren’t ever really okay, neutral or not. But something felt off. Not a Knowing—I’d never gotten any sense from Shane, at all—but something in the tone of his voice. A hint of disquiet. An edge.

Or maybe it was just the fact that he was sitting alone in the dark, staring at a decidedly unsettling painting.

“Perfectly.” He hopped down from the table and faced me, smiling. I wondered if I’d imagined it. He looked as he usually did, dressed in gray jeans and a dark green Drought and Deluge shirt that matched his eyes, his blond hair carefully tousled. And his smile was warm, genuine. All human, no hint of Harrower. “How may I be of assistance? I’m assuming by your presence here that you do, in fact, require help.”

He stepped toward me. His feet were bare. There was a smear of paint on his shirt, as well. A thin slash of red on his sleeve.

“Not help exactly,” I said.

“Out with it, angel.”

“You know my cousin. Iris.”

He nodded. “The girl we fetched up from the dark depths of Beneath, only to discover that she was far happier there than here.”

“I’m not sure happy is how I’d describe Iris,” I said.

“You’ll note the word I used was happier. Referring to a spectrum of emotion, not a stopping point. When it comes down to it, that’s all any of us have, isn’t it? Relativity.” He pulled two chairs from the table and offered one to me, seating himself backward on the other. He draped his arms across the chair’s back. Tilting his head slightly, he peered at me. “But that’s not the purpose of this tête-à-tête. Shall I hazard a guess? You fear a family reunion is imminent.”

I remained standing. “Is it?”

“How should I know?”

“I was wondering if you’d seen her. If you know where she is.”

“I haven’t Seen much of anything of late, I’m afraid.”

“I meant Beneath,” I said.

“As did I.” There was that edge to his tone once more, an undercurrent I couldn’t quite read. But I didn’t get the chance to question him further. With one smooth motion, Shane rose from his chair and crossed to me, taking hold of my hands and turning them so that the bandages on my palms were visible. His skin was cold; I flinched. “What happened to your hands?”

I pulled free from his grip, shoving my fists into my pockets.

He gave me a searching look. “Bad dreams, is it? What did you see?”