“Cuckoo comes calling, a lullaby he sings. And spider she’s sleeping all curled in her strings.”

Henry fell silent, feeling only the tingle of tiny flames on the back of his tongue. Then slowly the ruby spider curled her legs closed and dropped into Henry’s extended hand. He held the jewel for a moment, marveling at the craft of its design, feeling the slightest pulse pass through it, as if it harbored real life. And he knew that once it had.

Then he turned back to Commander Carerra and stepped out of the shade lands into the crisp air of the world of the living.

Several agents jumped back at his sudden appearance.

In his right hand he held the gray cinder that had once been some unlucky child’s heart and, in another world, still longed to be sung a lullaby and laid to rest.

“Door’s open,” Henry informed Carerra.

She pushed her spell projector sunglasses up from her eyes and scowled at him. “You’re certain? We’ve got two down already.”

“I never said you wouldn’t lose agents, just that I’d get the door open for you. It’s open. You may lose more once you step inside.” Henry gently slipped the hard little cinder into one of his deep pockets. “You want me to go ahead and clear the way?” Henry asked.

“We can handle it from here,” Carerra responded. She clearly didn’t want him taking credit for the capture of the site. That glory belonged to the San Francisco branch. That was fine with Henry; he’d found glory an overrated commodity. Didn’t keep a body whole or even make for good company through the lonely evenings that followed its capture.

Commander Carerra signaled the first six of her agents ahead through the door. They marched in like windup toy soldiers.

“I could follow them through the shade lands—”

“You let me worry about my agents, all right, Falk?”

Carerra gave him a hard glare and didn’t wait for his response. “HQ informed us that you could create some kind of dimensional split. Make this whole place disappear to the common populace. Is that the case?”

“I can call the Lost Mist and lay wanderers’ wards to keep anything from getting out of that building.” Henry shrugged. “It won’t help your people inside there, though.”

“You just concern yourself with keeping civilians from getting past our police lines,” Carerra told him. “The last thing we need are more pictures of bat boys popping up on the Internet.”

Henry heard something squeal and hiss from beyond the open door. He smelled the tang of human blood rushing up to the open air. They were already dying in there.

But these men’s deaths weren’t his business; if they were lucky, they never would be.

Henry gave Carerra a sloppy salute. Then he stepped back into the shade lands, where Carerra and her agents looked like shivering little shadows at the door of an immense, coiling darkness. He called up a white, rolling mist and it covered them all like a shroud.

***

The wheels of Jason’s battered green bike hissed against the wet pavement. He veered past braking cars and banked a sharp right turn despite the blazing red light. He couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to, not at this speed. Iron balconies and painted Victorian houses blurred as he plunged down into the sea of fog that lay across the streets below. Dull shadows and the haze of red brake lights were his only warnings of imminent collision. Jason swerved, darted, and narrowly missed a speeding police car.

 His heart pounded and sweat drenched his chest, but he didn’t slow. Instead he threw himself into the momentum of the steep San Francisco hill, racing into the cold fog. The whole city narrowed to the white mist, the slick black road ahead of him, and the knowledge that he was late and not getting any earlier.

He was only twenty-four, but he already knew that time forgave nothing. Not a single second could be begged back, not for pity, love, or money. Two minutes too late to save his father might as well have been two years.

He felt the immutable past as if it were growing behind him. He felt it like hot breath at the nape of his neck, drawing closer to him, hungry to overtake him. And he saw it too, wavering at the corner of his vision, those long white creatures with their grasping spidery limbs and gaping rows of bloody teeth.

A chill deeper than the damp fog sank through Jason.

He didn’t want to think about his father’s murder. He couldn’t keep his head on straight when he did. Because all those horrific details that he remembered so very clearly couldn’t have been what happened. Those long-limbed, gape-mouthed creatures that had crouched over his father’s prone body, feeding on his organs—they simply did not exist.

“They weren’t real. It never happened. Don’t think about it.” Jason repeated the words like a mantra, pacing them with the fast rhythm of pumping pedals. But the surrounding mists haunted him with creeping white forms, and that old fear twitched through his nerves.

Somewhere ahead, on Van Ness maybe, an ambulance siren wailed and distorted with speed.

“Never happened. Don’t think about it. Not real…”

It would have been so much easier to forget those red-slit eyes and bloody saw-blade mouths if he was still on ariprazole. But antipsychotic medications weren’t cheap and without insurance Jason hadn’t been able to fill a prescription in nearly two years. Most days he kept himself calm by averting his gaze and doing his damnedest to ignore what he knew was crazy. But this morning between the stress of traffic and this strange creeping fog, his brain was sputtering like an engine misfiring on all eight cylinders.

It shook Jason to realize just how quickly he could lose his grip on reality again.

He needed to keep his head together for a little longer, he tried to assure himself. Soon he’d be eligible for medical insurance; it was just a matter of maintaining steady, legal employment. Which was nearly as impossible to find as Brigadoon for anyone with a history like his. A brutal murder and years spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals and foster care weren’t winning resume builders.

All of which made Jason’s current job precious to him, an almost miraculous promise of a normal life. He still marveled at the sheer luck of it.

A month ago he’d ducked out of the rain and into the gil-ded warmth of Phipps’s Curiosities and Antiques. Among carved camphor cabinets brimming with glittering baubles and scattered across the displays of ornate furnishings he recognized several familiar musical instruments. Out of nostalgia he’d picked up a clay ocarina—not much larger than a human heart, he thought. When an older woman in a fashionable maroon suit inquired about it, Jason obligingly demonstrated the sweet, tremulous notes, playing an old melody he remembered from his childhood. The woman listened, her expression softening from cool interest to rapt delight.

“It’s so beautiful…” The woman gazed at the small ocarina with longing and Jason handed it to her. She cupped it close to her chest as if she were a little girl cradling a bird.

Then, while purchasing the small ocarina as well as an ornately carved Chinese bed, she gave Jason a bright smile and complimented the elegant silver-haired storeowner on his charmingly knowledgeable staff.

If the owner, Mr. Phipps, was surprised by the woman’s assumption it didn’t show in his serene, aristocratic expression. “We do our best.”

After the woman departed Mr. Phipps approached Jason and made polite but pointed inquiries concerning his musical training. Jason kept his answers brief and somewhat honest. He’d studied ethnomusicology at UC Berkley—at least as long as his scholarships had lasted. He loved old and odd instruments.

Mr. Phipps considered Jason for a few moments. His keen gray eyes seemed to take in every detail that Jason wanted hidden—his clothes slightly too loose to fit him properly anymore, his hair a little too shaggy to pass for stylish.