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I was back in the Charnwood Forest in the ethereal darkness of the glade. Gimel was still close beside me. I could smell her slightly spicy scent.

“What were you just thinking?” she asked. “I could feel your tension.”

“I was recalling my life,” I said truthfully. “And, sadly, it occurred to me that it hasn’t been what I’d thought it was.”

“What is?” Her eyes were shining in the dark. “Whatever we can immediately know must be of poor value, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know you.” I gripped her more tightly. “Not at all.”

“Am I precious, then?” Her eyes danced as she smiled wickedly at me. “Is that your meaning?”

A cool stillness seemed to banish the rest of the world to a dim and hazy daguerreotype. Did the breeze cease to stir the oak leaves; did the birds cease their evening songs, the insects their nocturnal Morse code? It seemed that way to me. In Mexico, Donnatella had once told me that when she was with me nothing else was real. “Existence, it is the tip of the flame,” she had said in the endearing way she had of reparsing the English language in her own image. “When I am in your arms I am in the flame, can you understand this?”

With Gimel I felt I was inside the flame, as if all existence resided in the minuscule space between us. But, in the end, the outside world intruded like a clammy and inauspicious wind. In the instant that my memories had overtaken me I had missed something, perhaps something crucial.

I was at once filled with apprehension. The smile had frozen on her face. I could see the skin on her arms had broken out into goose bumps.

“What’s happened?” I said.

Then I heard it, too. Something quite large was making its way through the forest. As we stood without moving a muscle, straining to interpret the sound, I could tell it was heading directly for us.

“It’s the beast,” she whispered. “It’s found us.”

“We’d better get back on our horses,” I said.

“Do you think that’s wise?” She put a hand on my mount’s bridle. “Now that we’re here do you still believe the best choice is to run?”

“What else is there to do?” I said. “Will your arrows stop it?”

“I have no idea.”

“That uncertainty doesn’t make for good odds.”

“What have odds to do with it?” All at once she seemed saddened. “Do you think Vav considered the odds when she took you down the Parisian alley?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Then you’re right,” she said, abruptly letting go of the bridle. She sounded as if at any moment she would break into tears. “We’d better try to flee before it’s too late.”

But it was already too late. As I put one boot into the stirrup, the underbrush parted and a dark and ungainly shape rushed us from the shadows. The black mare reared up, snorting, her nostrils flared, and Gimel nocked an arrow to her bowstring. She drew back the string and let fly. Maybe it was a trick of the last of the evening’s cobalt light, but the arrow seemed to disappear an instant before it would have pierced the beast’s chest. With a soft cry, she hurled herself directly into the beast’s path.

. “No!” I shouted as the thing swung an enormous paw at her. It was immensely powerful. Even from that distance I could hear her neck crack. She was lifted off her feet by the terrific force of the blow, spun around so that I saw all the light had gone out of her eyes. She fell to the forest floor, her head at an unnatural angle.

My stomach turned over and I tried to get to her. But I also felt compelled to get a better look at this beast than I had at the gargoyle. And yet I could only take it in with brief, furtive flicks of my eyes. It had the same hideous face I’d glimpsed out of the corner of my eye in the Parisian alley, but this time its body was definitely more animal than human. Just as it had before, it hesitated, but this time I thought I heard something, a far-off crack as if a rifle shot. Wasting no time, I gathered Gimel to me and dragged her into the mass of oaks. I picked her up amid the dense tangle of underbrush; she was as light as an infant. It was as if there was no substance to her, as if