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allowed her to peer between the cracks to the street outside.
    She should have seen the damp street and angry rioters when she peered through those cracks.
    Instead, she saw a gray brick wall only inches away. Close enough that she could have reached out the window and touched it.
    Another lethe hallucination.
    That was all.
    It was as much a hallucination as the feeling that Gage stood over her shoulder, smelling like bear fur as it burned in the asylum’s incinerator.
    Except that she wasn’t sure she could have hallucinated the runes stamped onto the brick in such vivid detail. The magic looked authentic. It also looked familiar.
    She had seen that gray brick wall before.
    “I took too much lethe,” Deirdre said aloud. The words echoed.
    Why else would she be hallucinating the Holy Nights Cathedral? It wasn’t in New York City. It was in some canyon out in the mountains, hours of driving away.
    Her cell phone rang.
    Deirdre fumbled for her pockets and pulled it out. There was a number flashing on the screen. Someone was calling her, even though it should have been impossible. The phone was a burner, something she’d only had for two days so she could make calls to other people. She hadn’t used it yet. Nobody should have had the number.
    She wasn’t sure if she was hallucinating or not when she answered the call.
    “Hello?” she asked.
    “Come outside,” said a masculine voice.
    He hung up.
    Come outside . Why not?
    The stairway swirled around her as she climbed it with leaden legs and a spinning mind. There were faces painted into the drywall that leered at her, judging her for failure, blaming her for everything that had happened ever since the day Rylie Gresham entered her life.
    Deirdre couldn’t be sure if she was obeying a hallucination or the real orders that someone had issued to her.
    Certainly, if she’d been in better mental condition, she wouldn’t have obeyed those orders at all.
    Fresh air slapped her in the face when she reached the rooftop. The cold was almost too much for her muddied senses. She gripped her intake bracelet in the opposite hand, squeezing it harder into her flesh so that the pain would wake her up.
    Awake or asleep, it didn’t matter. She saw the same thing beyond the edge of the high rise’s roof.
    She saw a cathedral’s steeple ringed by stone gargoyles, all of who were looking directly at Deirdre.
    Rain pattered against their rigid hides, drenching them in darker shades of gray. What color would gargoyles bleed? Did they have veins through which blood could flow?
    Deirdre leaped onto the tiled roof of the cathedral.
    She landed on something solid, so it must have really been there. The Holy Nights Cathedral had materialized on a New York City street hundreds of miles from where she had last seen it.
    When she crossed the peak of the roof, the gargoyles tracked her movements with their eyes.
    She never saw them move, though.
    Deirdre climbed into the bell tower. It was definitely the same room with the metal bars ringing the room, providing roosts for the gargoyles to stand upon. The windows looked out onto skyscrapers rather than trees. A familiar room in an unfamiliar location.
    She climbed down the stairs.
    The musty cathedral smelled of myrrh, and it was lit only by flickering tea lights along the back wall. The yellow flames illuminated a mural of a man and a woman, black-haired and pale, who gazed blankly upon the altar.
    Brother Marshall was waiting for her there, a new sidhe staff tucked under his arm.
    He was accompanied by one gargoyle. It seemed like it shouldn’t have fit within the confines of the cathedral, like its presence bent physics around it to make the room. It was entirely possible. Gargoyles were the product of unseelie magic, and they only obeyed physics in the very loosest sense of the term.
    Or it might have been Deirdre’s perception skewed by the lethe again.
    “How’d you do this?” she asked. “Stark broke your staff. You’re not