“That, my dear, is the million-dollar question.”

I beamed at him and snuggled closer, ignoring the corner of the dresser in my back, and giggled softly. He called me dear.

I felt a cool touch on my shoulder as I slept in Reyes’s arms, but after the night we’d had, I wasn’t terribly inclined to respond to the summons. Our training session had exhausted me. I’d have to practice more, learn to control myself and not ravish my affianced every time I had the upper hand. He was just so darned delicious. And Reyes Farrow vulnerable? Too tempting to resist, not that I had the best self-control as it was.

The touch returned, along with a soft, “Ms. Davidson? Are you awake?”

I couldn’t quite place the accent as I forced one lid open. Just one. I let the other rest. Our room was pitch black, but that never stopped me from seeing the departed as though they were onstage with a spotlight.

A man stood before me, pudgy, well dressed, and looking like he’d just stepped out of the 1940s. He had round-rimmed glasses and a thin mustache that looked like an insect over his top lip.

“Ms. Davidson, I had to see you before I left. I had no idea any of it vas real. I – I vould have come sooner had I known.” German. He had a thick German accent, and I realized who he was.

At that same moment, I also realized I had another visitor. Osh stood beside the man, his head down, his dark gaze glaring at the departed man beside my bed.

I sat up and rubbed my closed eye, coaxing it open to join the other. “Osh, what are you doing here?”

“Mark him and he’ll be mine.”

“Osh,” I said through a yawn, “I’m not marking this man’s soul for you just because you’re hungry.”

“What do you want?” he asked the man, taking him by the collar.

The man winced, his expression full of fear. “I just need to talk to Ms. Davidson. She is ze one, is she not? Ze daughter of light from ze prophecies?”

Osh glanced at me, then back to him. “She is. What’s that to you?”

“I – I have been translating zem. Ze documents. I – I zink I died before I could come to you.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. von Holstein,” I said. “You died two days ago.”

“No,” he said, lowering himself onto the edge of the bed. “Zat’s impossible. It vas only a moment ago.”

I leaned forward and put an arm on his shoulder. “Time is different there.”

“Apparently.” He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt.

“Can you tell me what you learned?”

He shook out of his stupor with a deep sigh. “Zere is so much I never imagined possible. If you are vat I zink you are, I can just show you, ja?”

“You can,” I assured him.

He put his glasses back on and slipped through me. I leaned forward, bracing my arms on my knees as his essence slid over me and his memories filled my brain to capacity. I skimmed past his childhood in West Berlin, unaware of the turmoil and strife that surrounded him. His family sent him to America as an exchange student and he’d come back to attend university here. His love of both countries was a constant struggle for him. He longed for home but loved the United States so much, he stayed and taught here.

I scanned forward in time until he was contacted by a westerner named Garrett Swopes about an ancient text he’d come across. I had yet to find out how Garrett came across the documents containing the prophecies in the first place or how he’d stumbled upon Zeus, but I knew it had something to do with his trip to hell and back, thanks to Mr. Reyes Farrow.

Then there it was. The doctor’s breakthrough. He’d finally found a pattern to the chaos. He had only copies to work from. Garrett must still have the originals stashed somewhere safe. But Dr. von Holstein found what he believed to be a grave error in his previous translation.

There were twelve. We already knew that. But there were more. The phrase went something like: Twelve sent and twelve summoned. That was what we believed would be Beep’s army: the good twelve. She would handpick twelve defenders to help her fight the fallen as they rose from hell. But the army was not part of either of the twelve.

Twelve sent and twelve summoned.

It was hard for the doctor to make out exactly what it all meant. The texts were written in riddles, in much the same way Nostradamus had written his quatrains, but von Holstein had begun to believe that Beep’s hand-chosen army was in addition to the good twelve. It would be the thirteenth warrior that would tip the odds in favor or against the daughter. And the war that could tear the world asunder or bring peace for a thousand years would be decided in a split second.

But I would never go against her, so surely I wasn’t the thirteenth in this situation. Maybe Beep herself was the warrior, but Dr. V got the distinct impression from a variety of contextual clues that the thirteenth warrior was male. And the thirteenth warrior, who had been born in darkness, would tip the scales one way or the other.

There was a lot more – so much, it was hard to absorb it all – but when I lifted my lids, Osh was sitting in my chair in the corner, waiting patiently.

He stood when I focused on him. “Well?” he asked.

“You’d better tell him,” Reyes said beside me. “He wouldn’t leave until you came out of it.”

“Out of it? How long was I in it?”

Osh looked at the clock on my nightstand. “Three hours.”

“Three hours?” I twisted around to see for myself. “That’s never happened before.”