The banshee manifests as either a beautiful young maiden capable of luring her victim toward death or an aging crone, two aspects of the triple goddess. No human is able to glimpse the third and most prevalent aspect, the mother, yet she has been there all along.

—ROSE’S Book of Trees

“I’m so sorry,” Paul said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. We can go back to Matera. I want to go. I need you. Just come back.” His voice sounded strange, as if he were talking from a tunnel.

“Where are you?” Callie asked. She regretted answering her cell.

“The boathouse.” He coughed once, then again. “I came looking for you, and I found the ring on the table.” He sounded as if he were crying: ragged sobs that broke into a deep, gagging choke.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” he said. “My heart—it’s beating strangely. And there’s a weird green halo around the moon.”

She looked out her hotel room window, toward the west, where the sliver of waxing moon was just setting. There was no halo.

She could hear the sound of him retching.

“I’m sick,” he said. “Oh, damn.”

“What?”

“There’s blood in it. A lot of blood.”

She drove as fast as she could, pulling into the back driveway, the one nearest the boathouse. “Paul?” She rushed from living room to bedroom to kitchen to bath before climbing the stairs to the lighthouse.

He wasn’t there, but a patch of bloody vomit was on the floor next to the phone. A scribbled note from him was on the table: Meet me in the spa. Finn sick, too. Marta needs help getting him upstairs. Doctor meeting us there.

She grabbed the note and sprinted through the woods to the main house, the huge pine trees spiking, pointing their shadows skyward, conjuring memories of fairy-tale forests and doomed children. The front door was locked, so she entered through the pantry. She called their names. No answer. There weren’t any staff members around; there was no sign of Marta or Finn. They must still be down in the spa. Callie felt fear rising as she ran through the library to the elevator. She pushed the button, and as the lift crawled and clanked upward, she wondered what could be happening. Food poisoning from the risotto? Something worse?

She stepped in, her panic growing as the elevator descended slowly to the spa. The door opened to a dimly lit but empty room. They’d already gone. She had started to get back into the elevator when she spotted a dark figure on the floor, in the back corner near the sea well.

“Paul!” she shouted, rushing to his side.

There was no response. The only sound came from the oak sea well as the water lapped its walls, surging with the high tide.

Paul was passed out, facedown in his own bloody vomit. “Paul,” she said again, shaking him to wake him up. She felt for his pulse; it was pounding wildly and skipping beats.

She tried her cell. No reception. She rushed to the house phone, picked up the receiver, and heard a busy signal. She hung up and tried again. When did you ever hear a busy signal? Someone must have left an extension off the hook somewhere. Damn.

She turned Paul onto his side, so that he would not choke if he vomited again, then tried the phone one more time…still busy. She got into the elevator, pulling the heavy glass door shut behind her. Just as she pushed the up button, the lights went out, leaving the room in total darkness. The elevator didn’t move.

She felt her way back to him in the blackness.

Rafferty was sleeping, the sheets tangled around him, when the phone rang. “What time is it?” he said as he picked up. The clock read 3:00 A.M. Then, hearing the voice on the other end, he dragged himself to a sitting position. “What’s wrong?” He listened carefully. “You tried the boathouse, and Pride’s Heart, and both their cell phones? Okay.” He hung up.

“What’s happened?” Towner asked.

“That was Mickey and Ann,” Rafferty said, pulling on his pants and shoes. “I have to go to Pride’s Heart right now.”

“Ann had a vision?” Towner asked, and Rafferty nodded.

“What did she see?”

Rafferty hesitated before he spoke. “She says she saw the badb,” he said.

Towner stared at him. “The what?”

“The banshee.”

“She saw the banshee?”

“She heard it wailing. And there’s something else,” he said, starting for the door. It was something Mickey had said, but there wasn’t time to elaborate. After the night they’d just spent together, leaving Towner alone was the last thing Rafferty wanted to do. But if he was right…

“Oh, God,” Towner cried. “Hurry. I hear it, too. Callie’s in trouble.”

“Hail Mary, full of grace…”

The tide had pulled away, taking the water from the sea well. The lapping against the oak well had gone silent, and Callie’s world had become the essence of nothingness. In the hours she’d been sitting with him, Paul had not come to, not even briefly.

She could no longer hear the sound of his breathing.

She comforted herself that he still had a pulse, though it was now so slow and weak she could barely feel it.

She’d yelled for help so many times that her throat was raw. She had even vomited herself, probably from fear. She’d tried the house phone again and again, hoping that someone had discovered the line off the hook, but she only got the busy signal. Finally, she prayed. She said every prayer she’d ever been taught, and then she began fingering the rosary and reciting her Hail Marys until she realized she’d been clutching the oak rose so hard her palm had started to bleed. She had likely created a new scar, a smaller rose inside the larger one.

Now, as if in answer to her prayers, she saw the elevator come to life and begin to rise. She could hear whoever it was as he or she climbed in and started to descend.

“Oh, thank God,” she said, jumping dizzily to her feet as the door opened and the lights snapped on. “Where the hell were you? Did you bring the doctor?” Why was Marta’s head haloed green? It was an odd vision. “We need to get him to the hospital right away. Help me move him.”

“I don’t think so,” Marta said. In one hand she held a carafe of the magenta port and a long-stemmed glass, and, in the other, a knife. She looked at the bloody vomit. “Interesting. I wasn’t expecting blood. The first phase of foxglove poisoning is marked by nausea and an irregular heartbeat. Then the muscles go slack. The final phase slows the heart, ultimately stopping it. I do regret that the little girls are going to be blamed for choosing the wrong flowers.” She shoved the glass into Callie’s hands. “You didn’t drink the port at dinner, and you didn’t toast our future as enthusiastically as etiquette requires. So now mind your manners and drink up.”