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“Okay … you’ll go?” Hari asked.

I shook my head, leaning back onto the counter. The reassuring scent of the bookshop lending me a strength I did not feel. “Okay, I’ll hear you out.” It was all I could offer.

Hari glanced to his watch, snapped it shut, and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. “Well then. Your Cornishman should be here this evening. His train was due at the station at half past.”

Hari had sent for Ruan? Now that was beyond the pale. It was one thing to corner me in the bookshop and badger me into succumbing to his will, it was an entirely different one to enlist Ruan Kivell to do the job. That familiar anger surged back with a vengeance, thrumming through my veins, and I grabbed ahold of it. “Oh, so you thought you’d have my paramour convince me if you couldn’t do the trick. I am of half a mind to throw you both out of my shop.” Ruan Kivell was far more than simply my lover. I’d only just begun to admit that fact to myself. I’d first met the peculiar Cornish witch, the one they called a pellar, months ago when Mr. Owen sent me to deliver him a box of grimoires. Ruan had gotten a great deal more than books in the bargain. Falling in love with a lady-sleuth-detective has that effect on a man. In the last few months I’d grown rather fond of him. Relying upon him. Trusting him. Admiring him. More than that, if I were truthful with myself, but I certainly wasn’t going to share that with Hari.

Mr. Owen’s gaze narrowed. “That’s enough, lass. Pull back your claws and hear him out. You’ll want the lad once you hear what Hari’s come to say.” Whether it was the thought of Ruan—my ally—being here with me, or simply exhaustion, I gave in.

Closing my eyes, I took another sip of brandy. For the last seven-odd years, I’d believed that my parents and younger sister had perished upon the Lusitania when the Germans sank her in May of 1915. The prescient dreams I’d had—watching my sister disappear from my mother’s grasp beneath the waves—had made clear their fate. I’d seen my father’s mangled body thousands of times in my mind. Watched the white ribbons lovingly tied in my sister’s dark hair as she sank deeper into the water. But in all my dreams, all those horrible nightmares, I’d never seen my mother’s fate. I never saw her death.

Very few people knew about my dreams. Of how I have seen things yet to come. Usually death. Lovely talent, that one. Bookseller, lady-sleuth, and portender of doom. I should have it emblazoned upon my calling card. At long last, as if the strength had finally left me, I dropped—inch by inch—with my back against the counter until I sat down hard upon the old wooden floor. Uneven and dark from hundreds of years of use.

Hari’s expression softened as he approached, and sat alongside me.

Hip to hip, just as we’d been in those dark days after the war when the pair of us were little more than two battered soldiers holed up in my parents’ home in New York as I settled their affairs. Selling off what could not be moved and giving away the rest. He placed his arm around my shoulders and pulled me against his side. I breathed in the fresh scent of him as I rested my chin on his shoulder, grateful for his presence despite my protestations. Hari knew how much this hurt, having lost his own family during the war. We were two orphans who’d found each other during those four interminable years in France. He was dearer than a brother to me because of it. I’d not had a brother, but I’d like to think if I did, he’d have been like Hari Anand. Clever. Determined. And as intractable as me.

Mr. Owen dropped a thick paper folio in my lap and gently brought himself and the decanter down to the ground before me with a grunt. The three of us sequestered behind the shop counter like a trio of naughty children hiding from our governess. It was absurd to hide like this—they must think me mad, and yet it was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in a very long time.

I downed the rest of my brandy before lifting the manila-colored cover to reveal a familiar face staring back at me from the front page of an old German-language newspaper. I drew in an unsteady breath, running my thumb over her sharp features.

Mother.

Her long dark curls had been harshly clipped, and her sea-gray eyes stared solemnly out at the camera. Good God, no wonder Hari had been so determined to talk to me.

He’d actually found her.

Tears welled up in my eyes, which I wiped away with the back of my hand. Mr. Owen, for once in his eighty-odd years of existence, did not speak. He simply reached out, resting a hand on the toe of my boot—where my one leg extended across the floor while the other propped up the paper.

I was not about to break. I was not.

Yes. Yes, I was. Because there in black and white and gray was Niamh Vaughn.

My mother.

The German paper did not know her name. They’d not pieced together that the woman found adrift in the North Sea was the missing American socialite and philanthropist lost aboard the Lusitania, which had been torpedoed miles away and several weeks earlier. From the stubborn set of her jaw to the wildness of her eyes, it was her. The two of us alike enough in look and temperament that my father wondered if he had any part in the making of me at all. If perhaps I’d been delivered to her by the fairies. A silly notion as I was quite certain the fair folk did not exist outside Mr. Owen’s stories. I blinked away the moisture, struggling to focus upon the newsprint.

Mr. Owen pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, offering it to me. I took it, tucking it beneath my leg on the cold wooden floor.

My German was poor despite the fact my father had been born there; I’d never bothered to learn it until the war, when it proved useful to be able to speak the language of one’s enemies. Nevertheless, I could make out the gist of things. June 1915. A supply ship spotted a woman dressed only in tattered underthings adrift upon flotsam in the North Sea. Believing her dead, they pulled her from the sea only to discover that she was alive. Mute. Erratic. Flying between fits of rage and deep periods of melancholy. She struck a sailor twice her size before trying to leap back over the edge of the ship. Worried for their own safety, and hers, they locked her away for the remainder of their journey. The captain was all too happy to deliver her to the German authorities upon their arrival at port.

The men who found her believed her a malevolent spirit and dubbed her the Rusalka. I flipped through the articles that Hari had amassed detailing the discovery of this woman. The German press gobbled up the sailors’ superstitions, using the word Rusalka in every article Hari found. The seven letters sat uneasily upon my tongue. My mouth grew dry as a dawning realization washed over me. “How … where … is she now?”

Hari glanced at me in the dim electric lights of the bookshop as the cathedral bells chimed midnight. “You worry me when you have that look in your eye. It reminds me of those dark days.”

“This is a dark day, Hari. You just told me my mother might be alive after all these years.”

He tapped the remainder of the documents in my lap. “Your mother is alive. What I wouldn’t give to say the same about my own.”

His earnest expression unmoored me. I raked a hand through my hair, fingers tangled in my dark curls. “Where did they take her once she came back to land? This newspaper article is from a very long time ago. There have been years between then and now. She could be anywhere…”

“It’s all in here … But I believe I have discovered where she is being held.” He leaned over, papers whispering as he flipped through them until he located a typewritten report and set it on top. “There’s a priory in the Namur province in Belgium. Saint Oda’s, they call it. The priory has been there for centuries, with a lake in the nearby woods that supposedly can heal the infirm, cure the mad—”

“I don’t believe in miracles,” I grumbled, knowing good and well where folklore and superstition had gotten me thus far.

Mr. Owen silently raised his brows as if to protest but wisely held his tongue.

“No, but you believe in science—do you not?” The edge of Hari’s mouth curved up into a self-satisfied smile. The bastard knew me all too well. “There is also a hospital housed upon the priory grounds. It’s been there since the war. The sisters who ran the place could scarcely afford the upkeep of the property, and the grounds languished for decades with only a small village, the priory church, and an orphanage. During the German occupation, the Germans requisitioned part of the priory and modernized the whole place to care for the war wounded.”