“Wh-what?”

“A bit of this, a bit of that. A twist here, a tweak there. And look what we have.”

I squeezed my eyes shut against the urge to ask what she meant. Whatever this thing was, I couldn’t trust her, no more than I could trust Dr. Davidoff and the Edison Group.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“The same thing you do. Freedom from this place.”

I settled onto the bed. As hard as I looked, though, I couldn’t see any sign of her. There was only the voice and the warm breeze.

“You’re trapped here?” I asked.

“Like a fairy under a bell jar, metaphorically speaking. Fairies are a product of the human imagination. Little people flitting about on wings? How positively quaint. A more fitting simile would be to say that I am trapped like a lightning bug in a bottle. For magical energy, nothing quite compares to a soul-bound demi-demon. Except, of course, a soul-bound full demon, but to summon one and attempt to harness its power would be suicide. Just ask Samuel Lyle.”

“He died summoning a demon?”

“The summoning is usually a forgivable offense. It’s soul binding that rather annoys them. Lyle should have been content with me, but humans are never satisfied, are they? Too arrogant to contemplate the possibility of failure, he neglected to pass along the true secret of his success: me.”

“Your magic powers this place. And they don’t even realize it?”

“Lyle guarded his secrets to the grave and beyond, though taking them into the afterlife was not his intention. I’m sure he meant to tell them about me…had he not died before he got around to it. Even a necromancer as powerful as you would have difficulty contacting a spirit in a hell dimension, so now I am bound here, my power enhancing the magics cast in this place. The others—this Edison Group—think it’s built on the junction of ley lines or some such foolishness.”