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they had any chance at healing. She doubted many of them had the blessing of a man like Jacob or the friends she had found to help them learn to live with what they had endured.
    She had spent a lot of time at prayer and on her yoga mat lately—more than usual—asking for God’s help for those girls, and trying to make sense of things.
    “Why am I not happy about this?” she asked God one night, sitting in her cozy yoga studio in front of the altar she had built. Taking inspiration from Lali, her first teacher, she had set up the room as a place of prayer and meditation as well as physical activity.
    She didn’t expect God to speak back, of course. If God were in the habit of doing so, he would have answered her when she lay on the floor of the harem freezing and starving, the constant terror of what would happen again over and over carving ragged gouges in her heart.
    She could not know the mind of God. If she had been released from the harem at any other time she might never have met Jacob. She certainly wouldn’t have been in Austin at the precise moment she needed to be to find inspiration in Miranda Grey, to stand up on her own two feet and walk out of that room. She might not have become the person she was becoming, and Cora had found that she liked that person, and her life, very much.
    She had seen what happened when someone of deep faith endured years of misery and turned his back on God. It was not a fate she would ever have desired.
    She thought of Prime Deven, who suffered more from the death of his faith than he ever had at the hands of others. She could feel, sometimes even across the ocean, the pain he was in—a consequence of the strange connection among them all, she guessed. She wished she could sweep the Prime up in her arms and promise him that God had not abandoned him—that Deven had closed the door, and only Deven could reopen it. She had to get through to him before it was too late.
    She pondered calling him, just to see how he was. He probably wouldn’t confide in her—she was fairly certain Deven had never confided in anyone—but she had to at least offer. They had spoken a few times since he gave her her Nighthound Vràna, so it wouldn’t be entirely novel for her to call now. She could perhaps use the pretense of asking his advice about the dog. As thorny and cold as he could be, every time she had ever called, he had stopped whatever he was doing and given her his full attention.
    As if the thought had been a hand stretching over continents, she abruptly stopped midprayer—she could feel him right now.
    What . . .
    An intense wave of energy washed over her, the likes of which she had never felt before; it felt nothing like a vampire’s power, although it was just as ageless and far, far stronger. It held the scent of green growing things, and it was redolent of healing, of rest.
    It was certainly not Deven’s energy, but it was twining through his like a climbing vine. She felt—or saw—it strengthening and supporting everyplace it moved. The two energies seemed to wrap around one another effortlessly, as if they had been made to join this way.
    The image of a darkened bedroom came to her mind. Next to a great bed sat Jonathan in a chair, watching the bed intently with his chin resting on his fist. On the bed itself, she saw Deven lying on his back, eyes closed, fingers twisted in the comforter and clenching in pain every few moments. And sitting with him, the Prime’s head in his lap, was . . .
    What in the name of . . . ?
    Her presence did not go unnoticed. The third figure “looked” at her, and she gasped and tried to flee back into her own body, both because the power before her was so alien and frightening . . . and because it was familiar.
    “I know you,” she whispered to herself. “How do I know you?”
    “Peace, child,” came a gentle, accented voice. “I am a friend.”
    Cora didn’t know if it would work, but she spoke back across the miles: