Much as Stephen has been chasing her, Asher himself had remained just out of reach if one stopped to think about it: the man painted in blurry outline, a muffled voice in another room, footsteps creaking on floorboards, a memory of a door having just closed after him. All of the other smiling generic faces in the village would only make oblique mention of it: I went hunting with him yesterday or we were out drinking late or he popped down to the river, you just missed him. Nobody else here has met him face-to-face. Astrid has had breakfast with Morgana, but never the girl’s father.

At the time, it had not seemed strange odd.

And now the door’s open, and Stephen feels that rush of fetid air sweep out into the room. The smell is vaguely familiar from his hospital days. Infection and rot and windows that have been closed too long, the air turning stale, illness going rancid. Except— no, this is further along than that: spoiled meat, cadaver study. On protective instinct, he moves up alongside Gwenaëlle, and he looks into the room,

and he’s seen worse things, he had once settled his own decaying flesh around himself like a shroud, but the bizarre thing is that when he looks at it, the something has no real face. (He never met Asher Hardie.) It’s still hazy and indistinct, no defining identifying features besides broad shoulders now gone sunken with wasted muscle and decomposition, tendons shrinking in on themselves even as it rustles and starts to move.

“Gwenaëlle—” Stephen says, a rising warning.