A/N: I tried and tried and tried to update this, but every time I did, I hit a brick wall. So I decided to just rewrite the whole thing, because there were plot and character changes that developed while I was brainstorming, anyway.

I've been working on this story for ten years. It's time to wrap it up and finish. You can read the other two stories, Transversed and On This Side first, if you like. I'll be making small changes here and there to those stories, although I'm not sure I'll ever do full-fledged rewrites. Cleaning and fixing plotholes, maybe, but nothing major. Thanks to The Karnstein for allowing me to use her character, Holly Angela.

Thanks to all my fans and friends for your support. I loves you guys!

My name is Amara Dolan. I'm twenty-seven years old. After college, I moved to California and joined the local police force's Cold Case squad. My best friends in the world, Ice Albers and Rupali Gray, are gone. Ice went to Nosgoth with Raziel, and Rupali disappeared in 2012. It's 2015 now. I have no one to rely on now but myself.

The last thing I remembered was answering the door. Everything before and after that is a blur.

My head ached terribly. I didn't want to open my eyes. I knew I was laying on my side, on a cold floor that felt like it might have been concrete. For a moment, I wondered if a serial killer had kidnapped me. That made sense. I answered the door, and he drugged me.

Without opening my eyes, I tried moving my arms, to check and see if I was restrained. A sigh of relief escaped my lips when my arm moved freely. I tried moving my legs next and almost smiled when they moved freely.

Okay. I'm not tied up. Maybe I should try standing up.

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I inhaled sharply when I saw the room I was in.

This was no serial killer's basement bunker. The architecture here was clearly medieval. The walls and floor were made of gray stone, and flying buttresses held up the vaulted ceiling.

My heart started pounding as I climbed to my feet. When I was fifteen, something very similar happened to me...and to my best friend Ice. One minute, we'd been in her bedroom, having a sleepover, and the next, we were in a parallel world called Nosgoth. There had been lots of medieval architecture like this. There had been vampires in Nosgoth, too. I had fallen deeply in love with one of them when he had wandered into my world, just before I turned twenty-one. His name was Dumah. I still wore the pendant he gave me, a silver amethyst point on a thin silver chain.

But Dumah, Ice, and Dumah's brothers Raziel and Rahab had returned to Nosgoth, along with Kain, the vampire ruler of Nosgoth.

Kain's voice echoed in my mind as I remembered the day they left.

We were all in the living room of the house I was renting then, while Kain was making plans to return to Nosgoth. He had instructed Ice to drive to the place where a return was possible.

"What about Amara?" Rahab asked.

"She stays."

Dumah's face fell. "Sire-"

"She stays," Kain repeated.

"Why?" I said before I could stop myself.

Kain slowly turned to me, regarding me with his gold eyes in the same way that he might have looked at a small child who'd asked him a foolish question.

"You belong here. For now," he said coolly.

"But..Dumah..." I finished weakly.

The corners of Kain's mouth briefly turned up. "Accompany us, then. Say your goodbyes. But you must stay on your side of the Veil."

If I didn't belong in Nosgoth, then what the hell was I doing back? More importantly, what happened to Ice? Would Dumah remember me? Time passed more quickly in Nosgoth than it did on Earth. Seven years for me would be seven hundred for Nosgoth.

I looked down. I had been getting ready for work when I had answered the door. I was wearing black dress slacks and a white button-down blouse with ruffles on the front. My shoes were kind of impractical, being black, medium-heeled boots. My blonde hair was loose and fell past my shoulders. I had meant to put it up.

I reached down, to where my holster would be, and remembered that I hadn't put my gun holster on before I answered the door. A shame. My gun would have been pretty useful here.

Okay. So. How do I get out of this? I scanned the room quickly. It was small, and except for a few crates in the corner, it was empty. There was a heavy, wooden door against the far wall. I slowly moved toward it. It was probably locked, but it couldn't hurt to try.

The first time I pushed the door, it didn't budge, but the second time, I threw all of my weight against the door, and it creaked open. I took a few cautious steps through the doorway and peeked out. There was a hallway immediately in front of me. I looked to the left, and then to the right. Wherever I was, it was oddly still. There was not a soul, human or vampire, moving.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It wasn't normal for a building in Nosgoth to be so still. The place had teemed with activity when I had been there last.

That was twelve years ago. And it was twelve hundred years ago in Nosgoth time, remember? A lot can change in twelve hundred years.

Maybe whichever vampire had owned this castle had abandoned it, choosing to keep court elsewhere. That was logical.

I stepped completely out into the hallway and looked again. I reached for the pendant Dumah had given me and squeezed it.

Dumah. Where are you? Find me, please find me.

I felt nothing, not the strange sense I felt when I knew the pendant was calling Dumah, just..nothing.

Had something happened to him?

For some reason, I felt a strong pull to go right. Maybe that was his way of bringing me to him. Yes. That was it.

I started down the hallway and slowly walked down, pausing every few moments to listen for footsteps. I had no way of knowing where I was or if the place was actually abandoned, after all.

Voices echoed down the hall. It sounded like two women, and they were coming toward me. My heart started racing. There was a huge window nearby that was covered with a large tapestry. If I could get to the window in time, I could hide behind the tapestry.

No time to think. I quickly hid myself behind the tapestry and stood stock still as the women moved past. The tapestry was heavy and smelled of years of smoke from torches. It was stifling behind it, but I dared not move.

"Lachesis, what of that girl that Lord Kain brought here?" asked one of the women.

I desperately wanted to peek around and see who these women were, but I knew better. If they were talking about me, and Kain really had brought me here, then they could. not. find. me.

"I suspect we will prepare her as we did the others." This woman sounded a little older. Her voice was sharp, cutting the air like a whip.

"Lord Kain warned Lord Vorador and the Priestess that she could be dangerous. She can't be that dangerous, though. She hasn't awakened yet." The younger-sounding woman seemed confident here.

"Even not awakened, she still has power..."

Their voices faded as they walked further down the hallway. I waited until the sound of their footsteps faded completely, and then carefully climbed out from behind the tapestry.

So Kain brought me to Nosgoth. How and why were my next questions.

The hallway branched after a few feet and I chose to go right again. This hallway was darker and less well-maintained than the others. Those vampire worshippers, if that's what those women were, must have only come here out of necessity. At the end of the hall, there was a set of elegant double doors. I smiled. If these were Kain's private chambers, I was going to do a little poking around. Maybe I'd find out what he wanted from me.

I slowly took hold of the handle on one of the doors and pulled. To my surprise, it easily opened.

The room was circular, and quite large. It reminded me of the inner sanctum of a medieval church. In the center of the room was a pure, white marble statue of Kain, standing in a regal pose. The statue was holding a stone version of the strange, wavy sword I'd seen him with the last time he came to Earth.

There were some strange runes on the base of the statue, but what surprised me most was that Kain had chosen to depict himself with feathered, angelic wings.

What an ego, I thought. I looked around the room and noticed that there were portraits painted on the walls. Eight of them.

The first portrait was of a young woman with very long, straight black hair that turned to red at the ends. She looked like she could have been Japanese. She, too, was depicted with feathered wings. A strange symbol was painted above her head. It looked like a hastily-written letter H.

My breath caught in my throat when I saw the portrait next to the one of the Japanese woman. The woman depicted here was strangely familiar to me, with her shock of curly blond hair. She looked older, in her late thirties, perhaps. Her eyes were closed and she was pouring what looked like liquid fire into a goblet of water. The portrait here strongly resembled the Temperance Tarot card. This woman, too, had feathered wings. The symbol above her head reminded me of a bird's wing. I realized then that the reason she looked so familiar to me is because she looked exactly like the subject of my most recent case. Holly Angela. Vanished in 1967. Some new evidence had come up in her case. But why would a portrait of Holly Angela exist in Nosgoth?

I scanned the other portraits, finding one of a demonic-looking woman with batlike wings whose symbol looked like a pair of crossed swords.

I recognized another portrait. The woman in the painting had dark skin and long, curly black hair. She was dressed in a simple green dress, but I knew her face.

Rupali. The artist had chosen to depict her standing with one hand behind her back and the other raised to her face. She wore an expression of absolute calm, and the artist had given her hawk's wings. The symbol above her head looked like an unfinished triangle.

What did this mean? Any of it? What game was Kain playing? Had he meant for me to find this room?

I turned to look at the statue of Kain again, and I noticed that there was a portrait behind it that I hadn't seen yet.

Curious, I walked behind the statue and looked up.

My blood froze in my veins.

Although the woman in the painting was wearing a long, orange dress, and although she had been depicted with black feathered wings and white hair, I recognized her face.

It was mine.