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That's the whole reason I don't.

She looks up. "Did I do that right?"

"You did it."

"That's not the same answer."

"No."

Her mouth moves into a smile. Then it goes.

"Gage, the front door wouldn't open. After. I tried the handle while you were carrying the salt in." She sets the cloth down. "I closed us in with it."

"It let go."

"This time."

I call Evelyn at four in the morning. She answers on the second ring, which means she hasn't been sleeping either.

I tell her the ward is shut. I tell her nine of them stood on my grass and waited to be invited.

I ask her to send someone to lay the wards again.

"I can lay a hundred," Evelyn says. "She'll open every one of them. Now they know she can, which means they'll never again send something that has to break in."

"Then what's the point of the wards?"

"There isn't one. Not on that house." A pause, and something under it I don't like. "Gage. You've been treating your home as a fortress. It's a box with her inside it and one working lock, but the lock answers to her."

I look through the kitchen doorway. Maren's asleep sitting up on my couch under her grandmother's quilt, still in her boots.

"We're not staying here," I say.

"No," Evelyn says. "You're not."

I hang up before she can tell me where she'd prefer we go.

Then I do what I've been refusing to do since Monday. I pull up Cass and type four words and send them before I can change my mind.

Bring whoever will come.

She answers in under a minute, and it's just: Say when.

I walk the line at dawn.

Frost has come down hard over the whole yard, and the grass past the walk is bare and undisturbed all the way to the road.

Inside the line, it isn't.

Footprints. Bare feet, small ones, pressed into the frost in a single unhurried circle around my house. Past the fire pit with its salt ring. Under the guest room window. Along the north side where the gutter drips, where nobody walks, where there's nothing to see.

All the way around. Once.

They end at my front step, toes pointed at the door, and they don't come back out.

She closed the seam with something already inside it.

I crouch and put my face down to the frost, close enough that the cold burns my eyes, and I breathe in.