Page 128

"Cass?"

Nothing from the yard. Nothing from the tree line.

Then, off the north side of the house I hear one short sound that sounds weird and gets cut off.

I get the door shut. I throw both bolts. My hands are steady the whole time, and I'm surprised by that.

Behind me, in the kitchen, the cloth moves.

The towel has unfolded itself.

Yellow, burnt on the corner, lying open on the counter like something set out for a guest. The loaf is split down the middle. Not cut. Split, the way wet wood splits, and the rosemary smell is coming out of it in a column.

The air above it feels wrong.

I can feel it the way I felt the ward on Gage's front step, and that one was beautiful. A seam laid across the world, drawn tight, humming. This is the same kind of thing but done badly. A hem picked out. A gap where a gap has no business being, with the edges gone soft and hanging.

And, something is coming through it.

Maren.

Sid's voice lands in my skull with no swagger in it at all. No commentary. Just my name, in a register I've heard exactly twice.

Don't let it finish.

The first one comes out of the gap like a man climbing out of a swimming pool.

Yellow eyes. Arms too long by half. Its mouth opens and keeps opening, past where a jaw should stop, and the smell that comes with it is smoke and rot and old blood.

I go backward into the hall so fast I take a chair with me.

I try fire.

Of course I try fire. Fifteen tries at the pit on Thursday and one success, and the success had a six-and-a-half-foot man's hand wrapped over mine.

I put everything I have into the space in front of me and I get nothing. Not a spark. Not warmth. The thing comes through the kitchen doorway and its feet don't quite land the way feet land, and I'm crawling backward over a knocked-down chair in a house that isn't mine.

He isn't here. That's the problem and I'm so tired of it being the problem. I want him here.

Then something in me goes very quiet.

I realize that I don't make heat. I've never made heat.

I make doors open. I find seams no one can see and I open and close them.

I don't make things. I move lines.

The second one is halfway out of the gap now, shoulders through, hips not.

I stop crawling away from the kitchen. I get up, and I go back in.

The gap doesn't want to be touched.

Reaching for the ward on Thursday was like putting my hand flat on a guitar string. This is like putting my hand into a mouth. It's hot and it's soft and it moves toward me, and everything I have says pull back, but I hold on anyway and find the edges of it.

Then I do the only thing I actually know how to do.

I close it.