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She looks at it for a long time. Long enough that I hear the clock in the hall go around twice. Her hand comes up and settles flat against the front of her coat, over the lantern, and stays there.

"Where did you get this?"

"Maren's mother kept a book. It was in it."

"Of course she did," Evelyn says, very quietly, to the table.

"You sat in that woman's kitchen."

The hand doesn't move. "Four times."

"You wanted Maren brought in before she was eleven."

"I wanted her tested, and I wanted her taught, and her mother threw me out four times for it, and the fourth time she did it on the front step where the neighbors could hear." Her mouth does something that isn't a smile. "She was very good at that."

I put one finger down on the corner of the photograph.

"Who is she?"

"You already know."

"Say it out loud."

"She's the last one." Evelyn sits down. "The last one before Maren. There hasn’t been another in four generations, and I’ve spent my whole adult life being the only person who knows that."

"What happened to her?"

"She was burned."

My wolf comes up under my skin the way he does when something walks into the yard.

"By who?"

"By the town." Evelyn's voice doesn't change. That's how I know what this can cost her. "Towns don't do that by themselves. A town needs permission from someone it trusts. Someone has to stand up and say this one, and not that one, and here's why it's necessary."

The room is cold. All these houses are cold.

"Did the Lantern stop it?"

She doesn't answer.

"Evelyn. Did the Lantern Coven stop it?"

"No."

She gets the word out and then she puts her hand back over the lantern at her throat and leaves it there. I finally understand what moved behind her face in the gravel on Friday, when I asked her the same question and she made me leave without it.

It wasn't guilt. Guilt is lighter than that. Guilt lets go eventually.

"Were you in the circle?"

"I wasn't even born." A pause. "But, my grandmother was."

I walk to the window because if I keep looking at her I'm going to break something in this house again.

Frost on the glass. Bare orchard past the drive. Three days out from a night that's coming whether anybody's ready or not.

"She's been in Maren's mirrors since the first morning," I say. "She was in her dream. She stood on her porch in daylight and smiled at her. She walked one circle around my house in the frost and I couldn't smell one thing, and I have never in my life failed to scent something.