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"I need you behind these gates until one minute past midnight." She's already reaching for the lamp switch, which does nothing. "One night, Maren. Thirty witches between you and the road. You’ll hate me but you’ll be alive."

"With the chair at the window."

"If it keeps you breathing, yes."

I look at her for a long moment. She doesn't flinch and I'll give her that.

"No," I say.

Then I go down three flights of someone else's stairs and out into the cold, where Gage is standing on the gravel exactly where I left him, and the second he sees my face he starts walking.

"Threshold Witch," I tell him.

He stops. Everything in him goes still.

"That's the word. She used it to explain why the door locks from the outside." My hands have started shaking, so I put them in my pockets. "The last one burned. They stood at the edge of the field and watched. And she's been in my mirrors trying to warn me."

Gage looks up at that white house for a while.

"Say what you want to do," he says. "Both of them will move tonight and I'll be standing where you tell me."

"I want my masks."

"What?"

"Half this town is walking into the Hollis mansion tonight wearing merchandise out of my shop." I hear my own voice go flat and mean and very calm. "So I'm going too. Someone should be in that room who knows where the doors are."

He opens the truck door for me and doesn't argue.

We're a quarter mile down the private road when I turn to look back at the gates.

She's standing at the end of it. Tall, thin, black to the ground, face lost in shadow the way it always is.

For thirteen days she’s pointed at me.

She isn't pointing at me now.

She's pointing back at the house.

41

GAGE

STILL HALLOWEEN DAY

She describes the room like a hotel she didn't care for. Bed, towels, lamp, a view of the valley.

"And a chair," Maren says. "Pulled up to the window. There was a cup on the sill."

I keep my hands on the sink and my face doing nothing at all.

"Empty?"

"Empty."

I nod once. I put the mug I've already washed back under the tap and wash it again.

My mother sat in a chair like that for twenty-two years. Second floor, east side, a cup of coffee she carried up every morning and poured out every night without drinking any of it. My father thought it was a habit. He'd tell people about it the way you tell people your wife collects spoons.