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"Maren," Gage says. Low. A warning about where this is going.

"I know," I tell him. I do know. She's not wrong, and that's why it works. He taught me that himself, in front of my own mirror.

"I can't take what you are." Seraphine spreads her bare hands. "Nobody can. Not Evelyn. Not me. It has to be handed over, and it has to be handed over freely, and that is the only reason you're still standing on your own two feet in the middle of my circle instead of tied to a chair in it."

"So the doors are hospitality?"

"The doors are so you'll listen."

"Mare." Lila's voice. Small.

"Don't." I don't look at her. I can't do that and keep my knees. "Not tonight."

Seraphine watches the two of us for a moment, and there's something in her face I don't want to name, because it looks like sympathy.

"Everyone in your life has told you what you are," she says. "Evelyn told you. Your wolf told you. That mirror has been telling you for thirteen days."

She lifts one bare hand, palm up, the way you offer a chair.

"I'm not going to tell you anything."

Gage lunges.

He's fast. He's the fastest thing I've ever seen in my life, and he doesn't get halfway.

Four hundred candles go out in one breath.

When the light comes back it isn't candlelight. It's afternoon, thin and cold through tall windows, and I'm standing at the end of a long table in a room I've only been inside once.

Evelyn Sorrell is sitting at the head of it. Twenty years younger.

And she's saying my mother's name.

44

MAREN

COUNTDOWN TO MIDNIGHT

My mother is young and she's begging.

She's standing at the far end of the long table at Sorrell House with her coat still on, in a room I've only been inside once in my life, and she’s younger than I am now.

There's a child asleep against her shoulder. Dark hair. One shoe off.

I know whose shoe that is.

"Then tell me what to do," my mother says.

Evelyn Sorrell sits at the head of the table with her hands folded on the wood. Her hair is black all the way through. Everything else about her is exactly the same, down to the gloves.

"Nothing," Evelyn says. "Let her be ordinary as long as she can."

"And when she isn't?"

"Then we'll come."

My mother shifts the weight of me on her hip. She has a hole in the elbow of that coat. I remember that coat. It hung on the back of a kitchen chair for years and I gave it to the church in a garbage bag six months after the funeral.