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"Come and do what?"

Evelyn doesn't answer her.

That's the whole thing. That's the entire deception, and it isn't a lie, it's a silence, and I've been on the receiving end of that exact silence for thirteen days.

My mother says my name. Not to me. To her.

She says it the way you say a name to someone who already knows it.

"You did that to the last one too," my mother says, and picks up her bag, and walks out past a version of me who is four years old and doesn't wake up.

Then the room tears sideways.

Other rooms. Faster. A woman on her knees in a barn with her wrists behind her. A woman in a doorway with her hands up. A woman tied to a post in a field of stubble, and it's raining, and it doesn't matter that it's raining.

Different centuries. Same shape.

And in every crowd, somewhere back in the dark where nobody's looking, one small silver light.

I count six before I stop counting.

I come back on my feet in the ballroom.

Gage is eight feet away and he can’t reach me.

The air between us is doing something. Not shimmering, not glowing, nothing you can really define. It's just that his hand stops on what seems like an invisible barrier. He hits it with his whole shoulder, the way he hit the terrace doors, and the sound is wrong, and he does it again.

The black star in the parquet is under my boots. The circle around it is maybe fifteen feet across.

I put my own hands out and walk the line of it.

Nothing. The same nothing as the terrace doors, the same nothing as the floor. On the other side of six inches of ordinary ballroom air Gage is saying my name and I can hear him fine.

Cass is at his shoulder with her hand flat on the same barrier, and Perry, and a wolf I don't know the name of.

Behind them the dead have come in closer.

All eleven, off the walls, standing in a loose ring outside the one the candles made. The old man off the piano bench. The two women down four stairs. Nobody living can see them drifting in around this circle like people at the edge of a grave. But, I can, and not one of them is looking at Seraphine.

They're all looking at me.

Seraphine is inside it with me.

So is Lila.

"He'll break his arm," Seraphine says.

"He'll break your face." My voice comes out shredded. "Give him a minute."

She smiles at that, and it's a real one, and I hate her for it.

Sid is on the parquet at the edge of the circle.

He shouldn't be here. He was asleep on Gage's wood stove at six o'clock and there are four miles of frozen road between there and here. How is he sitting in a place that a hundred and ninety pounds of alpha can't even get through?

He looks up at me and there's no swagger in him at all.

Maren, she isn't lying to you. That's the worst part.