Page 202

Boundaries are the family business.

The shadow burns off her face as she comes.

Dark hair. Serious eyes. The woman from the pendant photograph, the one who mouthed Run at me across my own kitchen table.

"You're the one from my mirror," I say.

"I've been at the glass since you were four years old." Her voice is quiet and plain, and it's the first whole sentence she's ever managed. "It's the first time it's ever let me finish."

"You pointed at me. That first morning. You pointed right at me."

"There was something standing behind you in your shop." She stops in front of me. "I couldn't reach it. I could reach the glass."

My eyes sting. "You screamed my name."

"You were about to pick up a mirror I was screaming through."

"The footprints. At Gage's house."

"Nothing else was going to walk that line," she says, "so I walked it."

I've spent thirteen days being terrified of her. My whole body feels like it’s going to fall over.

"Who are you?"

"Mercy Bell."

The name goes through me like cold water.

Bell.

I painted our name on my own door six months ago with a two-inch brush and a hangover. I thought I was being clever. Bell for me, Bone for October, a joke a tourist would remember.

"You put our name on your door," Mercy says. "I took it as an invitation. It's the closest I've been able to get in a hundred and forty years."

"We're related?"

"Of course we are. There's one bloodline and we're both on it. That's all the family anybody needs." Her mouth moves, and it isn't a smile. "They burned me on the town green in front of eleven people who'd eaten at my table. The women in the lantern cloaks stood at the back and let it happen, and then they wrote down that it was necessary."

"Do not trust the Lantern," I say.

"Your mother read the same page I did."

"She isn't here." I hate how young it comes out. "I looked."

Something moves across Mercy's face that a hundred and forty years hasn't worn off her. "No. She was able to go all the way through where the people go when they are ready. That's the kindness, Maren. Staying is the torture."

"Enough." Seraphine's voice cuts across the ballroom, and every candle in the circle stands up straight. "You are out of time, Maren. The veil is open. Choose."

Lila is beside her with her mask gone and her face wrecked. "Maren, please. Take it. Take what they're offering and stop letting them make decisions about you."

Three years of Tuesday nights and stolen fries and a red coat she's had since the day we met.

"You practiced that," I say.

"I've been practicing it for three years." Her chin goes up, wet. "It's still true."

"She has one minute," Seraphine says. "Then the choice makes itself."