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A hundred and eighty-four days, laid one on top of the other by the wolf everyone in this town keeps calling a danger to me, waiting for someone to come and get him.

Fate would have been so much cheaper.

"Oh," I say.

"What?"

"You enormous idiot." My eyes are streaming and I don't open them. "He's been counting."

Gage makes a sound I've never heard out of him.

Sid puts one paw on my boot.

Finally.

Two syllables, and under the cold enormous thing there's a small smug animal who has been waiting thirteen days to use that word on me.

You could have done that on a Tuesday in April and saved everyone a great deal of trouble.

Across the ballroom, something shatters.

Seraphine comes through Evelyn's wire with her sleeve on fire and her opened hand held out in front of her like an offering, and she goes for the seam, because it's all she's ever wanted and it's closing and she can see it.

"Maren," Mercy says. "Now, or not at all."

I open my eyes.

The crack in the floor of the Hollis mansion runs sixteen feet from the fireplace to the far wall, and the cold coming up out of it has stopped being cold. It's nothing. It's the absence of every warm thing that has ever happened, and forty dead people are standing around it in a loose ring, patient, the way they have been all night.

They're not afraid of it. That's when I understand what they've been waiting for.

"You're all going," I say.

The woman in the soaked coat inclines her head.

"Then go."

I put my free hand out over the seam and open it two more inches, which is either the bravest thing I've ever done or the stupidest, and the dead of this town go down into it like leaves down a storm drain, unhurried, in the order they arrived.

Seraphine is nine feet away.

Past her, still on her knees in the wax where she landed, Lila is watching me with her whole ruined face, and she isn't asking for anything, and I don't have one second to give her.

I give her a second anyway.

She nods, once, small, like we're across a crowded room at someone's wedding.

"Mercy."

"I know." She's already at the edge. Her burned hands are loose at her sides and her face is the one from the pendant and she looks a hundred and forty years tired. "Maren. Listen to me, because I have about four seconds and I want to spend them well."

"Don't."

"I've had my face against the only lock I couldn't pick for a hundred and forty years." She's smiling, and it's a terrible thing to look at, because it's the first one. "There was nothing to do but study it. I know how every binding I ever saw was tied and I know where each one gives, and it's all I own, and I'm not taking it down a hole with me."

She reaches out, and her hand stops an inch from my face like it stops at glass, and it doesn't matter.

It comes in anyway.