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Smoke. Then nothing.
Then just my neighbor, standing in a torn cardigan with an empty bag in her fists, breathing hard, blue light dying under her socks.
I have never wanted anyone so much in my life.
That is a genuinely insane thing to feel while a creature dissolves on the floorboards, but I feel it anyway, all through my chest and low in my gut, and my wolf isn't helping.
Ours, he says. Ours. Look at her.
I'm looking.
"Your arm," she says.
"It's fine."
"It's smoking."
"It's fine."
She crosses the porch and takes my wrist anyway, turning my forearm into the light, and her fingers are freezing and her hand is shaking and neither of us moves for a second longer than we need to.
Her thumb slides once over the inside of my wrist and I can tell that she feels the energy connecting us by the way her eyes go wide.
My whole body forgets what it's for.
"You need salt," she says, and lets go. I get my breath back the way you get it back after someone drops you in a lake.
She looks past me. At her hallway. At the six inches of dark her own front door opened onto.
"It let itself in," she says.
"Yes."
"With the good lock."
"Yes."
She's quiet a long moment. Somewhere behind the shop, a crow starts up and won't stop.
"Give me twenty minutes," she says.
She takes forty.
I stand in her living room and don't look at anything, which is impossible, so instead I look at all of it. The ceramic ghost with the chipped ear on the mantel. Six mugs, all different, none matching. A framed photograph of a woman with Maren's mouth, turned slightly toward the wall the way you turn a picture when it hurts to keep looking at it.
I don't touch anything. Not one thing. After the ring of her belongings on that kitchen table, I'm not sure I ever will again.
She comes out with a duffel, a laptop bag, a canvas tote of what appears to be entirely candles, and her grandmother's quilt folded over one arm.
"Don't say anything about the quilt."
"Wasn't going to."
"You washed it."
"It was muddy."
"You folded it into a hospital corner."
