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“At least they won’t float,” Callie said, her last word coming out shaken.

I pulled a dozen tealights from my backpack and set them on the table, then lit them with a lighter. The flames slowly flickered, but I couldn’t tell from what.

“Because things weren’t terrifying enough,” Priya said.

I dotted the candles around the room, lighting every corner, until the space glowed in warm pockets of light like the set of a John Carpenter film.

Damian moved to the door, then turned to look at me. “I’ll be right outside.”

“Wait, what?” Callie snapped, grabbing onto the edge of the table. “You’re leaving us here?”

“I can’t be here for this,” he said.

We were silent for a moment, the candles lighting our faces in shaky halos that made us all look twice as stricken.

“What, so summoning a dead occultist in a haunted house is somehow women’s work?” Jess said.

“In this case, yes,” Damian said.

He hesitated another few seconds. “If anything happens, I’m right outside.”

The door closed behind him.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The three of them looked at me like their lives were in my hands.

“Just remember what I said about breathing,” I said.

I pulled the mirror from the backpack, pulled out its easel stand and set it at the point marked in chalk, my knees unsteady when I bent down.

The black glass stared back at us, blinking like an eye in the candlelight.

I placed the salt and nails next to it, poured from the bag into a little heap, along with the marigold and one extra candle.

“What is that?” Callie said, staring at the little bundle like it might have a pulse.

“Protection. Damian made it for me, the day he told me everything.” I set it to the left of the mirror, exactly where Branwen had said the binding-thing should sit.

“What’s inside it?” Priya said. It was one of her layered questions. The hidden layer was what else have you been carrying around that we don’t know about?

“My hair, his blood, dirt from the fox grave, and a bunch of plants,” I said. “He told me I shouldn’t show it to anyone, so this is me trusting the three of you to keep quiet about it.”

The three of them stared at it.

“A poppet,” Jess said softly, like she already knew exactly what it was.

“Clemency’s missing step was something from the binding,” I said. “This is what we have.”

We arranged ourselves in a circle. I stood opposite the mirror, with Callie to my right, Priya to my left, and Jess completing the circle between them, just right of the mirror.

I touched my sternum. The locket hung there, right below the opal.

We joined hands. Our anxiety threaded through our grip like a game of telephone.

“Okay,” I said, my voice sounding weak in the large room. I cleared my throat. “Watch the candle. If it goes out, we have to stop. If the mirror clouds over, that’s good, that means she’s close, and we wait. We can’t rush it. And watch the flower.”

“The flower?” Priya said.