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“We bleed into the bowl,” I said, my stomach turning.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Priya said.

“He will not be required,” Clemency snapped. I bit down on a wild nervous laugh.

“Then the names,” she said, her voice still commanding the entire space between my ears. “Every bride they fed him. Every woman he took after. You will speak every one recorded.”

“All of them?” I said.

“If you mean to unmake him, you will name every single one,” she said, like a middle-school teacher correcting a wayward child. “Each name draws what is left of that woman to the silver—her grief, her fury, and the refusal she was never allowed to make. That is your weapon. It is not ornamental.”

“Understood,” I said.

“What’s understood?” Priya hissed. I held up a finger and repeated it all aloud, watching the color leave their faces.

“The center is you,” Clemency said. “With the locket as the bridge, you will take me in. I will speak the severing through your mouth, over what the bowl has gathered, and I will turn it into him while he feeds.”

I repeated her words aloud.

“What does ‘turn it into him’ mean?” Callie whispered.

The answer came from her cold:

“It means I will put it into his open mouth.”

I almost grimaced. None of us wanted to breathe.

“Ask her for the words,” Priya whispered. “The actual severing.”

Clemency’s face hardened back into stone before I’d finished asking her.

“No.”

“No?”

“You will not have the words now. They live in me. They will be spoken once, through your mouth, at the working, and not one moment sooner. Words like these do not keep. Write them down and they die on the page.”

I passed it on.

“So we do all of this,” Jess said, “and we just trust the ghost at showtime?”

Clemency’s voice cut through my own thoughts so sharply I flinched.

“The alternative is to do nothing and be eaten in installments. You may weigh the two plans at your leisure.”

I repeated her words.

“Do we do it here?” Priya asked quickly.

“No. It must be done within reach of their next abomination.”

“Their next—” I started.

“The next harvest,” she said, like I was dimwitted. “Timing is not yours to choose. He can only be killed while he feeds, while his throat is open, in the same water.”

“You mean at the beach?”

All three of them looked at me.