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She gingerly stepped through.

Damian replaced the boards behind us, and the darkness became complete.

The smell hit me first. Damp, dust, mouse droppings, and a putrid, cloying sweetness worse than a dead wren in a wedding veil.

Priya pulled her sleeve over her nose. “Oh god.”

“It gets better upstairs,” Damian said.

Jess looked at him. “Does it?”

“No.”

I let out a nervous laugh and pulled a flashlight out of my backpack. The others used their phones.

The basement was low-ceilinged and crowded with shelves of mason jars and rusted tools. The jars caught the flashlight beam in cloudy glints. Most were empty. Some weren’t. I didn’t stop long enough to figure out what was floating inside them.

A flight of steep narrow stairs waited at the far end. They let out a hollow groan under Damian’s feet.

Behind me, Callie said, “Absolutely not.”

I turned. Her face was pale in the yellow beam of the flashlight. Priya stood behind her, looking close to tears. Jess had both arms folded tight over her chest.

“I tested them already,” Damian said. “They’re fine.”

No one moved. Then Jess nodded once. “All right.”

We climbed slowly, freezing at every step, each one complaining in a different voice. At the top, the door hung open onto a hallway that smelled worse than the basement, because here the rot had air. We hesitated at the top of the stairs, our flashlights and phones like trembling little moons. They swept over peeling wallpaper, warped floorboards, and water stains that spread across the ceiling in sickening yellow tides.

The house seemed larger inside than outside. That was impossible, so I didn’t say it out loud.

We passed a sitting room where the fireplace had collapsed inward. A dining room with a chandelier hanging crooked from one chain. A corridor where yellowed drapes moved, even though none of the windows were open.

Then we came to the nursery.

I stopped and looked inside despite myself, because just the thought of a coven nursery in a derelict Victorian home was petrifying.

A crib sat beneath a lace canopy, its mattress stained yellow and brown with age. A dollhouse rested on the floor beside it, one wall broken open to reveal tiny papered rooms. A doll lay facedown near it, half-buried in dust, one porcelain hand reaching from under its dress.

In the center of the nursery, the floor varnish had worn thin in a perfect oval, as if women had stood there, staring out the window, year after year.

Priya throttled the noise that wanted to escape her throat. Callie grabbed onto my sleeve.

“Keep moving,” I said, softly.

The hallway bent left. At the corner, a shadow lurked just inside a room.

I grabbed Damian’s hand. He raised his flashlight.

The beam found a sewing mannequin draped in black cloth, its headless neck tilted slightly toward us.

All four of us exhaled at once.

“That,” Callie whispered, “was extremely fucking rude of the house.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“What do you expect from Victorian witches,” Jess said.