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“So we’ll make the coffin out of lead.”

“Where are we going to get a lead coffin?”

She gives me a little shrug and a hand spread.

“Magic, Marley. We use magic to make one,” she says.

And yes, she’s still wrong. But god, my heart is suddenly racing.

I have to really fight to get out the problems with this increasingly cool-sounding series of solutions. What if she actually comes up with one, I think, and suddenly I’m having to hide how breathless I feel.

“Yeah, about that. He can undo my magic.”

“What. How. Why. What do you mean?”

“I mean I can blast him and shoot arrows at him and occasionally melt part of his face. But I can’t do anything that lasts. I can’t contain him or keep him a certain way or maintain wounds in his body. After a while, he makes my magic crumble. Reverses it.”

“Is that something all vampires can do?”

She’s sitting forward in her seat now. Pressing her case. Pushing me to think in a way I had long since given up on. That sometimes I weirdly don’t even feel capable of. I don’t think I even realized, until right now, just how despairing I had become. “No. No. I don’t think so,” I say, and now the breathlessness is showing in my voice.

Why is it that this is the case, I think.

Because it is. I’ve bound other feral vamps before today.

“So it’s just him,” she says, eyes alight.

“Pretty much.”

“And all witches have this same issue.”

I go to answer and stop. Partly because I don’t know.

But mostly because I suspect what the answer is.

And she’s so gleeful now, I know where this is going.

“Ah, not all witches, then,” she says. “Just you. Only you can’t bind him.”

“Nance, that doesn’t mean you should get involved in this,” I warn, but she’s out of her seat now. She gets in front of me, so I can’t avoid her while pretending to pace. She’s maddening. She’s amazing.

“I think it does,” she says. “I think that is precisely what is needed here.”

“I’m not letting you and Cassie make a lead coffin to stuff him in.”

“Then we’ll create sunlight every time he gets near you.”

“Sunlight doesn’t really kill vampires.”

“If it burns him enough I’m sure he’ll start thinking twice.”

“He doesn’t seem to mind getting extra crispy, to be honest.”

“All right. So we stake him through the heart using magical crossbows.”

“Stakes don’t work, either.”

“Not even if you cut his head off, too?”