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“Who? Where are they? Tell me so I may tear them limb from limb.”

“Okay, first of all, calm down. Second of all, we don’t know for sure.”

“I understand that part.”

“And it’s a little bonkers.”

“Everything about this is. Someone killed you twenty-seven times, at least—if we don’t count the accidents and suicides and illnesses. Which I haven’t discounted entirely as the work of some malevolent force.”

“All right. So we think it might be your father.”

“Of course it is,” he cries, fist raised like he’s holding aloft an imaginary sword. I almost tell him he has a real one still in the living room, but before I can he seems to realize he has no idea why that makes so much sense. “Wait, what?”

“Agnatha—Phone—and I think he somehow followed you across time.”

He frowns. He scoffs. “By using magic.”

“Possibly. I mean, he would have to have enough magic to curse you.”

“But he abhorred it. He loathed it. He thought it was disgusting.”

“Or he said that because he wanted to be the only one to wield it. Or didn’t like women wielding it. Or feared some challenge to his power.” I spread my hands, but I don’t need to. I can see all three of these ideas resonate with him. So I continue. “Basically, there are a lot of possible explanations. And we don’t know which one it might be. But I do know that if this is right, the chances of the person being someone in town are high. And the chances of that person being Henrik Hannigan are even higher. He seems to know about witches; all of his behavior stinks of someone lurking in the shadows; some of his favorite hobbies are hating girls and being a puritan. It fits.”

“Show me a picture of this Hannigan.”

“He might not look the same.”

“I know he will not. I sought him after he made sure your life was taken, and only a disguise would have aided his escape. But I was certain then I would see the soul within if I was the one to look upon him. And I believe it still,” he says.

So I take him down to the office. I get out old newspapers—in particular, the one from when he first started the committee. I put his picture on the front cover so everyone would know who was being such an enormous ass.

He laughs at the headline.

OLD MAN SHAKES FIST AT CLOUD

He’s recently been getting into The Simpsons, so it’s not a surprise. But it is a surprise when his laughter dies. It goes low in his throat, even though he’s not looking at the picture. He’s looking up at the door. He’s staring at it as if he’s seen a ghost. “Far,” he says, and I think he means a distance, I think he means away.

But then it rearranges itself in my head, and I know.

Father, I think, and sure enough, there he is. The man himself, just beyond the glass. Just beyond the barrier I made, which is definitely working to keep him away. He paces around it like a wolf. Lips curled over those horrid tombstone teeth. Eyes just holes in his face.

How did you do this, I think faintly.

But there’s no time to consider that now.

I have to kill him before Sten tries to. A melting spell, I think, and go to form it with my hands as Sten quivers like a drawn bow at my side. “Don’t,” I say to him when I get within an inch of something that could kill him, anything that could kill him. The blue glows between my hands. The spell blossoms in a way that makes Hannigan snarl.

“You see the sickness in her,” he says. “And yet still you are by her side. Still I can smell her witch stink on you, you rotten, useless boy. I should have drowned you as a babe before you could ever shame me as you do.”

And when he does I close my eyes.

I go to grab Sten at the same time.

But too late, too late, Sten goes for him, as I knew he would. He smashes straight for the fucking door, so violently I think for just one beautiful, perfect second that he’s succeeded. He’s taken off Hannigan’s head, and all of this is over.

But then there’s a dark flash.

And Hannigan grins at the sudden way Sten winks out. He disappears, somehow, right into the black circle Hannigan has made with his hands. Magic, I think, just as I said. The same magic that he curls his lips over as he speaks. “There, now, nice and safe away from your disgusting spells,” he says.