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"Why was Lyra Byrne unable to accept passage across the River of Souls?"

"Because she had nothing left to pay with."

The receipt stopped trembling in my hand.

Charon stepped off the boat and folded that impossible body down until his burning eye was level with mine. I wanted to step backward. My legs had apparently forgotten how to move.

"There is always a price, child. Not gold. Not silver. Not the little coins your humans put on the eyes of their dead because they misunderstood the point. The price is the last thing a soul truly owns."

I barely recognized my own voice. "And what is that?"

"Whatever remains of them." His tone softened, which freaked the hell out of me. "A soul comes to me carrying the whole of a life. I take a piece, and the rest crosses." He leaned closer. "Your mother arrived carrying nothing."

My fingers went numb around the paper.

"Not one hour. Not one afternoon. Not a single memory she could call her own."

For one awful second I was standing in an empty apartment holding a letter written on lined notebook paper, reading a sentence about a Tuesday in a kitchen. I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. It did nothing for the burn behind my eyes.

Charon watched me piece it together but he still supplied the answer. "She had given every last thing she owned to whatever she bargained with before she reached my shore." His head tilted, and the silver coin caught light that didn't exist. "I do not ferry the empty ones."

My mother had been twenty-two.

That thought came from nowhere and hit harder than anything else he'd said. Twenty-two years old and pregnant, standing in that little kitchen with its built-in dresser and its bay window, making an arrangement with something powerful enough to take everything she had ever been.

And she had known the price.

"Who did she trade with?"

"Ah. Now you've asked the right question." I hated the pleasure in his voice. "And now I am going to disappoint you, because I do not know. I am a ferryman, not a witness. I see what arrives at my shore. I do not follow it home."

"You must have seen something. You must…"

"I must nothing."

The second voice came up underneath the first with enough force to shift the sand around my feet. River moved closer, near enough that cold brushed my arm.

Charon unfolded himself to his full height. "I have told you more in nine minutes than I have told any living creature in hundreds of years. I have done so because you finally learned to ask the right questions, and because I am fond of the way your family goes about being ruined." His eye narrowed. "Do not push me, child. Danika should've taught you better."

My grandmother's name drove straight through everything else.

"You know her."

"Everyone knows Danika Byrne." The coin in his eye socket caught the light. "Some of us have simply known her longer than others."

Lesson number thirty-one: when you finally learn to ask the right question, be prepared for the answer to be worse than not knowing.

I turned toward the river.

My mother had reached this shore on the night I was born, stood where I was standing, and been offered a way across. And there had been nothing left of her for him to take. She hadn't crossed. She hadn't gone anywhere peaceful. She had arrived here hollowed out, because she had already spent all of it on me. But that meant she was still somewhere.

My vision blurred. I blinked hard and the river smeared into a black ribbon beneath that bruised sky.

"Hazel."

I tried to answer. Nothing came out.

"Firefly."