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I don't sleep. I sit on the third stair with my grandmother's quilt around me and my head against the rail.

Standing in that doorway was the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me, and something in there walked toward me, and I still want to know what it looks like.

Around two I say, "Dario's alive."

"You don't know that."

"They didn't kill him. You said the blood stops." I look at the shape of him in the doorway. "Things that are being taken are going somewhere. And, there's a ‘somewhere’ that I just stood in the doorway of just about an hour ago."

He's silent for a while.

"Then that's the first good thing anybody's said in this house all night," he says. "Don't say it in front of Cass yet."

"Why not?"

"Because hope makes people do things they shouldn't."

At quarter to six he comes down in a clean shirt, and I understand that the barn is happening whether or not I have opinions.

"I'm coming with you."

"No."

"Ansel is going to stand in front of forty people and describe me, and I'd like to be there in person while he does it."

"I know." He crouches to get his boots, and even down there he's absurd. "And if you walk into that barn, every wolf in it has to decide in front of the others whether they're scared of you. You'd get a vote you can live with and I'd lose six people to their own pride by Tuesday."

I hate that he’s right. I think it over looking for the trap, and it doesn't have one.

"Fine," I say. "Go get voted on."

"Maren."

"I said fine. Go before I change my mind, which I will, because I'm extremely difficult."

He smiles. It's not much, but I'll take it.

I stay where I am on the stairs for a while.

Then something in the kitchen changes, and I don't know how I know, but I get up and I go and look.

The creature hangs where it's hung since six thirty. Mouth open. Eyes on me.

Its reaching hand has been open all night, fingers spread, inches from Gage's coffee tin.

While I watch, it closes.

30

GAGE

FOUR DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

Fourteen of my own people put their hands up to give her away, and I make myself look at every single one of them.

Marcy is one of them. She has twins who are seven.

I don't hold it against her. That's the part that would surprise Maren. Marcy stood in this barn last spring and put a hand up for me over something else. I'd rather she did it honestly in front of me than quietly for a month.