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"I could tell."

"Shut up."

But he smiles against my skin and I smile, too. I smile up at the ceiling, in the dark, with his hand in mine and his body warm against my side.

After that, we don’t move for a long time.

Later, I lie in the dark and take inventory.

No candles lit themselves. No windows are frosted. No doors are standing open, nothing's floating, nothing's stuttering, nothing's burning white in the street outside. The six wolves in the yard are still six wolves in a yard.

For the first time since a mirror screamed my name, my magic is quiet.

Quiet, the way a room is quiet after you finally turn off a machine you'd been hearing.

Gage is asleep against my back with his arm heavy over my waist. His breathing has gone even. This is what people write songs about, and it took me thirty-two years and monsters with a bad attitude to get here.

I let my eyes close.

And out of habit, the way you check a pocket for your keys, I reach for the front step ward.

I've reached for it a dozen times since the night I shut it. It's always right there, the taut seam laid across the world, the most beautiful thing I've ever touched.

I reach.

There's nothing there.

Not closed. Not open. Not a seam, not a line, not a hum. I reach further, out past the porch and the drive and the road, for the sashes and the property lines and the old dead wards still holding under the frost.

Nothing. Not one line anywhere in the area.

Like feeling for a stair in the dark that the house doesn't have.

I lie very still in the arms of a sleeping wolf, two days out from midnight on Halloween, and understand that I paid for that gravel after all.

37

GAGE

ONE DAY UNTIL HALLOWEEN

Maren's asleep on my hurt shoulder, but I'd let it go bad again before I'd move her.

Ours, my wolf says.

He's said it hundreds of times since April. But, it's the first morning it sounded content.

The light comes up gray behind the frost on the window. Down in the yard two of the six are still out there in the cold, walking the fence line because nobody told them to stop. My leg aches where the seam closed. My shoulder aches worse.

I've never felt better in my life.

She wakes the way she does everything, all at once and complaining.

"Your arm's dead."

"It's fine."

"It's dead. It's been dead for an hour. I could hear it dying." She lifts her head, and her hair is a catastrophe, and I have to look at the ceiling for a second. "Oh no."