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Everyone in this room wants Maren for something.

I'd rather lose her than be one more person using her.

She'll die.

"Then she'll die deciding," I say out loud, and my wolf goes quiet, and I don't think he forgives me.

I stop hitting it.

I put my palm flat against the barrier and I get as close to her as the world will let me, and Maren turns around.

Her eye makeup is ruined. There's a woman on either side of her telling her who she is.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey."

"They're both going to tell you there are two doors."

"I noticed."

"There aren't."

She laughs. It's a wreck of a sound and it's the best thing I've heard all night.

"I'm not going to tell you what to do," I say. "I've had plenty of time to do that and I didn't, and it wasn't because I'm good. It's because I know the bad things that can happen."

"Gage."

"You don't owe anybody in this building an answer. Including me." My hand is going numb against it. I leave it there. "Whatever you pick, I'm standing on this side of it when you're done. That's all of it."

Maren puts her hand up against the other side of the barrier.

Our fingers don't touch. They're never going to touch.

"Okay," she says.

Then, somewhere back in the house, a clock starts to strike.

Every clock. All of them at once, in every room, three floors of frozen hands coming off eleven fifty-nine together, and the sound of it goes through the walls like weather.

And under the black star, under her boots, the knocking stops.

It stops because it doesn't have to knock anymore.

46

MAREN

MIDNIGHT ON HALLOWEEN

The clocks start striking, and I feel something come right out of me.

I don't have a word for what it's been covering. I only know it's gone, and that it's been there my whole life, and I didn’t know.

The second strike lands.

I don't hear the third.