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Light comes up through the floor. Not from the black star painted under my boots. From underneath it, under the boards, under the foundation, under the hill this house sits on, and every line I've been blind to since I drew one out of nothing comes back at once.

They don't come back the way they left.

I used to find a ward the way you find a light switch in a strange room. One at a time. Close, careful, hands out.

Now the ballroom is a lattice.

There are lines in the plaster and lines in the chandelier chain and one running the whole length of the room under the parquet that's older than the house. I see all of them without turning my head, the way you see a room instead of a lamp.

I can see something around me, too. Six inches of nothing, curved like the inside of a jar.

It has a seam.

Past it, Gage still has his palm flat against the air where mine was. His mouth shapes my name.

The sound reaches me a second late, like it has further to travel now.

"I'm here," I tell him, and my voice comes out wrong. Too big for my throat.

The dead come next.

No one warns me about that. They don't have to arrive because they are already here. They've been here the whole time.The room just stops pretending.

A woman in a soaked wool coat stands by the punch table with her hair dripping onto the cloth. Two boys in short pants sit on the fourth stair, watching the paper bats. Someone waits in the doorway to the back hall.

Three hundred living people press against the walls. But, there are at least forty who aren't.

Nobody screams. The guests can't see them.

This is only happening to me.

I look for my mother.

I don't decide to. My eyes go around that room twice before I understand what I'm doing, over the dripping woman and the boys on the stair and the patient shape in the doorway, hunting a green cardigan and a way of standing with one hip out.

She isn't here.

Something in me is so disappointed.

Then Sid says my name.

Maren.

It comes in cold and enormous and old. Older than the hill. It doesn't fit inside my skull, so it doesn't try.

I look down. He's sitting on the black star with his tail curled over his feet, the same eight pounds of cat he's been for thirteen days.

"Sid?"

Obsidian. A pause, and under the vast cold thing there's a flicker of the smug little animal who stole my sandwich. I have waited three hundred years to say it like this.

Every mirror in the mansion goes at once.

I can't see them all from here. I don't have to. I feel them the way you feel a house with every window open. The gilt oval over the fireplace clouds, clears, and stops showing me the ballroom.

It shows me the woman in black stepping out.

She comes down over the mantel and onto the floor and walks toward me through Seraphine's ritual candles, and the flames lean away from her hem. Nobody stops her. Nobody moves. The barrier that's held my mate for an hour opens for her like a curtain, because of course it does.