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Not power. Not one drop of it. A hundred and forty years of knowledge, handed over, the way someone leaves you their notes.

"Someone in our bloodline should have it," Mercy says.

"Stay."

"No." She steps back into the seam and the nothing takes the hem of her dress. "You have our name on your door. Keep it up there. I like it there."

She goes.

Seraphine screams something in a language that hurts my teeth and throws herself at the crack.

She gets a hand in it.

I don't do anything to her. I want that on the record for the rest of my life. I never touch her. I close a door, the way I closed the last ward on Gage's front step, with my whole body and both lungs, and I don't check first to see who's standing in it.

The seam takes her arm to the shoulder and then it takes the rest, and the sound she makes stops before it finishes.

And the whole world tries to come with it.

Mercy told me it would. It goes down further than the hill and it comes up my legs like water in a sinking car, and my knees stop being mine, and then my chest, and I go blind and deaf in the same half second, and there's nothing anywhere except the pull of something enormous going shut and taking me along.

I feel the line go tight.

Then I feel something on the other end of it set its feet.

He plants. I've watched him take a thing twice his weight off its legs in my own garden and it was nothing next to this. The rope comes up hard under my ribs and the dark loses, and the two of them haul me back through a door I am still in the act of shutting.

I come up out of it like breaking water.

The last half inch closes under my boots, and the black star is just paint on the floor.

The chandelier is swinging. The candles are four hundred dead wicks in cold wax and there isn't one dead person left in that ballroom and no cold coming out of anything, and the house is so quiet I can hear the piano wires still humming where Seraphine went into them.

Gage catches me before I hit the boards.

"I've got you," he says. "I've got you. Maren."

I get one hand up into his shirt and hold on. Somewhere behind us Cass says, "Holy fuck."

Through the line, wide open now, I can feel every single thing in him. The terror. The stupid, blinding relief. A hundred and eighty-four days of cordwood, and the wolf lying on top of it with his chin on his paws, watching me like I'm the last thing he intends to look at.

And one more thing under all of it, plain as a porch light, that Gage has never once said out loud.

He has no idea I can hear it.

"Maren." Evelyn's voice, from the middle of the ruined floor. She isn't looking at me. She's looking through the open front doors, down the drive, where three hundred people are standing on the frozen lawn in their masks, not one of them leaving. "Get up, please. You have about four minutes before this town decides what the two of you are."

50

GAGE

NOVEMBER FIRST - FINALLY

Three hundred people are standing on a frozen lawn in masks, and not one of them is walking to a car.

Evelyn gave us four minutes. It's been about ninety seconds and I can feel it going the wrong way out there, the way a room goes before a fight. Someone's crying near the fountain. Two men by the hedge have their phones up and pointed at the doors.

They didn't only see her.