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"No."
He starts down the steps.
"No. We don't investigate. You are not that kind of cat."
He keeps going.
I swear at him and follow, because apparently that's who I am now. A woman chasing a black cat toward a haunted shop ten days before Halloween.
I could call Gage. I know I should. He's twelve feet away, and he'd come before I finished the sentence.
That's exactly why I don't.
Not because I think he won't help. Because I know he will. Instantly. No hesitation. And right now, still raw from him telling me he was assigned to me like a job posting, I don't want to need him.
Wanting comfort from the person who just gutted you. That's a bad sign in anybody's book.
The shop's dark when I let us in. I flip the lights.
Nothing explodes. Small mercies.
Bell & Bone smells the way it always does. Clove and dust and normal. Spooky-normal. My kind of normal.
In the corner, the antique mirror sits under its blanket, a shrouded shape the size of a body. I covered it yesterday. I haven't looked at it since. I'd be happy to never look at it again.
"You wanted in here," I tell Sid. "So do something useful."
He hops onto a display table and stares at me.
"That's the opposite of useful."
I need normal so badly my teeth ache. Inventory. Receipts. Objects that stay where I put them and keep their mouths shut. I drag a box of estate jewelry onto the counter and start unwrapping, and for about ninety seconds it works.
Then I lift out the mourning necklace.
Black glass beads. A tarnished silver clasp. A dark oval pendant with a photograph behind the glass, faded soft and brown at the edges.
A young woman. Dark hair pinned up. Serious eyes that seem to look straight through the lens and land on me.
The hair lifts on my arms.
"Nope," I say, and set it down.
Sid growls, low.
Too late.
The chain moves.
It slides across the counter on its own, unspooling like something waking up, and I stumble back into the shelf behind me. A ceramic ghost wobbles and falls.
"What the hell?"
The necklace launches.
I scream. Cold metal snaps around my throat and pulls tight, and my hands fly up to claw it off, and the shop tips sideways and drops out from under me.
Fire.
