Page 6

He's sitting beside the register, washing his face.

My skin prickles. "How are you doing that?"

The cat yawns.

I spend the next hour pretending everything is normal. I help two tourists choose vintage witch hats. I sell a stack of old horror posters to a man who explains for twelve uninterrupted minutes that modern horror lacks nuance. I drink my coffee cold.

I don't touch the mirror.

The cat follows me everywhere. At eleven fifteen I find him asleep in a cauldron. At eleven forty he steals half my turkey sandwich. At noon I threaten to name him Fluffy.

He bites my shoelace.

"Fine. Something dramatic then." His ears twitch. "Lucifer?" Nothing. "Bram?" One eye opens. "Poe?" Both eyes close. "Obsidian?"

His head lifts.

I grin. "Oh, you like that one?"

He stares at me, smug as sin.

"Too serious. How about Sid?"

His ears flatten, and I laugh for the first time all day.

"Sid it is."

The lights go out.

All of them, between one heartbeat and the next. Outside, the noon sun is shining. Inside Bell & Bone, darkness swallows the room whole, and the temperature drops so fast my breath fogs.

Then one candle lights itself.

Then, another.

And, another.

I back up toward the counter. "Okay..."

Flame after flame, all thirty-seven candles waking in the dark, and I never touched a match.

Sid leaps down from the cauldron. His gold eyes lock on the antique mirror.

The glass clouds.

My reflection thins, fades, disappears. White mist crawls across the surface from the edges inward, and letters begin to form in it. Slow. Deliberate. Like a fingertip dragging through fog on the wrong side of the glass.

I don't move. I can't.

Sid presses against my ankle, solid and warm and growling.

The final letter finishes.

THIRTEEN DAYS.

Then every mirror in Bell & Bone fogs at once. The vanity in the corner. The gilt oval by the dresses. The little compacts in the jewelry case. All of them are cloudy. All of them are writing.

THIRTEEN DAYS.