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"Yep."

"I'd like it on the record that the fridge started it."

Gage crouches and starts picking glass up, and he's doing the thing with his jaw where he's trying not to smile and failing at it, and I'd give my whole shop to know what he's thinking.

Sid strolls in, surveys the wreckage, and sits down.

Household staff making a mess.

"You could help."

He begins washing a paw.

My phone buzzes on the table.

Then again. Then four more times in a row, the way it only does when one specific person has decided a conversation is happening whether I'm present or not.

LILA: hey

LILA: hey where are you

LILA: I'm at your house

LILA: Maren your front door

LILA: What happened to your door???

LILA: why is it warm

I'm already moving to the kitchen window.

She's on my porch. Same red coat she's had since we met, hair up, phone in her free hand, standing in front of the sigil burned hinge to lock across my front door.

Her other hand is flat against it.

Palm to the wood, fingers spread wide, right in the middle of the char, where nobody should be able to hold on for more than a second.

She isn't pulling away.

Behind me, Sid has gone completely still on the floor.

She isn't...

He stops. His whole body locks, ears flat, and whatever the rest of that sentence was, it doesn't come.

19

GAGE

SEVEN DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

Maren's best friend has her hand flat on a Veiled Hand sigil, and she isn't burning.

I know what that door does. I put my palm on it yesterday to see how deep the mark ran and pulled back with a stripe across four fingers that hasn't finished healing. The wood holds heat like a stove lid. Frost won't sit on the porch boards within a foot of it.

Lila Dane has been touching it for eleven seconds.

Threat.