Page 6 of Cracked Doll

"Would you like us to read your palm?" Together again.

"I don't — I don't understand," I say.

"We work for The Midnight Menagerie," the nearest one offers, and something in her voice makes the hair along my arms rise. "We are the six who speak as one. We do not simply tell fortunes, Miss Sorrell. We help mend them."

One of them produces a folded paper from the depths of her sleeve and presses it into my hands before I can decide whether I want to take it. I open it slowly.

The poster beneath is a thing of dark, deliberate beauty — a great black gate wrought in iron, moths and ravens worked into the metal, and beneath it, in curling silver script:

THE MIDNIGHT MENAGERIE

Every night is Halloween. Come find out what you've been missing.

"I've heard of it," I say, folding the poster carefully back along its own creases, as though handling something that might bite. "Everyone has. I've never gone."

"We can help with that," they say, in unison, and it lands less like an invitation and more like a verdict.

"Help — how?"

"Necessity," one murmurs, "makes strange bedfellows."

"And ours," says another before the next finishes, "is a sacred duty."

"To set every woman free," they finish together, "from the fate of pain."

Something cold moves through my chest. "What pain?"

"The kind a man inflicts," comes the answer, flat and certain, from somewhere in the middle of the group, and none of them elaborate further, and somehow that's worse than if they had.

"If you ever wish your fate changed," they say, all six together, the words falling perfectly in step, "come to The Midnight Menagerie."

Are they witches?

Am I being invited to be a part of a coven?

Well, if any town could have witches, it would this.

One of them turns without another word and drifts toward the far shelf — the one holding the antique music boxes my father carved decades ago, before his hands forgot how to make anything but a mess — and lifts one down. Dark lacquered wood, a ballerina worked into the lid in faded gilt, small enough to fit in two cupped palms.

She sets it on the counter before me.

I check the little tag tied to its base. "Eight pounds."

She presses the coins into my palm — cold, every one of them, colder than coins left in a drawer have any right to be — and leans close enough that I catch the ghost of something like old roses beneath the black lace.

"He'll come looking for you," she says, quiet, almost gentle. "Don't be afraid of what you see when he does."

And then they're gone, the six of them moving as one toward the door, the bell singing once behind them, and the shop is silent again except for my own too-fast breathing.

I stand there a long moment with the poster still in my hand, staring at nothing. What was that?

The rest of the day crawls past, slow and grey, the kind of afternoon where the clock seems to lose interest in moving forward at all. I've nearly convinced myself the coven was some strange, elaborate joke — Goth Weekend performers, early to the season, looking to unsettle the odd girl at the toy shop for sport — when the bell rings again, and I look up, and the whole temperature of the room changes.

He's tall. Taller than the doorway seems built for, dark hair pushed back from his face, the kind of build that fills out a coat properly rather than hanging off it. He's not dressed for a place like this — no tweed, no wool, none of the practical, faded things Whitby men wear into a shop that sells cracked porcelain and old tin toys. His coat is black, expensive, tailored close, and there's something about the way he moves through the doorway — unhurried, utterly certain — that makes the whole shop feel smaller the moment he's in it.

I don't look at his face. I've trained myself well enough by now that it's almost reflexive — my eyes catch somewhere at his collar, the line of his throat, and slide away before they can travel any higher.

But I feel him. The same cold, deliberate weight I felt on the street yesterday evening, the same prickle at the back of my neck, and my hands go very still on the counter as I tell myself, firmly, it's a customer. It's only a customer.