Page 102

But it isn't moving.

Every flame in that pit stands straight up and holds, frozen mid-flicker, gold and silent and completely still. No crackle. No pop. The smoke hangs above it in one solid ribbon, stopped, not drifting.

The whole yard has gone quiet. No wind. No leaves. Sid is on his feet on the woodpile with every hair up.

I let go of Gage's shirt.

The fire comes back all at once with a thump, sparks blowing sideways, leaves scraping, the ghost down the block groaning again, and the night starts over.

"Did I do that?"

He sets me down on my feet. His hands are shaking, which I've never seen.

"Yeah," he says.

We don't talk about it and just go inside. He does the locks. All of them, twice, the way he does, and I stand in his dark kitchen under the dead bulb nobody's replaced and hold my own elbows.

"How many are left?" I ask.

"One more ward. The front step."

"Show me."

He takes me to the front door and opens it onto the cold. The porch light is out. Everything past the bottom step is fog with a streetlight somewhere in it.

"There," he says. "About a foot past the boards. Evelyn set it. You can't see it."

But I can feel it.

Standing there in my socks, I can feel it the way you feel a held breath in a room, a thin taut seam laid across the world, wanting something from someone.

It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever touched, and it's been sitting right in front of me my whole life and nobody told me.

I reach for it. Not with my hands.

Just to see if I can.

The seam gives, gentle and instant and glad, like a latch turning under a thumb.

Somewhere behind me Gage says my name in a voice I've never heard him use.

Out past the bottom step, deep in the fog where the streetlight can't reach, something takes one step forward onto the grass.

21

GAGE

STILL SEVEN DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

Something walks out of the fog and stops at the bottom of my steps.

I have Maren behind me before I finish turning. My arm goes flat across her stomach. Her fist closes in the back of my shirt.

Threat.

I know.

It stands eight feet off the porch. Man-shaped, if you built a man out of a wet coat and bad intentions. Arms too long. Yellow eyes set low in a face that hasn't decided where to put a mouth.