Page 108

Gage puts his hands in his pockets. That's what he does instead of fidgeting.

"You closed it," he says. "It’s only right that you get to know what's inside it."

I don't have anything to say to that, so I bump my shoulder into his arm, and I feel him stop breathing for about a second and a half.

Terrifying, this man. Menace to the entire community. Yeah, right.

I'm opening the shop.

We have a fight about it on the porch. It lasts four minutes and I win, because it's the Friday before Halloween week, my sidewalk sale is the single biggest day Bell & Bone has all year, and I refuse to let the Veiled Hand take my rent money on top of everything else.

Also because I need one normal thing to stay the same. I don't say that part out loud. He understands it anyway.

"Then we're not going alone," he says, and takes out his phone.

The truck that pulls in fifteen minutes later isn't his.

The woman who gets out of it is maybe five-four in boots, with a dark braid and the general energy of a lit fuse.

"Ma'am," she says to me.

Gage closes his eyes.

"This is Cass," he says.

"I know. You told her not to call me ma'am."

"He did." Cass hands me a coffee. Cream, no sugar. "He tells me a lot of things."

I like her immediately and I can tell it worries him.

The town has gone completely feral.

The square is strung end to end with orange lights, and every shop on the block has hay bales out front and a corn stalk zip-tied to the lamppost, which is against about four ordinances that nobody has enforced since 1994.

someone's playing organ music out of a Bluetooth speaker shaped like a pumpkin. The bakery has a sandwich board reading GHOULASH, which they think is funnier every year.

Bell & Bone is the reason people come down this end.

I unlock the door and thirty-seven candles light themselves before I get my hand off the key.

I stand there. Cass makes a small sound behind me.

"Morning," I tell them.

Two weeks ago that would have put me on the floor. Now I'm mostly annoyed about the wax.

Gage comes in behind me, and I catch him doing the thing where he checks all four corners of a room before he'll stand still in it.

"Was that you?" he asks.

"I think so."

"Are you calm?"

"Completely."

He nods, once, like that's the answer he expected and hated.