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"His wolf picked you in April and he sat on it for half a year and let you go on thinking you were a woman with a strange neighbor."

"Don't even go there."

"Your familiar came to you." She tips her head at Sid, who has come out onto the step behind me and gone flat, ears down, silent. "You didn't call him, did you? He simply arrived, and you named him, and you thought that made him yours."

The cold gets into my collar.

"Every single one of them made their choice about you before you knew there was a choice being made." She spreads her small hands. "Not one of them waited to hear what you wanted. Not one, honey. And here I am, out on the road, asking."

"You're asking me to walk into the dark with a woman who stood outside my window."

"I'm asking you to take one step off your own grass." She says it gently. "That's the entire thing. One step, tonight, and nothing else happens. I only want it to be yours."

And here's what I'm going to have to live with.

Nothing is holding my hand. Nothing is turning under my palm the way that latch turned. Nobody is operating me.

My feet just want to go.

I want to walk down my own walk, out of a story where everyone has already decided what I am, and onto a road where someone finally asks.

I lift my heel.

Then the cold changes.

Not colder. Deeper. The kind that stops being weather and starts being a direction.

The fog between us moves, and a woman is standing in the middle of my walk.

Tall. Thin. Black from her throat to the ground. Her face is a place where a face should be, burned out of the middle of the picture.

I know her. I've known her since noon on the first day of this, thirty-seven candles and every mirror in my shop fogging over at once.

But her back is to me.

Every time I've ever seen this woman, she's been facing me. Behind my reflection. At the foot of my bed. Smiling at me off my own porch. Facing me, always, and pointing.

Now I'm behind her.

The old woman in the road stops smiling.

I’ve never seen that face do anything but shine, not through a window at two in the morning, not across a square in broad daylight, and it goes out like someone pulled the cord.

The woman in black raises one hand.

And points.

Not at me.

The old woman backs into the fog without turning around, the way you leave a room with a dog in it.

Then something takes me from behind.

Cold fingers with too many joints in them close around my upper arms, and my boots leave the grass, and the smell hits me all at once. Smoke. Rot. Old blood.

I reach for my magic but there’s nothing there.

I've torn a gate off a fence with less than this. My heels kick at nothing over my own lawn and my magic doesn't come, doesn't stir, doesn't answer, and the fear that opens in me is worse than the thing holding me.