Page 205

That's the thing I'll always remember. Three hundred living people going out of that house like water out of a tipped glass, and the woman in the soaked coat stays by the punch table, and the boys on the fourth stair pull their feet in so the running feet can pass, polite about it, the way you'd move for someone on a bus.

The open doors aren't for them. Nothing in this house has ever been for them.

Gage doesn't run. Nine steps, and every one of them lands, and his eyes have gone animal-bright and his hands are shaking, and he stops in front of me and doesn’t touch me.

"Can I?" he says.

Two words. The same two he used with the chain-burn on my throat.

"Of course."

He puts his forehead against mine, and his hands come up on either side of my face and don't quite close, and for about four seconds there's nothing in the room except us as we hug each other.

Then Seraphine starts laughing again.

She's kneeling on the black star.

She's opened her own left hand from the base of the thumb to the wrist, and she's letting it run into the seam.

"You thought the circle was the spell." Her blood goes down into the crack and doesn't come back up. "The circle was the fence. This is the magic, and it doesn’t require your permission, only your presence."

The seam widens. Not by much. The width of a finger now, from the fireplace to the far wall, and the floorboards on either side of it have started to bow up like something's breathing under them.

"It opens through a Threshold either way," Seraphine says, pleasantly, to me. "Willing, you're the hand on the latch. Unwilling, you're the hinge."

"And hinges tear," Mercy says.

I hear it. I hear it perfectly.

So does Lila.

She's been standing at the edge of the wax with her mask in her fist since I told her no, and I watch the realization come over her face. Every promise she was given. A place beside them rather than beneath them. Three years of Tuesday nights sold for a version of tonight where I walk out of here.

"You said she'd live." Her voice cracks on it. "Seraphine. You said she'd live."

"She'll be immortal in a way," Seraphine says, without looking up. "Doors don't die."

Lila hits her.

Not magic. Not a spell. My best friend of three years drops her shoulder and hits a woman who could unmake her, and knocks her off the star and into the ruin of the piano, and Seraphine's bleeding hand comes out of the seam.

The floor stops bowing.

Lila lands on her knees in the wax. She doesn't get up. She looks at me across ten feet of the ballroom with her hair in her face and blood coming from somewhere above her ear, and she doesn't ask me for anything, which is the first honest thing she's done since June.

"Go," she says. "Close it."

Seraphine gets up out of the piano.

Gage steps in front of me and I put my hand flat on his back and move him aside, because he was never going to be able to be in front of me for this part, and he knows it. He lets me.

I look down at the finger's width of nothing running the length of my hometown's fanciest floor.

"Tell me how to shut it," I say to Mercy.

"You already know how. You shut a ward with your whole body six days ago and it nearly took you off your feet." She looks at the seam, and for the first time all night she looks afraid. "This one goes down further than the hill. If you close it standing on it, it closes on you too, and you go with it."

"So I don't stand on it."