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“Hey, Cookie,” I answer. “Do you know where my Regent is? I’m supposed to meet him here.”

“Oh.” She hesitates, her smile wavering. “Are we still going to the Holiday Carnival?”

I wince. Right, that was today. Because Charlotte’s usually too young to attend things by herself, she always has to ask one of us older Harbingers to help her out. No wonder she’s here at the pub. She’s been waiting for me to show up.

“Sorry,” I say, shaking my head. “Change of plans. Raven’s orders and all that. I have to report to my Regent. Maybe Katie’s free and can go with you.”

She looks crestfallen for a moment, and I feel a familiar flash of guilt. “I’ll make it up to you next time, I promise,” I add. “Okay?”

She shrugs and smiles. “Okay.”

“Thanks, Cookie.”

“I’ll put it on your tab,” she says, and I nudge her shoulder affectionately.

“Terran won’t be here anytime soon, by the way,” she replies, pressing a hand flat against the counter as she answers. She concentrates for a moment. “He’s not anywhere close to here. Maybe he’s running late.”

This is a fragment of Willow’s power that Charlotte has—that of Earth, to sense the location of all life nourished by the physical world. She has a particular knack, therefore, to know where people are at any given moment.

“Thanks, Cookie,” I say with a sigh, looking around.

“Hello to you, too,” Étienne says, and nods at me when I finally acknowledge him. He glances at the bartender. “Drink?”

Charlotte scowls at him. “No one ever buys me a drink.”

“You’re thirteen,” he replies sternly. “Drink your soda.”

“It’s not even cold,” she mutters, twirling her pencil in her hand. As I look on, leaves sprout from the end of the eraser, and the pencil’s texture changes to that of a twig.

This is another of Charlotte’s talents—to coax life and growth from wood and soil. Before she became a Harbinger, Charlotte was an only child who lived with her parents on a farm in the North Carolina countryside, where she had a habit of climbing trees. Willow had claimed her on her twelfth birthday, when she’d slipped and fell several hundred feet off a cliffside. Now she lives at Willow’s estate.

I nod at the bartender. “Just water for me, thanks.”

Charlotte beams at me from behind her glasses. “I’ll see you at my birthday next week, right?”

“I wouldn’t miss that for the world,” I reply. “What’d you decide to do?”

She grins. “A nightclub.”

I lift both eyebrows and glance at Étienne, who gives me a helpless shrug. “You talk her out of it,” he says.

“No, you’re not,” I say automatically.

“Oh, come on! The Koko Theatre is ages fourteen and up, and I’m finally old enough. I’ll be fine!”

“Old enough with adult supervision,” I clarify.

“You’re all adults supervising me!”

I roll my eyes and let out a long sigh.

One of the consequences of becoming a Harbinger: You must sever all ties with those who knew you in the mortal world. All the multiple copies of a memory, stored from the hippocampus to the neocortex, deleted. Synapses, permanently changed. You get to live, but no one from your life will remember you. It is a different kind of death.

Charlotte’s parents had loved her dearly, had been her light and world and best friends. In her case, she had chosen to become a Harbinger because she couldn’t bear the thought of her parents’ grief at her death. So instead, she’d decided to spare them any memory at all that they ever had a little girl named Charlotte.

She had loved her parents so much that she’d sacrificed herself. Orphaned, in a way.

So the rest of us have stepped in as best as we can, even though we’re always a little gentler with her than we probably should be.