October 2: The Book

Eli slept for eleven hours and dreamed of nothing, which he decided afterward was the last mercy he would be granted for a while.

When he came downstairs the kitchen was empty. A note had been stuck to the refrigerator with a lobster-shaped magnet: Errands. Back by noon. Don't touch the knives. A few of them have been altered with magic, and I can't which. The handwriting was round and quick, with a tiny star over each i. He read it twice, felt faintly ridiculous for reading it twice, resolved to leave every knife in the house exactly where it was, and spent the next ten minutes learning how his father's ancient percolator worked. By the time he turned around with a mug in his hand, Mordecai was sitting at the foot of the stairs with his tail wrapped around his paws, watching him with an expression of terrible patience.

"You slept," the cat said. "Good. You will not get many nights like that. Bring the coffee. The study."

The study was the one room in the house Eli had never been allowed to enter.

He had accepted that as a child the way children accept such things, without question. A door at the end of the upstairs hall, always shut, with a smell leaking from beneath it of paper and old smoke. When he was nine he had stood outside it one afternoon with his hand raised to knock, and his father had appeared at the foot of the stairs and said, very gently, "Not that one, kid." That had been the end of it. Eli had not touched the handle since.

Mordecai nudged the door open with his head. "The lock was for outsiders," the cat said. "You are his son and his heir. The room is yours now, with everything in it, and the door knows it."

The room was smaller than Eli had imagined. Shelves climbed every wall, crowded with books whose spines had no titles, with jars of dried herbs and blackened roots, with a pair of eyeballs drifting in clouded liquid, with a row of small skulls (a bird, a fox, something that was almost human), and with stacks of black-and-white composition notebooks bound in rubber bands. A desk sat beneath the window with a green-shaded lamp and a row of steel pens. Past the glass the harbor lay flat and gray under the morning. Chalk lines had been scrubbed into the floorboards so many times that they had left a pale ghost of a circle, worn into the wood like a path across a field. Pentagrams in chalk and silver paint overlapped on the ceiling. Candle stubs of a dozen heights had melted themselves into every flat surface. A wooden mannequin torso wore a necklace of iron nails, a stuffed raven watched from a shelf with glass eyes, and bundles of sage and wormwood and other things he did not recognize hung from the beams.

Mordecai leapt onto the desk and looked at the bottom drawer. It slid open with a long, dry scrape, no hand touching it.

"I will not apologize for that one," Mordecai said, "and I will not stop doing it."

Inside lay a book wrapped in black cloth. Eli lifted it out with both hands. It was heavier than it looked, bound in dark leather gone soft as skin, with brass at the corners and a clasp that had been mended more than once. On the spine, in his father's careful block capitals, someone had lettered DE VERMIS MYSTERIIS, and beneath it, smaller, Thomas Calloway

The clasp opened before his thumb reached it.

The cover fell back by itself, and the pages ruffled, as if a breath had gone through them, and settled on the inside of the front board. Eli went still. There was an inscription there, in his father's cramped, upright hand, in the blue-black ink that had stained his fingers for as long as Eli could . He had always assumed it came from paperwork.

Property of Thomas Calloway. To to my son and heir, Elias, in the event of my death, and only if I have not found a way to keep him out of this.

Under it, in a different pen, newer, the letters pressed harder into the page:

I hope I have.

Eli read it twice. It was not a long sentence. It took him a very long time. He touched the ink with two fingers, very gently, as if the letters might smudge. He ed his father crouched at the bottom of the stairs when Eli was five, arms open, laughing as he ran at him. He ed those huge, warm hands closing over his on the handlebars. He had followed this man from room to room as a boy, and had wanted to be exactly like him. He had loved him without reservation, once. He wished, with a force that frightened him, that he had been given more time.

"He wrote that years ago, as insurance," Mordecai said quietly. "He never wanted this for you, and he never truly expected it. He thought you were safe with your mother, far from this city, and he meant to keep you there. But grimoires follow blood." He paused. "They belong to the heir, whether the heir wants them or not, and the book decides whether to stay. It has been yours since the funeral. I think you can tell it has made up its mind."

The paper under Eli's palm felt faintly warm, like a hand left lying on a table. He closed his fingers on the edge of the page and found that he had stopped breathing.

"What is it?" he managed. "Exactly."

"Mostly a translation. The original is in Latin, with parts in something older that your father had to work out from context, and it took him eleven years. The author was a man named Ludvig Prinn." Mordecai settled on the corner of the desk. "Alchemist, necromancer, reputed witch. He boasted of reaching a miraculous age, and of knowing what lies on the far side of the grave."

"Boasted to who?"

"To anyone who would listen, which turned out to be the wrong audience. They burned him at the stake in Brussels during the worst of the trials, somewhere around the end of the fifteenth century or the start of the sixteenth. The records are untidy." The cat's eyes glittered. "He is said to have laughed the entire way through it. And whether he stayed dead is a matter of some debate."

Eli looked at the book, then at the cat. "Debate between who?"

"Between people who have read the book and people who would rather not."

"Mysteries of the Worm," Eli read from the spine, slowly. "Why the worm?"

"You will reach that part. Not this week." Mordecai flicked his tail at the back of the volume, and Eli saw that the last thirty or so pages had been bound shut with a length of red cord, knotted three times and sealed with a thumbprint of wax. "Your father stopped there. So will you, until I say."

"I've heard of one book like this," Eli said. "From games, mostly. The Necronomicon."

"This is not that, which is a mercy." Mordecai's ears flicked back. "Abdul Alhazred's volume tends to make its readers insane, and no one has ever found a polite way to read it. Prinn is, comparatively speaking, safe for a new witch to begin on." He let that sit for a moment. "Safe is a relative word. Read it wrong, or work it wrong, and it will still kill you."

Eli turned pages carefully. The margins were thick with his father's additions, in a dozen different pens. Prinn's circle fails at the third gate. Revised, see p. 212. A date. A drawing of a hand with the fingers splayed and lines running between the knuckles. Further on: Result: failed. Nearly lost left hand. Do not repeat without iron. And on a page whose corner had been folded down so many times it had gone soft: Improved. Holds.

"He was thorough," Eli said, and his voice was not entirely steady.

"He was obsessive. It is not always a different thing." Mordecai said it without cruelty. "Your father was the heir to the Calloway coven, Eli, a very old and very powerful clan of witches. It was in his blood, as it is in yours. Like every true witch, he wanted answers to the great mysteries. He was born into this life and shaped by it, and he could never have escaped it, whatever he told himself." His tail flicked toward the crowded margins. "That is why every note in that book matters. If one sits beside a procedure, then someone has tried it, and usually the someone was him. He tested everything on himself before he trusted it to anyone else."

So this was where his father had gone. The long silences on the phone. The excuses. The room Eli had never been allowed to enter. He ran his thumb along one line of the careful handwriting and felt something tighten behind his ribs, and he held the book for a moment longer, as if it might have more to say.

"So what do witches actually do?" he asked at last. His throat felt rough. "If it comes down to it. In a fight."

"Fewer fights than you think." Mordecai seemed almost pleased by the question. "A duel is rare, and a rare duel is usually a mistake. The strongest witch in a room is generally the one who prepared the room. A trap beats a duel nine times in ten. A ward beats a trap, and a ward is the thing your father was best at." His whiskers twitched. "Which is why we start with the house."

They began at the front door.

Mordecai made Eli look at it properly, which Eli had never done. Up close, the frame was covered in marks. Small symbols had been cut into the wood of the doorposts and filled with something dark. Some of them looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs, and cats were everywhere among them, sitting, stalking, curled in sleep, and one with a woman's body and a cat's head. Eli ed what Mordecai had told him. His father's patron had been Bast, the ancient Egyptian goddess of cats and hearths, and his father's familiar now sat at his feet in the shape of a black cat. He could not decide whether it was a coincidence or a signature. Above the lintel a row of iron nails had been driven in at an angle, like teeth. A horseshoe hung over the top of the door with its ends pointing up.

"A ward is a barrier," Mordecai said. "Not of brick, of intention. Some last an hour. Some last for years. They block harmful intent, and unwanted things, from entering a place, an object, or a person. What you are looking at is a threshold ward. It sits on every way in. Doors, windows, the cellar hatch."

Eli crouched. Then he noticed the windowsill beside the door. A thin line of white ran along it from corner to corner, and in the middle of that line, a patch of the paint had blistered and blackened in the shape of a spread hand, long-fingered and not quite human. The salt around it had fused to glass.

"Mordecai."

"I saw it this morning." The cat's voice was flat. "Something came to the window last night. It did not get through. Look at the nail above it."

One of the iron nails over the lintel had turned black from the head to the point, as if it had been held in a fire.

"The contest began at midnight," Mordecai said. "I expected scouts. Someone is already testing houses, Eli. Looking for the ones with someone new inside."

Eli straightened slowly. A chill went down the back of his neck. "Who?"

"I do not know. Whoever it was, the ward held, which is the point of wards." He nodded toward the porch. "Iron repels spirits. It has done since before anyone could write about it. Salt absorbs what iron turns away. The herbs above the windows are rosemary, rue, hyssop, and one root I will not name, and they are there for the things that are neither spirit nor flesh. And under that porch, six inches down, is a witch bottle."

"A what?"

"A glass jar filled with pins, broken glass, herbs, and a piece of your father. A clipping, a thread. A little blood." Mordecai's mouth did not quite smile. "It sits there like a hungry animal, waiting for something to walk into it."

Eli stepped away from the boards.

They walked the whole property, slowly, in the thin gray cold. Mordecai took him along the fence line, where iron spikes had been driven into the earth every few yards, out of sight under the grass. "A perimeter ward. A fence for things that do not use gates. If anything crosses it, your father felt it in his sleep." He showed him the cellar hatch, rigged with a double line of salt and a nail through the lock. He showed him, last, a thing Eli had not expected to feel.

"There are wards on people, too. Personal wards. They protect a body, or a name. Your father wore one for twenty years."

Eli stopped. "The cord." It came back to him all at once: a frayed black thread knotted around his father's left wrist, always there, through every birthday and holiday and awkward phone call. He had asked about it once, when he was seven. His father had said, It keeps me company. "He was still wearing it at the viewing."

"He was." Mordecai said it like something heavy being set down. "A personal ward turns aside spirits and curses, the harm a witch sends. It does not stop a truck on the coast road, and it does not stop a man from walking out of a warded house if he believes he has a reason to go."

"A reason."

"I do not know what it was. He told me to stay behind, and he never said why." The cat's eyes were very bright and very cold. "This is part of why I am certain, Eli. The ward on this house is flawless. The only way to reach your father was to bring him out of it. Someone gave him a reason to leave, and it was a good one, because he went without me."

Eli stood in the dead grass for a long time with his hands pushed into his pockets, and the wind off the harbor cut through his sweater, and he did not say anything at all.

The salt came next, and Mordecai took him to the kitchen for it.

On the shelf above the stove, between a bottle of olive oil and a jar of bay leaves, stood four glass jars in a row, each labeled in his father's block capitals. SEA. BLACK. PINK. TABLE. Eli took them down one at a time. The black salt was coarse and dull, like crushed charcoal. The pink looked like something from a health food store.

"The pink is gentle," Mordecai said, "for balance, for soft boundaries, the kind you draw around yourself when you are not under attack. Sea salt is for water, cleansing, letting go of a feeling that has hardened. The table salt is for ordinary work. A small purification. A line across a doorway in a pinch." His gaze moved to the jar in Eli's left hand. "That one is what you will use."

"The black."

"Witches' salt. Salt, charcoal, ash, and herbs, and not for eating. It banishes spirits and cuts a hex loose from the person it was laid on. When something is truly wrong, you reach for it. Keep a jar within arm's length of wherever you work. Your father learned that the hard way."

"What happened?"

"His eyebrows," Mordecai said. "Both of them."

Eli almost laughed. It startled him how close it came.

Mordecai had him pour a line of table salt across the linoleum, from the stove to the table leg. He did it slowly, with a shaking hand, and made it unbroken. The cat walked up to it, stopped with his nose a finger's width from the white, and sat down. His tail flicked once. He did not cross.

"A line of salt contains power and keeps out interference," Mordecai said. "I would find it very unpleasant to cross that. I am not in the mood to discuss why. A thinner line across a bedframe keeps out nightmares, and whatever sends them. A spoonful dissolved in a bath scrubs the weight off a person after a very bad day." He glanced up. "You may need that tonight. Tools can be buried in it overnight to reset them."

"That sounds like something off a new age website," Eli said. He had not meant to say it aloud. "Crystals and moon water and cleansing your aura. My mom's coworker has a whole shelf of that stuff."

Mordecai let out a low, rusty sound that might have been a laugh. "Most of it is a scam. People selling forty-dollar jars of salt to the lonely and the hopeful. But a scam has to be built on something, and the something is usually real. The kernels of true witchcraft were ed down for generations, distilled, watered down, and copied by people with no talent, who learned the gestures and sold the shape of them. They have the words and none of the power." His gaze sharpened. "True witches do not need a scented candle and a crystal from a gift shop. A salt line works because of who draws it, not because of the salt. The salt is a focus, and a courtesy to whatever is listening. The rest is blood, and will, and whatever in you answers when you ask."

"Now sweep it up," he added, "before Vex sees it and has opinions."

The sigil came after. Mordecai had him sit at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and one of his father's steel pens. "A sigil is a wish in a form your own mind cannot argue with. You begin with a sentence. Plain. In the present tense. Not I will be safe. I am safe."

"That's it?"

"That is the beginning." He watched Eli write I AM PROTECTED in block letters. "Now remove the vowels."

Eli crossed them out. M, P, R, T, C, T, D. "Then any letter that repeats." He struck the second T. Six letters. "Now combine them. Overlap them, rotate them, stretch them, until they make one shape that cannot be read as a word."

It took him the better part of ten minutes. What he produced looked like a crooked tree growing out of a broken wheel. Mordecai studied it and said nothing, which Eli decided to take as approval.

"Now you charge it. You hold it, and you give it your whole attention. Chanting, meditation, whatever works for you. Then you let it go. That part matters most. A sigil you cling to is only a drawing. You burn it, or dissolve it, or you put it somewhere quiet. In the grimoire, on a mirror, scratched into a candle." Mordecai paused. "Most witches use them for protection, or for clarity when a mind is tangled. A few use them for money, or for love, and those are the ones I would watch. Your father only ever wrote the first kind."

Eli held the page in both hands and thought about the word on it, protected, about the iron above the door and the black nail and the shape of a hand in the paint. For a moment he felt a faint pressure in the center of his left palm, as if someone had pressed a thumb into it from the inside. Then it was gone. He slid the page between two leaves of the grimoire and closed the cover.

"That is a start," Mordecai said, and it was the first thing that morning that sounded like praise.

Eli flexed the cramp out of his writing hand. Outside the kitchen window the fog had thinned enough to show the cranes on the far side of the harbor, and the cat had not moved from the chair across the table.

"Now," Mordecai said, "let us talk about familiars. You, at least, have the advantage of already knowing one."

Eli looked up from the table. "You said witch hunters thought you were imps."

"They thought we were demons. Low-ranking ones, sent by the Devil to help witches do harm. They believed we took the shape of cats, dogs, toads, mice, hares, even insects. They examined accused women for extra teats and growths, because they believed that was where a witch fed her familiar with her own blood."

"Did they find them?"

"They found what they were looking for on nearly every old woman in Europe. Moles. Scars. A boil. That is how you hang a person, or burn one at the stake." The cat's voice had gone very quiet. "I will tell you something about the witch trials, Eli, because no one will tell it to you honestly. Almost none of the people they killed were witches. They were widows. They were midwives, and women who lived alone, and men no one liked. They were the odd, the outsiders, the sick, the poor, the very old. They were people whose land a neighbor wanted. A cow dies, a child falls ill, a man covets a field, and a name is whispered. That is all it took."

Eli felt his stomach twist. "And the real ones?"

"A real witch is not so easy to burn." Mordecai's eyes glinted. "Prinn laughed, . Real witches are too clever and too powerful to be taken by regular humans. The ones who knew what they were doing slipped out of their cells in the night, or were never taken at all. And here is the part no one teaches. Many of the zealous men who led the hunts, the priests and magistrates who lit the fires, were witches themselves."

Eli stared at him. "What?"

"Few people know that witch is a gender-neutral term. Many of the men who burned women for witchcraft were witches too. In private they offered blood to their own patrons, and in public they burned innocents, so that no one would look at them. Some of the burnings were sacrifices in their own right, the lives of innocent women offered up to dark patrons under the cover of the law." The cat's voice went flat. "The ones who burned screamed because they were innocent, and the guilty ones were already in another country with another name. Those who made it out of those centuries learned one thing very well. Do not be found. Do not be ordinary. Never trust a neighbor."

"Blood sacrifices," Eli said slowly. "Those are real?"

"They are, Eli." Mordecai did not look away. "Though only the darker patrons demand them from the witches under their protection. Different patrons ask for different offerings. Some are pleased with milk and honey, or a lit candle, or a song sung at the right hour. Others can only be sated with blood. Bast never asked your father for blood. Had his patron been something like Set, he would have been asked often. Most witches who bleed for their patrons stay with animals. Chickens, goats, sometimes a great white bull, in the old way. Only the darkest witches turn to human sacrifice, and it is considered the strongest and the most accursed form of the practice, and it leaves a mark on those who do it." He paused. "There is something that may surprise you. Bast, and the powers of Ulthar who stand behind her, would count the killing of a cat as a far worse crime than the killing of a man. A witch who did it would meet certain and violent retribution, unless some other patron stood over them and was willing to fight for them. Don't mistake any of this for comfort. Most of the champions in this contest will have bled something for their patrons, and some of them will not have stopped at animals."

Mordecai seemed to read his face. "Do not worry about your father," the cat said. "He was not a murderer. He was not secretly sacrificing people for power. That was never him."

"I know," Eli said, and found that he did. There was a great deal he did not know about his father, a whole second life he had never been shown. But he knew this much. His father had never been the kind of man who would kill innocents for power.

Eli looked at the cat on the chair across from him for a long moment. "You talk about the burnings like someone who watched them," he said slowly. "They were centuries ago. Were you there?"

"I was bound to a man in that century too," Mordecai said. "I will tell you about it some night. Not today." He shook himself once, like a cat leaving water. "Every champion has one of us. I know a few. We will come to them. Now. Patrons."

"You told me what they are."

"I told you what they are. I did not tell you what they cost." Mordecai jumped onto the table. "A patron grants power, or knowledge, or a particular talent. In return it asks for service, and then it asks for more. There is a story in this family, from the year 1847. A Calloway named Josiah bargained with his patron to keep a ship from sinking in a storm. The ship came home. Every other vessel in the harbor went down that night."

Eli stared at him. "That's..."

"He never worked out whether he had been cheated. The patron said it had given him exactly what he asked." Mordecai let the silence settle. "That is the lesson. They do not lie. They only listen more carefully than you do. You will ask me before you agree to anything. Anything."

"I will," Eli said. And he found, with some surprise, that he meant it.

"Last. The order of things." The cat sat straight. "A coven has a hierarchy, and it is not a polite one. At the top, the master or matriarch, called a high priest or high priestess in some cultures, who holds absolute power. Under her, the full witches. Then the apprentices, who are learning. At the bottom, the acolytes, who serve. Do not assume rank follows talent. Often it does not. There are acolytes in a coven with more power than the witches above them, and witches who climbed into the upper circle by flattering the leader and very little else." His gaze flicked toward the ceiling. "Vex calls herself an apprentice. She is being modest, or careful, I have never decided which. She has far less experience than your father had, but she was born with a far greater magical affinity than most, and after three years at his side she is as powerful as any full witch in the coven. Excepting your grandmother, of course."

"And me?"

"Technically, an untrained witch, which is a rank of its own." The dry note came back. "In practice, as Thomas Calloway's son and heir, you outrank everyone in the clan except your grandmother, and she will remind you of the exception. Rank is also a leash, Eli. Keep that in mind tomorrow night, when you go to her estate for dinner. You will meet some of her acolytes there, and other of the coven, and others who are not witches at all, ordinary people she holds in the palm of her hand."

He nodded slowly. The dinner. For nearly an hour he had managed to forget it.

"There is too much," he said, and rubbed his face with both hands. "I know nothing. I've been a witch for a day, and the rest of them have been doing this since they were kids."

"Most of them, yes. Some were raised for it, and have done things you would not want described." Mordecai's voice stayed level. "You do not have to be as good as they are. You have to be good enough to be alive on the thirty-first. That is a smaller thing, and it is possible. But it takes work."

"Then I'll work," Eli said. It came out harder than he expected.

"Good," said the cat. "Light the candle."

He set a plain white candle on the kitchen counter, a stub from the drawer beside the stove. He stood over it with his hands braced on the edge of the counter, took the breath Mordecai had taught him, and thought about the wick.

"Small," Mordecai said from the windowsill. "Do not give it everything. Only enough to light it."

Nothing happened.

Eli frowned and tried again, harder. He thought about his father's hands. He thought about the hole in the ground, the gray suit, the text he had answered with a single word, the black nail over the door, a hand burned into paint. He thought about everything he had never said to his father, and about the time they might have had, stolen from him by a nameless murderer before he had ever had the chance to reconnect. A pressure built behind his eyes and in his chest and at the center of his left palm, bright and hot and entirely out of proportion, and he pushed with all of it, because it had to go somewhere.

The candle did not so much light as detonate.

A sheet of flame leapt off the counter and slapped the underside of the cabinet. The dish towel beside the stove went up in a single breath. The curtains over the sink caught, and a wave of heat struck Eli's face hard enough to stagger him back into the table. Mordecai hissed from the sill. Somewhere above them, a smoke alarm began to scream.

"Eli!" the cat yelled. "The salt! The black salt!"

He could not move. He stood and watched the fire climb the wall, and for one clear, awful second he thought: this is how I burn the house down, and I've been a witch for two days.

The back door banged open.

Vex came in at a run with a paper grocery bag clutched against her chest. She took in the room in a single glance, dropped the bag where she stood, and went straight to the shelf above the stove. She did not even slow down. She snatched the jar marked BLACK, unscrewed it with one hand, and flung the contents across the counter in a wide arc, the dark grains scattering over the flames like thrown sand. She said a word Eli did not understand. It had too many consonants, and it hurt to hear.

The fire went out.

Not gradually. All at once, as if a hand had closed around it. The alarm kept shrieking for another few seconds, and then Vex reached up and smacked the button, and the kitchen fell into a smoky, ringing quiet.

"What the hell," Vex said, breathing hard, "was that?"

"I tried to light a candle." Eli felt a little sick. Black grains coated the counter, the scorched cabinet, the ruined towel. A thin gray haze hung under the ceiling. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to."

"I know you didn't." Her voice gentled. She crossed the kitchen and examined his face and his hands, quickly, like a nurse. "You didn't burn yourself? Okay. Okay." She looked up at the ceiling, then at the stove, and some of the fear in her face turned to wonder. "The kitchen ward ate half of that. If it hadn't, we would be standing in a lot at the edge of town."

"Transmutation," Mordecai said from the sill. "Your father was proud of that one. It catches harm and turns it into something harmless. Today it earned its keep."

"What did you tell him?" Vex asked.

"To start small. He did not."

"He has the blood," Vex said. "He doesn't have the control. Of course he didn't."

"I am a poor teacher of this," Mordecai itted, and there was no defensiveness in it. "A familiar does not learn magic, Eli. We are made of it. I can tell you what it is. I cannot tell you what it feels like to be someone who has to reach for it. I have never had to."

Vex looked from the cat to Eli. Something shifted in her face, a decision, and she pulled out the chair across from him. "Okay. Sit. I've got this."

He sat.

"Your dad's notes are good," she said, leafing through the grimoire. "Really good. But he isn't here to answer questions, and a book written five hundred years ago doesn't care whether you understand it. And the cat is..." She glanced at Mordecai. "The cat is the cat. You need someone who re being new at this."

"You said you were an apprentice."

"I am. But I was new once, not so long ago, and I exactly how it felt." She picked up the candle stub, wiped the soot off it with her sleeve, and set it between them. "First lesson. You pushed. Everyone pushes. The first time I tried, I blew out every glass window in the house. Your dad told me once that he singed off his eyebrows." The corner of her mouth moved. "You're angry, and you're sad, and you're scared, and you used all of it. Magic doesn't want all of it. It wants a clear picture and a steady hand. So don't push. Ask. Look at the wick, only the wick. Tell it what you want as though you already know it will do it."

"That's all?"

"That's all. The first time is the hardest."

He tried. Nothing. He tried again, and a trickle of smoke curled off the wick, and Vex said "Better" without taking her eyes off it. The third time he stopped thinking about his father. He stopped thinking about the fire. He thought only about the thread of cotton at the center of the wax, white and small and ordinary, and asked.

A bead of flame stood up on the wick and stayed there.

It was tiny. It burned with a steady yellow light and did not spread. Eli stared at it, breathing carefully, afraid that if he moved it would go out or explode. Something inside him settled, like a key finally turning in a lock he had not known was there.

"There you go," Vex said softly. She was smiling, a real smile, the first he had seen on her. "Welcome to the business."

Mordecai, on the sill, said nothing. But his tail lay still for the first time all day.

The afternoon was salt and soot and scrubbing. They took the ruined curtains out to the trash and scraped the blackened cabinet, and for most of it neither of them said much. The house was quiet in the way a house is quiet after a funeral. Every few minutes Eli caught Vex stopping in the middle of a task with a sponge in her hand, staring at nothing.

He understood. She had lived here for three years. She had slept in this house every night beside a man who was now a grave on a hill, and every room held some small piece of him. His coat still hung on the hook by the back door. A dried ring of his coffee still sat in the bottom of the mug in the sink, and neither of them had been able to wash it. Eli ed her at the funeral, standing at the edge of the crowd with her eyes swollen and red. She had cried for his father, the man who had been her boyfriend for three years, the man whose bed she had shared every night. If anything, she might be carrying a heavier emptiness than he was. Eli had not lived with his father for years, and a distance had grown between them long before the end. Vex had spent every day and every night with him in this house for three years, and now she walked through the rooms where it had all happened, with no one left to share them with.

By six the kitchen smelled of bleach and scorched wood. It was too late to think about cooking, so Vex ordered pizza from a place on Dock Street called Marino's, and when it arrived she carried the boxes into the living room, set them on the coffee table, and sat at one end of the couch with her knees pulled up. Eli took the other end. Between them lay a cushion's width of two people who had buried the same man for different reasons.

"Your dad hated pizza," she said at last, handing him a paper plate. Her voice caught on the word dad, the way a sleeve catches on a nail. "Well. Not hated. He couldn't. He'd say a man his age had to think about his heart." She looked down at her own slice. "Which is a hell of a thing to say about pizza."

Eli bit into the first piece and realized he was starving. He had eaten almost nothing in days. The cheese was too hot and the crust was a little burnt, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted, and the fact of liking something made him feel faintly guilty. "I'm eighteen," he said, mostly to the plate. "I'm not thinking about my heart."

For a moment neither of them moved. Then Vex let out a wet, startled laugh, and Eli found himself laughing too, and it hurt a little, the way a stiff limb hurts when it first moves.

"God, I know," she said, wiping her eye with a knuckle. "It's wonderful. I got half pepperoni and half plain. Guess which half is yours."

"Pepperoni."

"Thank God. We can be friends."

They ate for a while without talking, but the silence was easier now. Eventually Vex set down her plate. "I think you've had enough magic lessons for one day," she said, reaching for the remote. "Do you want to watch something?"

A big modern television hung on the wall across from them, far newer than anything else in the room. His father must have bought it sometime in the last three years. Eli tried to picture him standing in an electronics store and could not.

"Sure," he said. He needed something to keep his mind off things, and neither of them wanted to sit in the quiet.

"What do you have?"

"Let's see." Vex pulled open the cabinet under the television, and a shelf of discs came into view, the spines crowded and well handled. Eli suspected she had bought every one herself and that his father had never touched a single one. The Crow, Evil Dead 2, Donnie Darko, a battered copy of Suspiria, and one very old musical about a mad scientist and a castle full of strangers. She talked about them the way some people talked about old friends. "The Crow is a cult classic. Brandon Lee was unreal in it, he could have been a huge star if he hadn't died during the shoot. Evil Dead 2, Ash Williams at his finest. Donnie Darko, you have to watch it if you haven't, I've seen both the theatrical cut and the director's cut. And Suspiria, I've had this one forever. The original 1977 Argento. The remake isn't half bad, but the original is a classic."

Eli went through the cases with real interest, turning each one over to read the back. "They all look good."

"Your dad had no interest," she sighed. "None. I could never get him into cult movies. I tried anime once. I put on the original Ghost in the Shell, one of my favorites, and he watched for twenty minutes and said, 'This is a very strange cartoon.'"

Eli groaned. "Yeah. That sounds exactly like him."

"Cartoons. He called all of it cartoons." Vex groaned too. "He thought everything animated was for kids. He couldn't understand adults being into anime."

"I got into anime and manga in middle school. He found my sketchbook once and asked if I was going to be a Disney animator." Eli shook his head. The memory arrived with an ache and a smile at the same time. "I never corrected him."

Vex tilted her head. "You draw?"

"Sort of. I used to. Not much lately."

"Show me sometime." She said it like she meant it. "What did you like? What got you into it?"

He told her: Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Evangelion, and a few he was a little embarrassed to it to. "I watched Brotherhood as a kid, and then got into the older stuff, Bebop and Evangelion, as a teenager."

She had seen every one. "I love all three. I could argue with you for hours about the ending of Evangelion. And I cried at the end of Cowboy Bebop."

"You're gonna carry that weight," Eli said softly, quoting it. "It's one of the best shows I've ever watched."

Vex nodded hard. "It really is. Have you seen Satoshi Kon's movies? I've watched Paprika like three times."

"It's an absolute masterpiece."

"Better than Inception."

"Fully agreed."

The list of things they shared kept growing, and with each one Eli felt something in him loosen. "Have you seen Death Note?" he asked, and she pointed at him with the crust of her pizza.

"The anime was incredible. It made me go buy and read the manga. The Netflix adaptation, though."

"Don't."

"It was awful."

"It was so awful," Eli said. "I watched it just to see how bad it could be, and it blew past my expectations." He started to laugh. He could not help it. This time it came up out of his chest easily, without hurting, and it went on longer than he expected. Vex was laughing too, her head thrown back against the cushion, her piercings catching the lamplight. Mordecai had curled on the arm of the chair with his eyes shut and his ears turned, listening.

"Willem Dafoe was good, though," Vex said, when she could breathe again.

"He's good in everything."

"Have you seen The Lighthouse?"

"Loved it. Robert Pattinson has come a long way from Twilight."

"Right? Who saw that coming?"

They went through the newer shows too, trading titles like cards. Arcane, which Vex said had wrecked her for a week. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which had wrecked Eli. Fate/Stay Night, which they had both watched, and which, as she pointed out with a crooked smile, was a strange thing for two witches to be arguing about over pizza. "Magic duels, and a prize that grants a wish. Just saying."

Eli almost choked on his crust. "Too soon."

"Too soon," she agreed, and grinned, and they both let it drop, though the room felt a little lighter for having said it out loud.

"I've got a whole shelf of comics upstairs," Vex said after a moment. "The Sandman, The Crow, The Umbrella Academy, V for Vendetta, the Death Note manga. The Sandman is great. Too bad the author turned out to be a creep."

"I'll have to raid your collection sometime."

"Anytime. Just don't crack the spines."

They asked each other a lot of questions, the way two people do who have just discovered the other is not what they expected. She asked what high school was like, and who his friends were, and what he was going to do after graduation, and he itted he did not know. He asked where she was from, and she said, "Nowhere you'd know," in a tone that closed the door, and then opened a different one. She had worked a string of part-time jobs, she said, and panhandled, and couch-surfed with whoever would have her, and she had learned how to get money out of people and how to talk any bouncer in Port Verity into letting her into any club by the second sentence. "It's a useful skill," she said, and winked. Eli filed that away. Someone who had already spent many nights sleeping on strangers' couches would not have found a spare room in a man's house all that strange.

They put on an anime film Eli had never seen, Perfect Blue, about a pop idol and the fan who will not let her go. Vex curled against the arm of the couch with her feet tucked under her. She was wearing a short band tee that left her pale, flat stomach bare, and when she stretched to pull a blanket over her knees, Eli noticed a small silver ring in her navel. It looked really hot, for reasons he could not quite explain, and the thought immediately felt wrong. Vex had been his father's girlfriend, and they had buried Thomas only two days ago. He should not be noticing his father's girlfriend's navel ring, and he definitely should not be finding it hot. That said, Thomas had never struck him as a man who would go anywhere near a tattoo or a piercing. It was strange to picture his father with a girl like Vex at all. He made himself look at the screen.

They ate. At some point he realized he had not thought about the contest in nearly an hour, or about the funeral, or about the tall, silent figure of his grandmother at the edge of the grave. For a little while he forgot he was a witch. He forgot that his father was dead. He forgot, most of all, that the girl at the other end of the couch had slept in the same bed as his father, that she and his dad had fallen asleep naked in each other's arms. For a little while she was just a cute girl near his age, with good taste and a quick laugh, and no baggage that he could see.

When the credits rolled, Vex reached for her phone and the room filled with guitars. "Okay, music," she said. "What do you listen to?"

"Mostly whatever my friends send me," Eli itted.

She started naming bands in response. "My Chemical Romance. Pierce the Veil. Bring Me the Horizon, Black Veil Brides, Motionless in White. Paramore. Nightwish. I've been to see half of them," she said, "in sweaty clubs with the floor sticking to my boots." She played him a few seconds of each, her head tilted, watching his face for a reaction.

"I tried to get your dad into them," she said. "Even one song. He'd listen politely for about thirty seconds and then shake his head like it was clearly not for him." She snorted. "He liked classical music, on a radio turned down low. Instead of movies or shows, he watched the news. I kept asking him to come to a show with me. We were supposed to be boyfriend and girlfriend, right? That's the sort of thing couples do. He never would."

Eli tried to picture it. His father, forty-seven, tall and bearded and quiet, standing in a packed club among kids in black hoodies and eyeliner with his arms folded. The image would not hold. It kept sliding off the edge of his mind.

"Sounds like you didn't really have much in common," Eli commented.

"We really didn't." Vex sighed. "I tried to do more couple things with him. He refused to get matching tattoos. He refused to get anything pierced. He looked at me like I'd asked him to rob a bank."

"I can't picture Dad with tattoos or piercings."

"You and me both. I did get him to wear matching shirts, though. 'I come in peace' for him, and 'I'm peace' for me." She was grinning at the memory. "I made him wear it when he took me to dinner, twice, with me clinging to his arm and letting everyone on the street read our shirts. He complained the whole way."

Eli tried to imagine that and, to his own surprise, started laughing again. "I would have paid money to see that."

Then another thought arrived, a less comfortable one. If Vex and his dad had gone out to a show together, strangers would not have seen a couple. They would have seen a middle-aged father who had brought his teenage daughter along, not a boyfriend and a girlfriend who lived together. Maybe that was the reason. Maybe his father had not wanted to be seen with her in public, and that was why Vex had never been able to get him to a concert. It might even explain why Thomas had never introduced Vex to him, or to his mother, why she had existed only as a rumor, a woman at the other end of a phone line that nobody ever put on speaker. "I met someone," his father had told him once, in a voice that closed the subject, but he had not wanted Eli or his mother to know how young his new girlfriend was.

Eli did not say any of that. It felt unkind, and it felt like it belonged to someone else to say.

"I'm not really into music like this," he told her instead. "But I'll try it. Properly. I'll listen to the whole thing."

Vex looked at him for a moment, and her whole face changed. "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Your dad never would." She said it lightly, but there was something raw under it. Then she smiled again and turned the volume up a little, and the sound filled the room.

He sat with it. The song was loud and furious and strangely tender underneath, and he did not understand the half of it. But he watched her instead, the way she mouthed the words, the arm warmers bunched at her wrists, the red streaks in her hair catching the lamplight, a silver ring flashing as she tapped time on her knee. She was beautiful in the way that only seemed to happen when someone stopped caring who was looking. He felt something shift low in his chest, warm and uninvited, and right behind it a sharp, bitter flicker he did not recognize at first.

It took him a moment to name it. Desire and longing, aimed at a beautiful young woman. And right behind it, something that might have been jealousy, even resentment, aimed at a dead man who had known her in every way for three years.

Eli looked away and pressed the feeling down hard, ashamed of it. He did not even want to think about it in his own head. It stayed there anyway, like a coal.

"Can I tell you something kind of weird?" Vex said after a while, still looking at the screen.

"Sure."

"Thomas sometimes acted like my dad." She picked at a thread on her arm warmer. "He asked me if I wanted to go to community college, and offered to pay for it. I didn't. He even gave me an allowance, like you give your kids. Every month, in an envelope. Cash. I spent almost all of it on things I wanted. Band tees, clothes, concert tickets, movies, records, comics. Everything on that shelf, basically. I never saved a cent." She smiled a little. "I thought it was sweet. He was a proper, responsible adult, and I think he was a dad at heart. You were away, so he couldn't spoil you. So he spoiled me instead."

Eli thought about it. It did sound sweet, at first, a boyfriend who provided for his girlfriend's hobbies and kept her comfortable. Vex had not needed to worry about money while she lived here with his father. But there was another way to look at it. A forty-four-year-old man, and an eighteen-year-old girl in his house, who depended on his money for the things she wanted. Vex had been an adult when she became his father's girlfriend, that much was true, but there had been a clear power imbalance between them. He was a middle-aged father with a fifteen-year-old son, and she had only just turned eighteen.

He thought about his father at the kitchen counter, sliding an envelope across the wood, unable to look at her. He thought about a man of forty-four who had not been able to bring himself to tell his own fifteen-year-old son that he now had a girlfriend of eighteen. His father had been lonely, and embarrassed, and divided against himself. The part of him that was a divorced man with sexual needs, and the part that needed a partner who could help with his rituals and help him survive the contest, had won out against the part that knew it was wrong. And he had never forgiven himself, so he had kept it hidden.

That was almost worse, in a way.

"I'll be honest, I'm surprised you and my dad lasted three years as a couple," Eli found himself saying, the words out before he had decided to say them. "The way you talk about him, it sounds like you had nothing in common. How did you manage it?"

"Well, there were two things we had in common." Vex shrugged. "Magic and sex."

Eli cringed, and felt his ears turn red.

"Oh, don't look like that." She had turned fully toward him now, eyes bright with mischief and something more careful underneath. "It's true. It's the only reason it worked, with a twenty-six year age gap and almost nothing else in common. He needed me, you know. As a witch, there are a lot of rituals you can't do alone. Rituals that need both a man and a woman." She held his gaze. "And to tell you the truth, when I first moved into this house, he didn't want me. He said I was nearly his son's age. Twice he told me to find somewhere else to stay." She picked up a slice of cold pizza, apparently for something to do with her hands. "But he'd been alone almost three years by then, divorced and single, and he was a man with needs, and I was right there in his kitchen in my pajamas. Turns out a lonely man finds that irresistible. He held out about a week."

"Vex."

"After that? I don't think either of us left the bedroom for three days." She said it with a perfectly straight face, and then she grinned. "Once the dam broke, and his desires won out over his taboos, he went all in. We tried every position either of us could think of, and a few we had to invent. It was like Thomas was trying to make up for three years of involuntary celibacy in three days. By the end he was dehydrated and completely drained, and I had to bring him water like he'd crawled out of a desert." Her smile turned a little fond. "I'm not going to say anything else. Except that Thomas was good at it. Experienced. Really attentive. He made sure I was having a good time, too. Most younger guys only care about their own satisfaction. Your dad always made sure I was fully satisfied. His mouth, his tongue, his fingers, his you-know-what, whatever it took."

"Okay." Eli's ears were burning. He held up a hand like a man warding off a bus. "Too much information. Way too much."

"You're bright red."

"I'm not."

"You are." She smirked. "We're both adults. We don't need to be shy or prudes about sex." It was clear that Vex saw sex as a casual thing, and found nothing wrong with teasing him once she realized he was embarrassed by it. She leaned closer, studying him, and her eyes narrowed with sudden, delighted suspicion. "So. Eli. Have you ever had a girlfriend?"

Eli said nothing, which was an answer.

"Oh my God." She pressed a hand over her mouth, but the laughter leaked out around it. "You haven't. That's so cute."

"It's not cute."

"It's a little cute. You haven't had your first kiss yet either, have you? No, I can tell. You definitely haven't. And here I am telling Thomas's son about the three days I spent having a sex marathon with his dad." She did not look sorry in the slightest. The pleasure she took in watching him squirm was wicked and warm and impossible to miss, and, he realized with a kind of horror, he did not entirely mind it. She was teasing him without malice. "Don't worry. I'll stop teasing you and behave from now on. Probably."

"Please don't make promises you can't keep."

"I never do." She was still grinning.

Eli groaned and slid down into the couch cushions, covering his face with both hands, and he could hear her laughing. It was awful. No one wanted to hear about their father having sex, or picture him naked in bed with a girl close to their own age. And yet there was something under the embarrassment, the outline of a man he had not known, someone who could be gentle, who had held a girl three years older than his own son and been careful with her. For whatever it was worth, Vex had been an adult when she became his father's girlfriend. The age gap was not ideal, but she was old enough to consent, and from what she had said, she had been the one to start things. His father had not been a predator hunting for a younger girl. He had been a flawed man, but he was not a monster, and Eli was certain he would never have touched Vex if she had been underage. He turned over everything she had told him. It was not an easy picture. But it was a whole one, which was more than he had had that morning.

And he had to give his father some credit. Thomas had been single and divorced for three years, starved for sex, yet he had held out for a full week, while Vex, probably the prettiest girl Eli had ever known, lived under his roof and walked around the house in her sleep shorts and tank top, her pale midriff and legs bare, plainly willing. Most men would have folded in a day. His dad had lasted a week. That was weirdly respectable, under the circumstances.

The movie played on. They went back to talking about other things, other films, a book they both disliked and a band they both liked. The easiness returned, a little more careful now, but real. Close to midnight, when the film had long since finished and the room was dim, Vex pulled her knees up and looked at the dark window.

"I used to wonder what kind of guy you were," she said. "Whenever Thomas talked about you. I never expected us to have so much in common. If I had, I'd have asked him to introduce us ages ago." She glanced at him. "We could have been friends years ago."

"Yeah," Eli said. His throat felt tight. "We could have."

"He talked about you a lot, you know."

Eli lowered his hands.

"All the time. I got sick of it, honestly. No one really wants to hear their boyfriend talk constantly about the son he had with another woman." Her mouth quirked. "I felt a little jealous of you and your mom, even though it's embarrassing to it now. Thomas and I were together every night, and he was still hung up on his old family."

"You can't choose or police your thoughts," Eli said. He had a few involuntary ones of his own tonight that he wished he did not have, about Vex and his father and their three years together, thoughts he refused to look at directly.

Vex went on. "I learned a lot about you before I ever met you. Your dad showed me things. Your report cards. Your school photos. Photos of you as a kid. He printed them at a drugstore and taped them inside the study door where nobody could see them. He'd stand there sometimes and look at them and not say anything. He kept your bedroom exactly as it was when you were a kid, even though he couldn't invite you here while we were preparing for the contest. When I first saw you at the funeral, it brought a lot of memories back. I felt so sorry for your dad, and for you." She hesitated. "I think he missed you a lot, Eli. I don't think he knew how to say it."

The room was very quiet. He thought of the inscription in the front of the book. I hope I have.

"Thanks for telling me these things," Eli said, after a while. It was all he could manage. Despite everything, the distance, the secrets, all he had learned today, he realized that he still loved his father, and that his father had loved him. He wished he had more time with him. He wished they had crossed the distance that had formed between them before it was too late.

Vex nodded, and did not say anything else. After a moment she stood and gathered the plates. At the kitchen door she stopped with her back to him.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Dinner with Ophelia. Be polite. She likes it when people are polite." A pause. "But also be careful what you promise her."

Then the water ran, and she was gone.

He went upstairs and lay on his old bed in the dark, looking at the ceiling. The stub of blue candle sat on the dresser where Mordecai had lit it the morning before, small and cold. Beyond the window the harbor was black, and a single light moved far out on the water. Between two pages of his father's grimoire, a sigil he had drawn slept in its paper.

Tomorrow he would have to sit down to dinner with his grandmother, Ophelia Hale, at her estate. The matriarch of the Calloway clan was waiting for him at Hale Manor. And somewhere out in the fog, twelve other champions were preparing too, and Eli had no idea which of them had stood outside his window in the dark the night before.