October 7: Missing

It felt strange to go to school in the middle of a deadly contest of witches.

Eli stood in the kitchen at seven in the morning with a backpack he had found in his old closet, a binder he had bought at a drugstore the afternoon before, and the cold, unreal sensation of a man dressed for the wrong play. Eleven people in this city were trying to win a wish, and at least one of them had already killed. He had a ward on his skin and an iron nail in his pocket and a brand burning faintly in his left palm. And in forty minutes he was supposed to walk into the senior class of a high school he had never attended, in the second week of October, as the new kid.

But his grandmother had arranged it, so it would happen.

"Eat," Vex said, setting a plate in front of him. Scrambled eggs again. They were better this time, soft and a little too salty, and he suspected she had been practicing. "You can't learn on an empty stomach."

"I can't learn on a full stomach either. I'll be too nervous."

"It's high school. Nobody learns anything in high school. You just survive it." She sat across from him with a bowl of cereal and her feet on the rung of his chair. She had come down in a black hoodie and striped knee socks, with her hair pinned up in a messy knot, and she looked, in the pale morning light, about seventeen. "I last went to high school over three years ago. Dropped out, ran away from home, left in the middle of my last year. Got my GED a bit later, barely. I never went to college. I went straight into the coven and became an apprentice. It was the only thing I was any good at."

"You don't regret it?"

"Sometimes." She shrugged. "Not really. I think I'd have been bad at college. I'm bad at sitting still." She tilted her head. "What about you? You're a senior. You must have applications."

He made a face. "I was supposed to be working on them. I was going to do early action, and I had a list. Art schools, mostly." He did not usually say that aloud. "Animation, maybe. Or illustration. I have a portfolio, sort of. It's mostly sketches. I had some essays half done and a deadline on November first, and then..."

"Then your dad died."

"Then everything." He pushed the eggs around his plate. "I don't even know what I'm going to do. I don't know if I'll be alive on the first of November. I don't know why I'm worrying about applications."

"You're worrying about them because you're eighteen and you want to have a future," said Vex quietly. "That's not stupid. That's the most sensible thing you've said all week." She reached across the table and tapped the back of his hand with one finger. "Don't stop doing it. Even if you have to work on them at midnight. Whatever else happens, I want you to have the option. And art is good for a witch, you know. Sigils, ritual circles, wards, it all comes down to a steady hand and an eye for shapes. You're already ahead of half the coven."

He nodded, not trusting his voice.

"Your friends back home must be wondering where you went."

"They are." He took out his phone. A dozen unread messages from the group chat sat on the lock screen, with a string of increasingly worried emojis. bro u alive. teachers keep asking. call us when u can. He had answered the first few. He had said he was fine, and that he was staying with family for a while, and that his mom would explain. He had not told them about the transfer. "I don't know what to say. They'll think I've lost it. And my mom still thinks I'm on bereavement leave. She doesn't know I'm enrolled here."

"Are you going to tell her?"

"I have to." It came out heavier than he intended. "She'll be furious. Not at me. At her."

Vex did not need to ask who. "Tell her soon," she said. "Before somebody else does."

He finished his eggs, and she walked him to the door. He was halfway through it when it struck him that he had lived in Port Verity until he was twelve, and he had gone to elementary school and middle school a few miles from here, and he was going to be sitting in classrooms where the walls had probably not changed since he left.

"I might know some of them," he said. "From before. I might know people."

"You might." She leaned on the doorframe, arms folded, and gave him a crooked, tender, surprisingly maternal look. "Be careful. But I think you'll be okay. No witch in their right mind is going to try anything during the day, in a crowded school, with a hundred witnesses. They like the dark." She hesitated. "Have fun, Eli. I mean it. Try to relax while you still can. It'll be over before you know it, and you'll miss it. Everyone does."

"Thanks for breakfast."

"Thanks for eating it."

Mina was waiting at the gate.

She stood very straight, in a black pleated skirt, black tights, heavy boots, and a faded gray cardigan over a black shirt, a silver pendant at her throat and the black lipstick as dark as ever. She had a backpack on one shoulder. She was a high school senior herself, eighteen years old, and she was walking to school as his servant by his grandmother's order. He could see her trying, with some effort, not to call him Master.

"Good morning, Eli," she said carefully.

"Morning." He fell into step with her. "You don't have to walk with me, you know."

"I do. I have to keep you safe."

"We're going to a school."

"I know." She looked straight ahead. "It is still my duty."

They walked for a while in silence. The morning was cold and bright, with a thin fog still lingering in the low streets, and the gulls were noisy over the harbor. As they passed the end of Dock Street, Eli glanced down it out of habit. A brick wall, blind and soot-stained, an old fire escape bolted to it. Nothing else.

It occurred to him, as he walked, that the transfer was not really about school.

His grandmother was one of the largest donors to the district. She could have anything she wanted from its board, and what she had wanted was her grandson, here, in Port Verity, enrolled and registered and on the books, for the rest of his senior year. It was a leash. It was a very well-made one. If he was enrolled here, his mother could not take him home without pulling him from his classes in the middle of the term. He would have to stay in the city until at least June, or until he graduated, and then there would be college, and by then who knew what Ophelia would have arranged.

He sighed, and the breath came out white. He had understood, a little more each day, why his mother had never liked her mother-in-law. Ophelia Hale was as controlling and as manipulative as anyone he had ever met, and she did it so smoothly that you might not feel the collar until it was already closed.

"Is everything all right?" Mina asked.

"Fine. Just thinking about my grandmother."

"Ah." The faintest shadow passed across her face. "Yes. She is..." She stopped, and did not finish the sentence, and he saw her lower her eyes. "She is very thorough."

Port Verity High School sat on a low hill above the water, a long, rambling building of red brick and tall windows, with a clock tower that had stopped at some unremembered hour and a flagpole in front. It was smaller than the school Eli had attended in the city. It was older, and shabbier, and the front steps were worn into shallow dips by a hundred years of feet. A banner over the doors read HOME OF THE MARINERS. He stood at the bottom of the steps and looked up, and it seemed to him that he had seen this building a thousand times in dreams, and not in the way he had seen the Dreamlands.

The front office smelled of floor wax and burnt coffee. A woman with a lanyard and reading glasses glanced up from her computer, saw Eli, and went quite still. "Elias Calloway," she said. "Yes. We've been expecting you." Her voice was bright and careful, like a person who has been told exactly how to behave. "Welcome to Port Verity High. Mrs. Hale called personally."

"I'm sure she did," Eli said.

He was given a schedule, a locker number, a map he did not need, and a hall pass. He was told, with an anxious smile, that if there was anything he needed, anything at all, he need only ask. The woman did not look at Mina, who stood beside him with her hands folded. He had the feeling that every adult in the building had been informed in advance, and that most of them were frightened of the answer to a question they had never been told to ask.

He was heading down the second-floor corridor toward his homeroom, with Mina one step behind, when someone said his name.

"Eli? Eli Calloway?"

He turned.

A stocky young man was standing by the lockers, with curly black hair and a broad, open, slightly stunned face, in a faded blue Mariners hoodie two sizes too big. He had a chipped front tooth. He was grinning in a way that Eli would have known anywhere, a wide, helpless grin, like a dog that has seen its owner after a long absence, and for a moment Eli could not breathe.

"Danny?"

"Eli!" The grin split into a laugh, and Danny Reyes crossed the corridor in three strides and caught him in a crushing hug, slapping his back like a man trying to start an engine. "Oh my God. Oh my God, it's actually you. I heard there was a new kid. I heard the name. I didn't think..." He pulled back, holding Eli at arm's length, and shook him a little. "Look at you. You got tall. You got, like, normal-sized. You were this big!" He held a hand at his waist.

"I was eight."

"You were tiny. You were the smallest kid in the whole class." Danny's eyes were shining, and suddenly, awkwardly, he rubbed his face with one hand. "I'm sorry about your dad, man. I really am. We heard. It was in the paper. I wanted to come to the funeral, but I didn't know, I didn't think you'd want..." He stopped. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Eli found that his own voice had gone thick. "Thanks. It's good to see you."

"Danny, you're going to break him."

A small girl had come up behind them, with a stack of folders under one arm and a long black braid hanging over her shoulder. She wore round tortoiseshell glasses, a green cardigan, and a skirt that did not quite match, and there was a smear of blue ink along the side of her hand, and another on her chin. She looked at Eli with a pair of sharp, bright, curious eyes and then smiled, slowly, as though a lock had clicked open somewhere.

"Priya?" Eli said.

"You remember me." She sounded pleased and a little surprised. "I was worried you wouldn't. I had braces, and a terrible haircut, and I was always correcting the teacher."

"You corrected me in second grade. I got a B on a spelling test because of you."

"You spelled necessary wrong. I was helping."

"She is still helping," Danny said, with enormous fondness. He had put one arm around Priya's shoulders, and she leaned into it without looking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "She edits the school paper. She runs it, basically. She's going to be a lawyer, or a senator, or a supervillain."

"I haven't decided." Priya adjusted her glasses. She was small, and she had grown up cute in a way that was quietly, unmistakably nerdy, all sharp elbows and ink and bright intelligent eyes, and she was looking at Eli with something that was not pity. It was more like attention. "I'm really sorry about your dad, Eli. And your mom. How is she? She used to bring us orange slices at soccer."

"She's okay. She's, you know. She's hanging in there." He was very conscious of Mina standing silently behind his shoulder. "She's in the city. I'm staying at my dad's house for a while."

"We figured." Priya's eyes slid, once, to Mina, and back, with a flicker of quick, measuring thought, and she did not say anything. "Do you have lunch? Fourth period? We eat in the library. It's quiet. Danny's allowed in as long as he doesn't eat the books."

"That was one time," said Danny.

Eli laughed. It startled him how easily it came. For an instant, in the noise and bright fluorescent light of the corridor, with the lockers banging and the bell about to ring, he felt something he had not felt for a long time: the sense of having come home. It lasted a moment. Then he saw the two of them together, her small hand over the arm that held her, and his chest went tight in an unexpected way, and he understood that they were a couple, and had been for some time, and that they had built a life in the years he had been gone.

"You two are together," he said.

Danny went pink to the tips of his ears. Priya did not blink. "Since sophomore year," she said. "He asked me to the winter dance. He tripped over a chair."

"I recovered."

"You bled."

Eli grinned. It was good, it was really good, and under the warmth, where he could not quite touch it, something ached. Six years. He had gone away, and they had grown up without him, and they had found each other, and the world he had left behind had closed over the gap like water. He had a whole life he could not share with them. He had a ward on his skin and a brand in his hand, and a cat that could grow as tall as a horse.

How thin it was, he thought, the old life. How thin it had become.

Then the bell rang, and Priya squeezed his arm, and said, "Fourth period. Library. Don't be late," and the two of them were swept away down the corridor in the crowd, her braid swinging, his arm around her shoulders, laughing. Eli watched them go.

"They are your friends," Mina said softly, behind him.

"They were." He picked up his bag. "I think they might still be."

At least one good thing, he thought, had come out of his grandmother's controlling nature and the transfer she had arranged without asking. He had found two people he had thought were gone.

The morning was a blur of cracked textbooks, buzzing lights, and eyes that slid away when he looked at them.

Eli heard the whispers before he reached his first class. They followed him down the corridor like a draft. That's him. The Calloway kid. His dad died, the car accident, remember? His grandmother is the Hale. The whole Heights. She practically owns the school board. A pair of girls at the water fountain stopped talking when he passed, and then started again, breathless and thrilled. Teachers glanced at the new name on their rosters and straightened, and spoke to him in the soft, over-careful voice of people addressing the grandson of the woman who signed their paychecks. One gray-haired man in a bow tie actually called him sir before correcting himself. He sat in the back of homeroom with Mina in the desk beside him, her hands folded on the cover of her notebook, and listened to the principal read the morning announcements over the speaker in a tight, bland voice.

"...a reminder that the harbor police have asked students to avoid the waterfront after dark, and to travel in pairs. The department is investigating a number of recent reports. If you have any information, you are encouraged to come forward."

A faint stir rippled through the room. Two boys in the row ahead of him exchanged a look.

"That's five now," one of them muttered. "Five people. Since the weekend."

"My cousin knew the guy from the cannery. Walt. He said Walt never misses a shift."

"They're not gonna find him."

"Shut up."

Eli looked down at his notebook. Under the desk, his palm throbbed once, sullenly, and went quiet.

In second period, when the history teacher launched into a unit that Eli had never seen, Mina quietly slid her notebook across the desk without a word. Her handwriting was small and neat, with color-coded tabs and a margin of carefully ruled questions. "You are behind on the syllabus," she murmured, her eyes on the board. "These may help. There is a test on Friday."

"Thanks," Eli whispered. "Really."

She inclined her head. For half a second, so quickly that he almost missed it, the corner of her mouth moved, a small, startled, shy almost-smile, as though she had not expected to be thanked for it. Then it was gone, and she folded her hands again. He copied her notes carefully, and kept the notebook a little longer than he needed to.

During the break between second and third period, in a quiet stairwell with Mina keeping a polite distance, he pulled out his phone and searched for the news. It took no time at all to find. The Port Verity Courier had been running the story for three days, in small, tight paragraphs near the bottom of the front page. Fifth person reported missing from city waterfront. The names were all unfamiliar. A deckhand. A cannery worker. A woman who sold crab off a cart at the end of Pier Six. A retired longshoreman who walked his terrier every night. A teenager from a shelter on Marsh Street. No bodies had been found. There were no signs of struggle. The harbor police, said a spokesman, were treating the cases as unconnected.

He read the article twice. A cold, small, unpleasant thought stirred somewhere at the back of his mind, and he put the phone away before it could finish forming.

The library was at the end of the second-floor corridor, a high-ceilinged, dusty, sunlit room smelling of old paper and lemon polish, and Danny and Priya had claimed the table in the corner by the window. Priya had spread folders and a laptop over most of it. Danny was eating a sandwich the size of his forearm. They both looked up as Eli came in, with Mina trailing, and Danny waved the sandwich in greeting.

"Sit! Sit. I saved you a chair." He glanced at Mina, and then at Eli, and then politely at his sandwich. "Hi. Danny."

"Mina," Mina said. She did not sit. She took up a position beside the window with her hands folded, and Danny gave Eli an odd, questioning look, which Eli ignored.

"She's, uh. A friend of the family."

"Sure," Priya said mildly. She had not looked up from her laptop, but there was a bright, interested glint behind her glasses.

They caught up the way people do who have not seen each other in six years, in broken, overlapping stretches. Danny had not left Port Verity once. He talked about it with a kind of bashful pride. He worked at his uncle's bait shop, Reyes Bait & Tackle, on Dock Street, every day after school and all day Saturday, and he had done it since he was fourteen. He knew every deckhand and every captain on the harbor, and he could tell a flounder from a fluke at forty feet. "My uncle's getting old," he said. "The place is gonna be mine someday. I mean, I hope."

"What about after graduation?" Eli asked.

"I'll stay." Danny shrugged. He said it easily. It was clear that he had said it to himself many times. "I'll take the shop full time. I'm not smart enough for college, man. I'm not rich enough, either. And it's not, like, a bad life. It's a good life. It's a real one."

"You are smart enough," said Priya.

"I'm okay."

"You know the tide tables by heart. You can do the whole shop's books in your head. You saved a boy's life with a fishing line in the seventh grade." She pushed her glasses up with an inky finger. "You are not stupid, Daniel Reyes. You're just stubborn."

Danny looked at her with such helpless adoration that Eli glanced away. Priya was the smart one, he gathered. She was going to apply to a dozen schools, with a scholarship essay half-written, and she was already talking about law. She would go away, and come back, or not. Danny would stay, in the same city, behind the same counter, and wait. It was a sad shape, if he looked at it too closely. But they seemed happy, and he did not look. Neither of them came from money. Danny's family lived in the flats behind the harbor, in a house with a leaking roof, and Priya's parents ran a corner pharmacy and worked six days a week. Eli, whatever else his family was, had always had a college fund, because his mother and his grandmother's checks had made sure of it. He had never thought about that before. He thought about it now, with a small, uncomfortable heat.

"What about you?" Priya asked. "Where are you going?"

"Art school, maybe. If I get in." He found, to his surprise, that he was telling them about the drawings, the animation, the portfolio he had never shown to anyone, and that neither of them laughed. "I'll show you sometime."

"Show me tomorrow," said Priya. "I want to see."

"Eli." Danny had put down the sandwich. His face had changed. It had grown older all at once, and troubled, and he leaned across the table and lowered his voice. "Listen. You heard about the people who went missing? From the docks?"

"I read it this morning."

"I know them." Danny's voice cracked, a little. "I know most of them. I mean I knew. Walt Pruitt comes in every Tuesday for night crawlers, like clockwork, and he didn't come in this week. He's been fishing off Pier Four for thirty years. And Eddie, the deckhand, he's a good guy, he drinks too much but he's a good guy. And Mrs. Teixeira with the crab cart, my grandmother buys from her. She's like sixty. She never hurt anybody." He swallowed. "They're just gone. Nobody saw anything. Uncle Mateo is making me close at four. He says lock the doors at dusk. He's scared, man. I've never seen him scared."

The sunlight on the table seemed to grow a little thinner.

Eli sat very still. He thought of a cold wind off the water, and an angle in the corner of a graveyard, and a black card on a doormat. He thought of a woman on a bench with her pearls beside her. Eleven champions still living, he thought, and at least one of them is hunting. He did not think it was the Wolfe hound or the surgeon's spider. He did not know why he was so sure.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That's awful."

"Yeah."

Eli turned his pen over in his fingers. He was thinking, and the thoughts were not good ones. "How long has it been going on?" he asked. "The disappearances. Is it only this month?"

"Just this month, as far as I know," Danny said. "Why?"

"I don't know. It's a lot, all at once. I lived here until I was twelve, and I don't remember anything like it." He kept his voice casual. "I keep wondering whether it's happened before."

Priya's head came up. A bright, quick light had come into her eyes behind the round lenses, the look of an editor who has just been handed an idea. "That's actually a good question," she said. "Nobody has asked it. The Harbor Light hasn't published a word on this. The principal says it would upset the parents." She pulled the laptop toward her. "The school subscribes to the Courier archive. It's all scanned, back to the twenties. I can search it from here."

Danny dragged his chair around to look over her shoulder. Mina stayed where she was, by the window, with her hands folded, as still as a statue. Eli sat on the other side of the table and watched Priya's fingers move over the keys. She typed missing, then waterfront, then October. The screen blinked and filled with results.

She read the first headline aloud. Then the second. Then she stopped reading aloud.

"Okay," she said slowly. "That's weird."

"What?" said Danny.

"October 2008. Four people missing from the waterfront. No bodies." She scrolled. "October 1990. Five missing from the docks. No bodies." She scrolled again. "October 1972. Four. October 1954." She sat back. "Six."

The sunlight on the table seemed to grow thinner.

"Every eighteen years," Priya said, very softly. "Always October. Always the waterfront. Always people nobody would look for quickly, the ones with no one to miss them, and not a single body found. Ever."

"That's not possible," said Danny. "That's seventy-two years. That's... no. There's no way one guy has been doing this for seventy-two years. He'd have to be a hundred."

"Unless it's not one guy."

"A family, then. A gang. Maybe a cult." Danny shook his head, and then, as if the word had frightened him, shook it again. "Every eighteen years, like a calendar? Come on. That doesn't make any sense."

"No," Priya said, "it doesn't." She was staring at the screen, and her voice had gone odd. "There's an old story about the harbor. My grandfather used to tell it. He said Port Verity takes its tithe. Every generation, the sea wants its share, and it takes it in October, and if you're smart you stay off the piers."

"My grandmother says that," Danny said, unexpectedly. "She crosses herself when she says it."

"It's a ghost story," said Priya. She did not sound convinced. "It's what people say when they don't want to say there was a murderer."

"Right," Danny said. "Ghost story." He laughed, uneasily, and nobody laughed with him.

Eli said nothing at all.

He knew it was not a story. He knew exactly what the tithe was, and why it came in October, and why it came every eighteen years. The last time it had come, he had been a few weeks old. The people on the screen had not been taken by the sea. They had been taken by the thirteen, by the contest, by someone in the dark who needed what they carried for a reason he did not yet understand. He was sure of it with a cold, sick certainty. One of the other champions was behind the disappearances. He did not know which.

The bell rang.

"Whatever you two are doing," Danny said, getting up, "I'm in. I want to know what happened to Walt, and Eddie, and Mrs. Teixeira. I want it to stop. I'm no good with microfilm, but I know the docks, if you need a pier or a warehouse." He glanced at the clock and groaned. "Shop class." He squeezed Eli's shoulder, awkwardly and hard. "Man, I'm sorry about all this. The whole thing. I'll see you later?"

"Later."

"I have a class too," said Priya. She had begun to save the search results, one by one, to a folder on her desktop. "After school, in the basement of the Harbor Light. I'm going to pull the microfilm for the early decades. The scans are bad before 1960." She hesitated. "Come if you want. I have a feeling this is going to get stranger."

"I'll come."

Eli had a free period. He should have used it to read ahead in his history book, or to start the English essay that Mina's notes told him was due on Friday. He took a seat in a back carrel instead, with Mina at the next desk over, and took out his phone. He was in Port Verity High School, because his grandmother had put him there. But he was still in a contest to the death, and he could not afford to waste an hour.

He went down the list of names.

Harlan Vesey, eighty-three, had no social media at all, which was hardly surprising. The few traces of him that Eli could find on the web were decades old: a donor's name on a plaque, a line in an academic obituary, a photograph of an old man in a white coat on a hospital board, squinting in the sun. Eli stared at it for a while. It was hard to imagine an old man, too ill to travel, putting a stranger on a bench. Then again, he knew almost nothing about how witches aged, or what an eighty-three-year-old one could do from a chair, and Mordecai had told him that the old ones were often the most dangerous. He did not cross Vesey off.

Marguerite Beaumont had an obituary on the Courier's website, dated that morning. Beaumont, Marguerite, 52. Of Alder Street. Survived by her maid. There was a brief news report of the seawall discovery, and a photograph of a bench with police tape on it. She had been found dead exactly as Nye had said, so Nye had not lied. And she was dead, so she was certainly not the killer. He crossed her off, with a small sour twist in his stomach.

Dr. Imelda Roth was on LinkedIn. It was a sparse and efficient profile, with a photograph of a woman with a silver bob and steel-rimmed glasses, and every detail matched what she had said at the Parlor: Chief of General Surgery at St. Anne's, thirty-one years, retired. A dozen published papers. He read the list of her skills twice. Anatomy. Trauma. Precision. A woman who could open a body, and close it again without leaving a mark. He kept her on his list.

Brother Anselm turned up in a single old news item. Priest Removed After Incident at Sunday Service. No details, no charges. A mad priest who had turned to serial killing was not hard to imagine, and Eli put a star beside the name.

Cassius Wolfe had an Instagram, immaculate and golden, full of fencing trophies and a yacht and a family estate, and not one image that suggested anything at all. Cassius had tried to kill him. But the fight at the grave had left his hound badly wounded, and there had been disappearances since then, so Eli had a feeling it was not Cassius either. Still, Cassius was dangerous, wealthy, and skilled, and he had a bone to pick with Eli and his family. Eli did not cross him off.

Ruth Calder was easy. A long article from three years back on her retirement from the Port Verity police, with a line about her closing rate and another about her sudden resignation. She was unlikely to be the killer. A former police officer, and Eli remembered what she had said at the Parlor, that too many of them were children. She was not the type to murder kids. One of the victims had been a teenager from a shelter. Unless she was an incredible actress and liar, it was not Ruth Calder.

Tak Mori had a tattoo shop in the city, with five stars on every review. He had seemed friendly at the meeting, and he seemed friendly online, and Eli put him very low on the list. Fen Alder had an old, dormant handle on a hacker forum, with a profile picture of a ferret, and a few jokes about coffee. His accounts showed a tech-savvy young man and nothing that suggested a murderer. Eli put him low as well.

He was surprised when he searched for Gwendolyn Pryor. She was a very popular influencer, with over two million followers and a feed of immaculate hair and sunlit coffee and brand partnerships, and he doubted that someone that famous, with that many eyes on her, could moonlight as a serial killer. He crossed her out. He did notice that she had not posted in six days, which was forever by influencer standards. He looked at that for a long time.

The Vances were worse. They had shared social media profiles, with pictures of the two of them in matching sweaters and captions like my favorite person, which might have suggested loving siblings who were very close. But Eli knew what he knew from the Parlor, and he remembered a girl's voice murmuring I'm going to fuck you so hard when we get home, and every smiling photograph made him feel sick. He went through their pages anyway, hoping against hope that there was some loophole, that they were stepsiblings, or adopted, or anything at all. There was not. He found baby photos, a shared birthday cake, a family tree on a genealogy page. They were full siblings, same mother, same father. Eli regretted looking. In a way it felt even grosser than murder. He wondered what kind of childhood could have produced the two of them. It could not have been a good or normal one. But they came from a witch family, and a witch family's childhood was unlikely to be normal. Eli had been lucky in that regard. His father and his mother had both protected him from that life, and had given him an ordinary childhood. People who were weird enough to sleep with their own siblings could be messed up enough to be serial killers as well. He decided to keep an eye on them.

Zara Qadir had no social media, or at least none that he could find in English. He typed her name in Arabic, and found more: a handful of posts, a scholarship fund for translators, a long and gentle article about a mosque restoration. She seemed a pretty nice, normal, well-adjusted person, all things considered, and he could not imagine her as a serial killer. Then he remembered what Drew had said at the Parlor, that the nicest one in the room might be the killer, pretending to be kind to throw off suspicion. It was an overly suspicious way to look at things. But it was better to be paranoid and alive than trusting and dead in a deadly witches' contest, and he did not delete the thought.

He typed the last name. Silas Crane. There were no results. No profile. No photograph. A property tax record for a house on Dock Street, in the name of a dead man. Nothing else. A most private gentleman, Nye had said, and Eli understood now that it had not been a joke. It was simply a fact.

He put the phone away. He would ask Priya and Danny whether the name meant anything to them. It was a small risk, and it was the only one he had.

The basement office of the Harbor Light lay behind a door marked STAFF ONLY in faded stencil, down a flight of stairs that smelled of damp concrete and old ink. It was a low, cramped, windowless room full of battered desks and filing cabinets, with a microfilm reader in the corner and a wall crowded with yellowing front pages, framed and pinned and curling. Priya had already been there for ten minutes when Eli came down after the last bell. She had pulled three reels of film onto the desk and was threading a fourth into the machine with the brisk, practiced care of someone who had done it a hundred times.

"The scans are bad before 1960," she said, without turning around. "I've been through the 1954 reel. It's the same. Six people, October, the waterfront, no bodies. It's in the tiniest print." She nodded at the chair beside her. "Sit. Don't touch anything that looks fragile."

He sat. The machine hummed. For a few minutes neither of them spoke, and the pale blue light of the screen turned the old headlines to ghost writing.

"Can I ask you something?" Eli said. "Do you know anyone named Silas Crane?"

"Crane." Priya paused, with her hand on the crank. "Like Crane and Sons? The funeral home on Dock Street? That closed before we were in high school? Danny calls it the dead house. He won't walk past it after dark." She tilted her head. "Why?"

"I heard the name at my grandmother's." It was a lie, or the thinnest edge of the truth. "I was curious."

"Okay," she said, mildly. She did not seem to find it odd. Eli had the sudden strong impression that she liked this, that a puzzle with real pieces was exactly what she had been waiting for all fall. "Let's look."

It took her less than ten minutes. She went to the 2008 reel, skipping through the fall, and found the cluster of headlines without having to search. October 2008: Four Missing From Waterfront. Police Baffled. Search for Missing Teenagers Called Off. And a third, in smaller print, three days after the others: Funeral Director Questioned in Harbor Disappearances. Released Without Charge.

"There," Priya said, and tapped the screen.

A grainy photograph filled one corner: a tall, stooped, gray-faced man in a black suit, standing on the steps of a building with boards over its windows. Ambrose Crane, 52, owner of Crane & Sons Funeral Home, leaves police headquarters after questioning. A witness reported lights in the building on the night of the disappearances. No charges have been filed. Beside him, half hidden behind his arm, stood a thin teenage boy with his head bowed and the collar of a dark coat turned up around his jaw. His face was turned away. The younger Mr. Crane, 16, declined to comment.

"Sixteen," Eli said.

"What?"

"In 2008, he was sixteen." He did the math without thinking. "That would make him thirty-four now." He heard himself add, in a voice that did not sound quite like his own, "His name is Silas."

Priya looked from the screen to his face, and then, slowly, back. She scrolled down.

...a woman who lives near the old Dock Street wharf told reporters that on the night her friend vanished, she heard a man humming in the dark. 'It was a lullaby,' she said. 'Like you'd sing to a baby. I thought it was somebody's father, coming home.'

The room was very quiet. Somewhere above them, a bell rang, muffled, and feet began to move in the hall.

"That's horrible," Priya said, very softly.

"Yeah."

"Can I ask why you're so interested in him?" She did not say it with suspicion. She said it the way she might have asked the time, plainly, and with real concern. "I'm not trying to pry. I just don't want you to get hurt."

Eli looked at the photograph. He had not planned to say it. He found that he wanted to, a little, to someone who was not a cat or a girlfriend of his father's.

"My dad," he said. "The police said he died in a car accident." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't think it was an accident. I can't prove it. A lot of things about it don't add up, and the name Silas Crane came up. I don't know if he's connected to my dad or to the people at the docks. I don't know if I'm crazy."

"You're not crazy." Priya had turned fully toward him now. "Eli. I'm so sorry."

"It's okay."

"It isn't. But I understand." She was quiet for a moment. "If you suspect someone, why not go to the police?"

"I have nothing they'd believe. A name and a feeling. And I'm not even sure myself." He spread his hands. "If I'm wrong, I've pointed at someone for nothing. If I'm right, I don't know what happens next."

Priya looked at the screen, and then at him. She nodded, once, slowly, and some decision settled in her face. "Okay," she said. "Then we find out more. Quietly. I'm going to make a file, with every article, every date, every name. I'll keep digging in the evenings. And if you ever want to talk, or if you find something, you tell me."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know I don't." She pulled a printout from the machine and slapped it into his hands, with a sharp, kind, slightly furious glance. "I want to. Just don't get killed."

It did not confirm everything. He told himself so as he climbed the stairs, with the printout folded in his bag and the cold already settling in his bones. It was a pattern. It was a name, a face, a shape. It was not proof. But he thought of the empty seat at the Parlor, and of a name that had made the fire gutter, and of an old, patient, humming sound in the dark. He could not be sure of it. He only suspected, with a sick and uneasy certainty he could not quite explain, that he might know who had killed Marguerite Beaumont.

He was going to keep an eye out for Silas Crane.

Danny was waiting at the front doors when the last bell rang, leaning against a pillar with his hands shoved in his hoodie pocket, looking young and tired and uncertain.

"Walk you out?" he said.

"Sure."

They went down the steps together into a cold and yellow afternoon. Mina fell back a few yards, tactfully, to give them room. At the bottom of the steps Danny stopped, and scuffed his shoe against the curb.

"I'm really glad you came back," he said. He did not look up. "I know it's, like. It's a terrible reason. Your dad, and everything. But I missed you, man. I missed you a lot. When you left it was like..." He shrugged, helplessly. "I don't know. Like somebody pulled a tooth. You get used to it. But you notice."

"I missed you too."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. A lot."

Danny nodded, with a quick, embarrassed, fierce jerk of the head. He was quiet a moment. Then, in a lower voice, as though he were afraid of the words, he said: "Can I tell you something? Nobody knows. Not even my uncle."

"Sure."

"I'm going to marry her." He said it all in a rush, and his ears went red. "Priya. Not now. Not for a long time. She's going to college, she's going to be something big, and I'm gonna wait. I'll be at the shop. I'll save up. I'm gonna get a ring, a real one, and when she's done, when she's ready, I'm going to ask." He swallowed. "I'm serious, Eli. I'm not messing around. I've never been more serious about anything."

"I believe you."

"It's not gonna be easy." Danny rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm Catholic. My grandmother goes to Mass every morning. And Priya's Hindu. Her parents are really nice, but, you know. It's a whole thing. Her mom already has opinions. I don't know how it's gonna work." He laughed, shakily. "But I think it can. I think we can make it work. I think if you love somebody enough, you figure it out."

Eli looked at his friend's broad, flushed, honest face, and thought of everything he had learned in the last week, and everything he could not say.

"I think you will," he said. "I hope so. Good luck, man. I mean that."

"Thanks." Danny grinned, the crooked, chipped, beautiful grin. "Come by the shop Saturday. I'll show you the new tank. We got a lobster the size of a cat."

"I'll be there."

He watched Danny go off up the street, with his hands in his pockets and his head up, toward the harbor and the long gray row of warehouses. He told himself that it was the cold that made his eyes sting.

Jonah was waiting at the corner of Harbor and Fifth.

He was leaning against a lamp post in the long black coat, with his hands in his pockets and the silver ring catching the late sun, as still as a statue and almost as out of place. He straightened as they approached, and a smile of enormous, unconcerned brightness flickered across his pale face and was gone. "Master Eli," he said, and then, catching Mina's look: "Eli. Sorry. Eli." He tried the name over again, as if tasting it. "Eli."

"Hi, Jonah."

"I watched the school," Jonah said. "The whole perimeter. There were two cats, a custodian who smokes behind the gym, a boy selling pills behind the east bleachers, and a pigeon with a very odd way of walking. There was also a couple in a parked car on Fifth Street, having sex. They are teachers here, I believe, a man from chemistry and a woman from the art room, and I do not think either of them is married to the other. I watched them for some time, to be sure they were not a threat. Nothing else. Nobody suspicious." He said it with great seriousness, and beside him Mina closed her eyes. Eli decided not to ask a single follow-up question. "I'm good at watching."

"You said." Eli almost smiled. "Thanks."

They fell into a loose line along the sidewalk, with Mina on his left, Jonah on his right, a half step behind. It struck him, walking, how different she looked among other people. At school, in the bright flat light of the hallways, Mina had looked like an ordinary girl. A very pretty one, in her own way, tall for her size and graceful, with her black lipstick and silver rings and her heavy boots, a Black girl with a gothic style that she carried with calm and unforced elegance. A few of the other students had nodded to her. One of them had asked, shyly, where she got her jacket. Away from the doors, with the hall noise gone, she seemed to fold up and settle again into the quiet watchful stillness of the manor. It was as if she wore two faces, one for the world and one for her work, and could change between them in a breath.

Jonah did not change. That was the thing about him. Eli could not say what it was. Jonah was polite, and watchful, and mild, and perfectly capable. But there was something under the surface of him, an odd, restless, bruised light, that kept catching at the edge of Eli's attention. When Eli glanced at him, Jonah looked quickly at the pavement. When Eli looked away, he could feel those pale eyes on the back of his head. Whatever it was, it did not seem to be hostile. It seemed hungry, and shy, and very much like waiting.

He did not know what to do with it. He put it away to think about later.

"Can I ask you something?" Eli said. "Both of you. What's your story?"

They glanced at each other.

"We were born into it," Mina said, after a moment. "The life. The craft. My family has served the Calloways and the Hales for generations. So has Jonah's. We were raised to serve, and there was never anything else." She said it simply, without bitterness, as another person might have said she was born in the spring. "We have known each other since we were small. Our mothers worked in the same wing of the manor. We began dating at fourteen, and we have been serving the coven together as a couple ever since."

"It is a pleasure to serve," Jonah added, with perfect sincerity. The odd, bright look had come back into his eyes.

Eli did not know what to say. "Okay," he said. "Thank you for telling me."

He noticed that neither of them had said they had chosen it. He noticed, too, that neither of them seemed to find that strange. It seemed to him that Jonah truly was glad to be a servant. He wondered which Mina was the real one, the mostly normal goth girl who shared her notes at school, or the submissive acolyte who secretly worked for his grandmother.

They left him at his father's gate, with a murmured good evening and a bow that was not quite a bow. He watched them go down the road together, her hand brushing his, and shut the door behind him.

Vex had made grilled cheese again. It was becoming a tradition.

They sat at the kitchen table with the printouts spread between them and Mordecai curled on a chair, bandaged and drowsing. He was healing slowly. A familiar drew its strength from its witch, and Eli was new, with no patron to feed the bond, so wounds that would have closed overnight under Thomas were taking days. For a long while Vex said nothing. She read every page. She read the one with the photograph twice, and put her finger on the line about the lullaby, and sat looking at it with her lips pressed together.

"Crane," she said at last. "I know the name. Not the man. The clan. They're undertakers, mostly. Old and strange. They keep to themselves. Your dad told me once that no one has been inside a Crane house in thirty years who came out the same." She shuddered, slightly. "I never thought about them again."

"I have not heard the Crane name in a long time," said Mordecai, without opening his eyes. "I thought that line had died out. It was a quiet, ugly one, and I thought it had ended quietly." He opened one eye. "But Silas Crane does not sit for the Crane clan. The seat he holds, Number Five, belongs to the Marrows. Gideon Marrow was to be their champion this year. He died in September, in his bed, of a failed heart. Silas's mother was a Marrow. Ambrose Crane married her and kept the boy apart from her family, and after she died, nobody saw him. He claimed the seat through his mother's blood, and the Marrows, I am told, had no one else. So the clan was expected to send an old man named Gideon, and it sent a Crane. That is why no one in that room knew his face."

"September," Eli said. "Like my father."

"Yes. I noticed." The cat closed the eye again. "I do not know what it means. It may mean nothing."

"It might not," Eli agreed. He laid his palm flat on the table. "I think it could be him. Marguerite. The missing people at the docks. I don't know. I can't prove any of it, and I might be wrong."

"Then we keep our eyes open," Vex said. "And we stay out of the dark. And we do not go looking for him." She gave him a hard look. "Eli."

"I know."

"Say it."

"I won't go looking for him."

"Good."

They ate for a while in silence. The light had gone orange in the window, then red, and a siren wailed somewhere across the harbor and faded. He turned a crust over in his fingers.

"Mina and Jonah walked me to school," he said. "Like I was a prince. Like they were my guards. Grandmother calls them gifts." He said the word carefully. "When I told you she'd given me two people, you said, she does that."

Vex went very still.

"I want to know what you meant," Eli said. "If you don't mind. If you don't want to, I'll drop it."

For a long moment she did not answer. She picked at the edge of her sandwich. Then, with a small sigh, she pushed the plate aside and drew up her knees, and looked at the window.

"I ran away when I was seventeen," she said.

He did not speak.

"I won't tell you why. It isn't a good story, and it doesn't matter anymore. I just left. I took a bus with eighty dollars and a bag, and I kept going. I moved around the country for a few months. Ohio, Arizona, a few weeks in Chicago. I slept on couches, and in shelters, and once for two weeks in the back of a laundromat. I learned how to talk to strangers. I learned how to ask for money, and how to make people feel good about giving it." She smiled thinly. "And one day I got on a bus in Pittsburgh without really choosing to, and I got off in Port Verity. I didn't know anybody here. I didn't know why. It felt like something had pulled me. Like I had followed a string."

"Fate," Eli said.

"Something. I found a shelter on Marsh Street. And three days later, a woman in a green coat came into the soup kitchen, and looked at me across the room, and said, in front of everybody, Child, you have a spark." She laughed, once, without humor. "She was so kind. She took me back to the manor. She fed me, and gave me a room, and clothes, and a bath. I thought she was a rich old lady who did charity. And then she showed me what I could do."

Eli thought of the banner in the manor's hall. The Hale Foundation. The shelters, the soup kitchens, the scholarships, the name carved into the sides of buildings. The thought settled over him, cold and exact. It was not charity, or not only. It was a net. There was no shortage in the world of runaway teenagers and homeless kids and desperate people with no one to miss them, and Ophelia had the money to lure them in with a hot meal and a warm bed and a kind word, and then turn them into tools for the coven. He remembered the young servants at the dinner, the girls in white gloves and the boys at the mayor's elbow, and wondered how many of them had come in through his grandmother's generosity. She had a reputation for charity. He saw now that there was nothing charitable about her at all.

"What did you do?"

"I made a candle burn blue." Vex held up one finger, and a tiny blue flame stood on the tip of it, and went out. "I'd been doing little things my whole life. Making lights flicker. Knowing who was at the door. I thought I was strange. She said I was gifted. She said I could be extraordinary." She dropped her hand. "She trained me for a few months, and I learned fast. The first time she made me push, I blew out every glass window in the east wing. She laughed for ten minutes. She taught me the basics, and the rituals, and the oaths. I was the best she'd seen in decades, she said. She took me into the coven. She made me her apprentice. And the week I turned eighteen, she told me she had a gift for me."

Eli's stomach tightened. "Dad."

"Your dad." Vex nodded. "I didn't understand it at the time. I thought I was being rewarded, that I'd been sent to learn from the best witch in the family, a gift from Ophelia to me. It took me a long time to see that I had it backwards. I was the gift. I was the gift she gave her middle-aged son. A witch like Thomas needed a partner, for certain rituals. Some of them need a man and a woman, and it's traditional for a younger witch to be attached to an older one. The old one teaches. The young one assists. Ophelia thought it was perfect. A talented girl in her son's house. An edge for him in the contest. A leash on him, to keep him obedient. And a pair of eyes." She said the last word flatly. "A spy."

"She sent you to spy on him."

"I did, at first." She met his eyes steadily, and did not look away. "I'm not proud of it. I reported on him. Who he called. What he wrote. Where he went. I told her everything for the first year, because I owed her everything, and I was eighteen and I believed her."

"Why you?"

"For my talent, she said. Because I was loyal. Because I owed her my life." She rubbed her wrist. "And I think, though she'd never say it, because it was a slap at your mom. Your dad was divorced. She hated Claire. She could not have found a more perfect way to say look what I can give him that you never could than to put a girl twenty-six years younger than him in his bed."

"That's..."

"Petty. Yes. She's very petty." Vex smiled, bitterly, and picked up her glass. "I wasn't a prude, Eli. I don't think I ever was. I looked at your dad, and I thought, well. He's not ugly. He's tall, and bearded, and weathered, and he has those big hands with the ink all over them, and he's kind. He's divorced. He's single. He wasn't a stranger, he was a man in a house. We were both adults, and both single. I didn't see what was wrong with it. Not really. Not even with the age gap. I didn't mind becoming his live-in girlfriend, and learning everything he knew. It wasn't a bad life. It was a good house. Good food. Money. My needs were looked after, and I had a very active, very satisfying..."

"Please," Eli said.

"...life with him," she finished serenely. "I'm only saying it wasn't a prison."

"Okay."

"The only thing I never had was the other thing." She had turned the glass in her fingers. "The part where you're in love. We never had that. He cared for me, in his way, and I cared for him. We took care of each other. But we were from different generations, and we had nothing in common, and I think we both knew, from the beginning, that it was something physical, and nothing more. It was never romantic. I never fell for him." She shrugged. "I tried. It's just not what was there."

The kitchen clock ticked. Mordecai had opened one eye.

"Somewhere in the second year," Vex went on, "I stopped reporting. I didn't plan it. Your dad was kind, and he was lonely, and he talked to me about you all the time. And I started to feel like a thief. I stopped telling Ophelia anything real. I fed her scraps, and then I fed her nothing. And one night I told him. I couldn't stand it anymore. I said, Thomas, I've been telling your mother everything. And he looked at me, and he said, I know. I've known since the first month." Her mouth shook, briefly, into a smile. "He wasn't angry. He said he'd been grateful for the company."

"That's why you're still an apprentice," Eli said slowly. It had begun to fit together.

"Yes. Ophelia doesn't forgive disloyalty. I was never promoted, never advanced. I'm still an apprentice in the coven's eyes, three years later, when I can do everything a full witch can, and more." She waved a hand. "I don't really care about being a bigshot in the coven. I never wanted to be. But she had big plans for me, before that. You wouldn't believe how big."

"What plans?"

Vex hesitated. "You're not going to like it."

"Tell me."

"She wanted me to have his babies." She said it fast, like pulling a bandage. "She wanted me to marry him. Be his wife, his partner in the coven, and bear his children. A whole line of them. And I was gifted, remember, and Thomas was gifted, and your mother had no magic at all. She figured the kids would be stronger than any Calloway in a hundred years. She wanted a new generation, with full blood and full talent. And me as the daughter-in-law, her right hand, someone who did everything Ophelia told her to."

Eli's stomach turned over. He saw it all at once, with a sickening clarity: Vex, three years older than himself, round and pregnant, standing in this very kitchen, and then in a hospital bed, pushing out his half-brother or half-sister. His father's hands on her. A baby on a hip, a half-brother, a half-sister, sharing half of his blood and half of hers. A whole brood of them, bred to a purpose, bound to a house. She had become his friend over the last week, and he did not want to see her like that, not for a second.

"She wanted to replace me," he said.

"I think she wanted a backup." Vex's face was pale. "You didn't have the training, you didn't have the talent that she could see. You were Claire's boy."

"So she wanted new grandchildren."

"Better ones. In her mind." She shuddered. "I want you to know I never wanted it. Not for a second. I was eighteen when I first met your dad. I am twenty-one now. It was way too early. I didn't want to be a mother. I didn't want to make babies for a coven, to give them magic. The idea of it makes me sick."

"Dad must have felt the same." The words were out before he could stop them. "He must have hated it. A girl three years older than his own son?"

Vex did not answer. She looked at her hands, and her face tightened, and she let out a long, unsteady breath.

"He considered it," she said.

Eli stared at her.

"Once. Just once." She winced. "He missed you, Eli. He was a dad at heart. He had a whole life he couldn't use. He'd lie awake, and I'd feel him thinking of you. And one night he asked me, very quietly, if I wanted to have his babies. To raise them together. To be a family." She swallowed. "I said no. I said it as gently as I could. And he said, All right. And that was the end of it. He never brought it up again."

The room seemed to tilt.

Eli sat very still. He was, he found, trying to come to terms with a great many things at once. He had begun to accept that his father had slept with this girl, and lived with her as a boyfriend for three years, and had loved her in some way, though not the way that counted. That had been hard enough. But the thought that his father had sat in the dark and wondered whether to put a child in her, a replacement, a second chance, made his skin crawl all over again. He was grateful to her. He was fiercely, almost painfully grateful that she had said no. He did not know whether he could have sat across a table from her, as he did now, if the answer had been different. He did not think he could have looked at her at all.

"I'm glad you refused," he said, hoarsely.

"So am I." She laughed, wetly, and wiped her face with her wrist. "Oh, God. I'm sorry. That was a lot."

"It's okay."

"It's really not."

"No," Eli admitted. "But I'm glad you told me."

He looked down at the table. A long time passed before he spoke again. When he did, his voice was low, and quite steady. "Mina and Jonah," he said. "They're the same thing, aren't they. They're meant to be what you were. A leash, and a pair of eyes."

"Yes," said Vex. "That's what the gifts are. Hooks. She uses them to control you, to make you do what she wants."

The phone rang.

It buzzed on the counter, two long, insistent shudders, and the screen lit with a name that he had not yet put in his contacts. Ophelia Hale. He had not known that she had his number. He supposed she had always had it. Vex's face went blank, and she shook her head very slightly, don't, and then slowly nodded. He picked it up.

"Grandmother."

"Elias." The voice was warm, low, and utterly composed. It might have been the voice of a woman sitting beside a fire. "I hope your first day went well. I am told you have reconnected with some old friends. A Reyes boy, and an Indian girl, I believe. How charming."

His hand tightened on the phone.

"It was fine," he said. "Thank you for arranging it."

"It was nothing. A small thing." He could hear a faint clink, glass against glass. "I will not keep you. I only wished to offer a word of advice, as your grandmother. You are new to this. You will find, as you progress, that the patrons favor those who give something of themselves. They like to feel that they are valued. Think on it."

"I will."

"Good boy. Good night, Elias."

The line went dead. Eli set the phone down very carefully.

"She knows about Danny and Priya," he said.

"She knows everything you did today," said Vex.

Mina, he thought. He remembered how she had followed him everywhere that day, through every hallway and into the library, like a shadow, and reported all of it to her mistress, the matriarch of the clan. He sat looking at the dark screen. Beneath his politeness, he felt a cold and steady suspicion. How does she plan to use me? He did not know. He only knew that she would. He thought of the first twelve years of his life, spent, without his knowing it, at a careful and loving distance from this house and this woman and this web. His father had kept him out. His mother had carried him away. Six more years of quiet, of school and summer and ordinary life, because two people had loved him enough to say no to Ophelia Hale. He was grateful to them both, with a force that startled him.

And now he was back. He had walked into the middle of the spider's web, of his own free will, and there was no way out but forward.

"Hey."

Vex had gotten up. She went to the freezer and came back with a tub of mint chip and two spoons, and set it between them on the table with a thump. "Dessert," she said. "For clearing the mind. It's very scientific."

He took a spoon. The ice cream was cold and sweet and tasted of toothpaste, and he ate it in silence with her across the table, spoon against spoon, until the weight in his chest had eased a little. He tried to put everything he had learned out of his head again. What she might have been to his father did not matter. What mattered was that she was here now, and that she had been a huge help to him, and that he liked sitting across from her with a spoon in his hand. She did not say anything else. She did not need to. It was enough that she was there.

The small television on the counter was murmuring in the background. He had stopped listening to it. Then a voice cut through the quiet, bland and professional, and the two of them looked up together.

"...the sixth person to be reported missing from the harbor district this month. Police are asking the public for any information. Residents are advised not to walk alone near the waterfront after dark..."

Neither of them said a word. Vex reached over, after a moment, and turned it off.

He went up to bed with the sound of the harbor in his ears. In the pocket of his jeans, his phone buzzed once. Saturday? Danny had written. Dont forget the lobster. He read it twice, and put it face down on the dresser, and lay in the dark with his palm warm on his chest.