October 8: Mother

The text arrived at ten the night before, while Eli was brushing his teeth.

Your school called me. They said they'd had a records request from Port Verity High, and that your grandmother arranged the transfer. Eli, what did you do? I'm coming tomorrow. Be packed.

He read it twice with the toothbrush still in his mouth. Then he spat, and rinsed, and sat down on the edge of the bathtub with the phone in his hands. He had known this was coming. He had put it off for two days with a steady, cowardly practice, telling himself he would call when he had worked out what to say. He had not worked out what to say. There was no version of the truth that did not begin with a talking cat.

He typed Okay, and deleted it. He typed Mom, I can explain, and deleted that too. In the end he sent Okay. Drive safe. It was the first time in his life he had felt a message was a lie by what it left out.

In the morning, Vex made him toast and did not make a joke about it.

"She's going to hate this house," she said, leaning on the counter with her arms folded. "And she's going to hate me. You know that, right? Even if she never says it."

"She doesn't know about you."

"She knows your dad had a girlfriend. I'm sure of it. People always know." Vex stared into her mug. "I'm going to stay upstairs. Out of sight. I'm the last person she wants to see."

"You live here."

"I know." She gave a small, tired laugh. "That's the problem."

He had told Mina to tell the school that there was a family matter, and Mina, who now seemed to understand the value of not asking questions, had only nodded. So there was no school. There was only the long gray morning, and the sound of the harbor, and Eli at the window of the living room, watching the road. Mordecai lay on the arm of the sofa with his bandage off and a faint pink scar showing where the fur had grown back wrong along his flank. He was looking at the door.

"She will not take it well," the cat said.

"No."

"She has reason." He lifted his head. "Remember, whatever you decide, that she is a good woman who has done an extraordinary thing. She has raised a witch's son without once teaching him to fear the dark. That is not nothing, Eli."

"I know."

A little before noon, an old green hatchback turned onto the street and pulled up at the curb.

Eli knew it at once. It had a dent in the rear fender from a parking lot in his seventh-grade year and a bumper sticker for a public radio station, and it was so ordinary, so completely of the other life, that for a moment he could not move. The engine cut off. The driver's door stayed shut. She sat there for a long moment with both hands on the wheel, looking at the house, and he saw her take a breath, and let it out, and open the door.

Claire Mercer was forty-four years old, and she was small. That was the first thing anyone noticed, and the first thing she never seemed to notice herself. She was petite and slight, in a navy cardigan and sensible shoes, with auburn hair that had gone silver at the temples and been pinned back in a hurry, and a pair of tired eyes that had not slept properly since the phone call that told her her ex-husband was dead. She had gone back to her maiden name after the divorce. She had said she wanted to stop being a Calloway in every way that counted. Eli had kept his father's name, and she had never once asked him to change it. She stood on the sidewalk with her purse clutched against her side and her gaze traveling slowly up the face of the house, from the porch to the gables to the dark upper windows, and a small, involuntary shiver went across her shoulders. She did not know why. She could not have said what she felt. But Eli, standing behind the glass, felt the wards stir, a faint sensitive hum in the frame of the door, and understood that something in her had heard them.

He opened the door before she could knock.

"Eli."

She crossed the porch in three steps and took his face in both hands. She searched it, from his forehead to his jaw, and her eyes filled, and then she pulled him down into a hug so fierce that it knocked the breath out of him. She smelled of lavender and gas station coffee and the inside of the old car. She was shaking. He put his arms around her, and for a minute he was twelve again, and nothing was wrong, and nobody had died.

"You've lost weight," she said into his shoulder.

"I've been eating eggs."

"That isn't weight." She drew back, wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and put her expression on again, one piece at a time, like armor. "You said you were staying to sort your father's things. You said a week. You did not say you were enrolling in a new school."

"Mom..."

"We'll talk about it." Her mouth was very tight. "Let me in. I haven't been in this house in six years."

She stopped on the threshold. Her eyes went to the frame of the door, to the row of iron nails and the hanging horseshoe, to the thin white line of salt along the sill, and for a moment he thought she was going to turn back. Then she put her chin up and stepped through. In the hallway she paused again, and looked around at the old stairs and the coat hooks and the long dim corridor, and said quietly, "It smells the same." Eli watched her stand there, and understood something he had never let himself think about. She had loved his father once. Before the secrets, before the silences, before the divorce, she had walked into this hallway as a young wife, and carried a baby over this threshold. It must be hard, he thought, to come back to the house where she had built a life with someone, now that he was dead.

"Mom, I..."

"Oh, Mordecai!"

The cat had slid off the sofa and come to wind around her ankles, with a perfectly convincing look of feline ordinariness. Claire dropped to a crouch and put her fingers into his fur. Her whole face softened. "Look at you. Are you still alive? You were old when Eli was born. This cat is older than you are." She stroked his scarred ear. "What happened to you?"

"He got into a fight," Eli said.

"Of course he did." She smiled, and it was the first real smile he had seen on her in a week. Mordecai bore it with grave patience. Only once, as she rose, did he lift his amber eyes to Eli, and they were very serious.

That was when someone started down the stairs.

Eli saw her before Claire did. Vex had been halfway up the second flight, in her striped socks, with an armful of laundry, and she had stopped on the landing with the freeze of a deer in headlights. She had pulled a hoodie over her band tee and tied her hair back, and her eyeliner looked as though she had put it on and wiped it off twice. There was nowhere to go. She had only come down because the old pipes had begun to knock, and she had forgotten, for a second, that she was meant to be hiding.

Claire turned.

The silence in the hall was complete. Eli saw his mother's eyes go to the girl on the stairs, and take in the black-and-red hair, and the piercings in her lip, and the striped arm warmers, and the age of her, and the way she stood in the house with her laundry as though she lived here. He saw the pieces assemble. He saw his mother's face go very still and pale, with a small, appalled, polite blankness, like a woman who has just been told the price of something she cannot afford.

"Hello," Claire said, in a voice so careful that it creaked.

Vex's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. Her knuckles were white on the laundry. She looked at Eli with a naked, helpless plea.

And Eli heard himself say, "Mom, this is Vex. She's a friend. She's been helping me sort Dad's things. And with the laundry."

Every word of it was true. Somewhere in the last week she had become his friend, and she had been helping him go through his father's things, and she had been carrying armfuls of his laundry down those stairs. He watched it land.

It took a second. His mother's shoulders came down by about an inch. Something that had been clenched in her face for a very long time unwound, and went out of her in a quiet breath. "Oh," she said. "Oh. A friend." The tight politeness broke, and a flustered, relieved warmth came into her voice. "I'm so sorry. I'm Claire. I'm Eli's mother. I didn't know... it's so nice to meet you. Thank you for helping."

Vex had gone from white to flushed. She came down the last steps, shifted the laundry to one arm, and put out her hand. "Vex," she said. "It's no trouble. I'm... glad to help." Her voice cracked, very slightly, on the last word. She did not meet Eli's eyes, and the relief that poured off her was so visible that he wondered how his mother could have missed it. But Claire had her own relief to manage, and she shook the girl's hand twice, and let it go, and glanced away, and neither of them looked at the other for longer than a second.

It was the most awkward handshake in the history of handshakes. Vex could not seem to look at the woman in front of her, who was old enough to be her mother, and who had been married to the man she had slept beside for three years. Claire was only a little better. And Eli, standing between them, felt the whole absurd weight of it: two women, both of whom had shared a bed with his father, shaking hands in his father's hallway. His mother knew that Thomas had found someone after the divorce. She did not know that the someone was closer to her son's age than to hers. He decided, in that moment, that she never would. It was the kinder lie. It was also, he realized, the kindest thing he could have done for either of them.

"I'll make tea," said Vex, and fled.

Claire sat at the kitchen table with a mug of tea she did not drink, and her son across from her, and told him what she thought.

She was not shouting. That was the worst of it. She talked in the low, even, reasonable voice she used when she was frightened, the voice that had walked him through every childhood fever and every school meeting, and it was far harder to bear than anger. Port Verity High had pulled his records without calling her. A woman from the district had said that Mrs. Hale had taken a personal interest. His old school had assured her that his enrollment was fine, and then, in a different tone, that it had been fine until the transfer. She had called the Port Verity school board and been put on hold for twenty minutes. She had called her lawyer.

"I haven't done anything wrong," Eli said. "I mean, not on purpose."

"I know you haven't. This isn't about you." She set down the mug. "It's about your grandmother. She's done this before. She decides. She decides where people live, and what they wear, and whose children go to which school, and then she makes it so, and nobody ever thinks to ask whether they agree. I let it go for years. I let it go when you were small, and the checks came every birthday, and I put them away. I let it go when she tried to put your name down at her private academy when you were four." She pressed her lips together. "I'm not letting it go now."

"Mom, I'm eighteen."

"I know how old you are. I was there." The words came out sharper than she had intended, and she closed her eyes, and opened them again. "I'm not trying to control you, Eli. I swear I'm not. I know that's what it looks like. But I let you come here for a funeral, because I couldn't keep a son from his father's grave. And I let you stay a week, because you asked, and because I thought, a week. A week is nothing. And then your school calls, and tells me you've been transferred, and I find that the one person on the planet I never wanted near you has already got her hands around your life." Her voice broke. "I've lost one person to this family. I'm not going to lose you."

Eli had no answer. He sat looking at her small, tired, determined face, and the same ache rose in him that he had felt at the grave. He had never been so close to saying everything. Mom, Dad was a witch. I'm one too. There's a contest, and people are dying, and I'm in it. The words sat in his throat like stones.

"Why did you leave Dad?" he said instead.

She looked at him. For a moment she seemed to measure how much he could bear.

"I'll tell you in the car," she said, and picked up her mug.

His phone buzzed on the table. He glanced down. It was Mina.

Your grandmother is on her way to the house. Jonah saw your mother's car and reported it before I could stop him. I am sorry.

Mina was at school, covering for him as he had asked. Jonah, who was supposed to be watching the house, must have seen the green hatchback pull up and reported it to Ophelia, as he had been ordered to. Jonah must have told Mina afterward, as he told her everything, and she had tried to warn Eli in the little time she had. He did not know what to make of that. Later, he would be grateful for it. For now he was already looking toward the window when he heard the sound of tires on the gravel, a long, smooth, expensive crunch, and the soft thud of a car door. Beside him, Mordecai lifted his head. His whiskers had gone flat. His mother's face did not change. It went absolutely still, like the surface of a pond in the moment before a stone drops.

"Ophelia," she said.

They met her at the gate.

She had not come through it. That was the first thing Eli noticed, stepping out onto the porch with his mother's hand locked around his wrist. A long black car stood at the curb, with the same silent driver at the wheel, and his grandmother stood on the sidewalk just short of the iron fence, with her gloved hands folded over the handle of an umbrella she did not need. She was in a charcoal coat of exquisite cut, with her silver-streaked hair swept back, and the cold wind off the harbor did not seem to touch her. She could not cross that line. Eli understood it without being told. His father had set the perimeter ward so that no one passed without the permission of the master of the house, and he had not trusted his mother, so he had built it with her in mind. Ophelia could have forced her way through, but it would have taken great effort and a great deal of noise, and she was not going to be seen struggling at a gate. So she stood outside and waited, with perfect composure, and made it look like a choice. The master of the house was Eli now. Only he could ask her in.

In the back seat of the car, behind the glass, he saw a pale face and a flash of silver at one eyebrow. Jonah was looking at his knees.

"Claire," said Ophelia. Her voice carried across the yard without effort, warm and low and utterly composed. "How very unexpected. You look tired."

"I drove four hours," Claire said. She had stopped at the top of the porch steps. Her small frame had gone rigid, and her voice did not shake, though Eli could feel the tremor in the hand around his wrist. "Ophelia."

"I had heard you went back to Mercer," said Ophelia. "How very thorough."

"It is the name I was born with."

"Of course," said Ophelia. "I stayed a Hale myself, even after I married Elias's grandfather. A name outlasts a marriage." A flicker of something amused crossed her face. "And now you have come to take him home. Home. Is that not a rather strong word?"

"It's where he lives."

"It is where he has been staying." Ophelia lifted her chin, and her eyes went to Eli, and for just a moment, and for the first time that week, he saw something in them that was not warmth or calculation. It was a sort of tired, cold, ancient contempt, and it was not directed at him. "I will be honest with you, Claire. I have always been honest with you. I was glad when the marriage ended. I made no secret of it. Thomas was never meant for a life of homework and carpools and a house in the suburbs. He was a Calloway. He had obligations. You did what any sensible person does in your position. You ran."

"He was a good father."

"He was a wasted one."

"You enrolled my son in a school," Claire said, in a voice gone suddenly thin and clear, "without asking me. Without asking him."

"Elias is eighteen. He does not require your permission, or mine." Ophelia turned her head. "He chose to attend. Didn't you, my dear?"

Eli felt his mother's eyes swing to his face. He felt the weight of two women's expectations settle on him at once, one worn and trembling, the other cool and bright and as smooth as glass.

"Did you?" Claire whispered.

"Not exactly," he said. It came out hoarse. "I didn't... it was already done."

"A technicality," said Ophelia.

Claire let go of his wrist. She came down the porch steps, one at a time, and crossed the little yard, a small woman in a navy cardigan walking toward a tall one in a charcoal coat. She stopped an arm's length from the fence. Eli saw her hands tighten at her sides, and he saw that she was not afraid of the woman in the way a person is afraid of a stranger. She was afraid the way a person is afraid of a house at night, of the sound under the stairs, of something she had never been able to name.

"I don't know what you are," Claire said.

The wind moved in the bare trees.

"I never did. Not in twelve years of marriage. Not in all those years of birthday checks, and Christmas dinners where nobody looked at the door, and the way Thomas would go quiet when your name came up." Her voice had steadied. It was a small, flat, unwavering voice, and it carried the weight of a decision long since made. "I never knew what your family was. I only knew that there was something about it that frightened me. Something that did not feel like love. I watched you look at my son when he was a baby, and I thought, she wants something from him. I thought, this family wants to use him. And I couldn't prove it. I couldn't prove anything. But when Eli was twelve, I packed our bags and I took him away, and I would do it again tomorrow."

Eli stood very still on the porch. He had never heard her say it. He had thought, for years, that she had left because she was tired of the marriage, or the secrets, or the silence. He had never once thought that she had been afraid.

Ophelia smiled.

It was not an unkind smile. It was the smile of a woman complimenting a child on a clever drawing. "You always were a clever girl, Claire," she said, "for an outsider. Clever enough to run. I am not at all certain that it was clever enough to matter."

"Grandmother." It was Eli who spoke. He had not meant to. "That's enough."

Ophelia's gaze lifted, and rested on him. Something moved in the pale light of her eyes, and passed, and was gone. "As you say, Elias." She inclined her head. "I only came to pay my respects. To the house, and to the family. And to Vesper, of course. I understand she has been such a help to Elias this week. She has always known how to make herself at home in this house."

There was the faintest, most delicate pressure on the word. Eli felt it like a pin.

Claire's head turned slowly toward the house. Her eyes found the upstairs window, where a pale shape had drawn quickly back from the curtain. "Vesper," she said. "The girl."

"Vex," said Eli, too loudly. "She's a friend. She's been helping me with Dad's things. I told you."

"So you did." His mother's eyes narrowed, for one long second. Then she turned back to Ophelia, and the second passed, and he knew that she had let it go, because the thing in front of her was a great deal bigger. He did look at his grandmother then, hard, over his mother's shoulder. He could feel her amusement, lazy and patient and perfectly pleased. She could have done so much worse. She could have told his mother plainly who Vex was, and that she had chosen her herself, a girl who was not even half Claire's age, sent to Thomas's bed to replace the wife who had walked away. Ophelia would have enjoyed it. She would have savored showing Claire how easily she had been replaced, by someone younger and prettier, a girl who had shared her husband's bed, a girl young enough to be her daughter, and she would have called it a lesson in obedience, a punishment for the daughter-in-law who had never done as she was told. If Vex had borne Thomas's children, as Ophelia had once planned, she would have used them to make it hurt even more. Eli would not let that happen to his mother. Nor to Vex. He held his grandmother's gaze, and put everything he could into the look, a flat refusal. For a moment something calculating moved behind her eyes. Then she smiled, very slightly, and let it go. He understood that she had weighed the swipe against his goodwill, and decided that keeping him on her side was worth more, for now, than a petty cut at her former daughter-in-law.

"Elias," said Ophelia. "Your mother is of course welcome to take you home. I would never prevent it. You are an adult, and you must decide." She tipped the umbrella a fraction, and the point of it touched the pavement. "But you know what it is that waits for you. You know that it does not stop at the county line."

Claire's head came up. "What does that mean?"

"It means that I am old, my dear, and I have seen what happens to boys who walk away from their families." The smile never wavered. "Think carefully, Elias. That is all."

She turned, and the driver opened the door for her. She slid into the back seat like a blade into a sheath. In the window of the car, Jonah's pale eyes met his for an instant, with an odd, bright, apologetic look, like a dog that knows it has done something wrong and is not sure what. Then the glass went dark, and the car drew away from the curb, and was gone.

The street was quiet. Claire stood at the fence with her shoulders shaking. He thought she was crying, and then he saw that she was furious, with a white, silent, trembling fury.

"I hate that woman," she said.

"I know, Mom."

"I hate her." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and turned, and the look in her eyes was one that he had not seen since the divorce. It was a mother's look, absolute and unarguable. "Go upstairs. Pack your bag. We are leaving. Now."

He went up the stairs because he had been told to, and because his legs did what they were told. In his old bedroom, he pulled the backpack out of the closet and stood looking at it, with the faded plastic stars on the ceiling and the stub of a blue candle on the dresser, and he did not put a single thing inside.

Mordecai was sitting on the bed.

He had come up without a sound, as he always did. He sat upright on the quilt with his scarred flank toward the window and his amber eyes level, and he did not say anything for a while. He let Eli stand there.

"You are going to tell me not to go," Eli said.

"I am not." The cat's voice was quiet. "I am going to tell you what I know, and then it is yours to decide. You are eighteen, and you have the right."

Eli sat down on the edge of the mattress. "Okay."

"The Sigil does not care about distance." Mordecai said it flatly, like a man reading out a sentence. "It does not care how many miles lie between you and Port Verity. It is a part of you now, and every other champion can feel it. They felt it when you were at the grave. They will feel it in your mother's kitchen. The dog found you in an afternoon. A better hunter could find you in an hour, and it would not matter where you were." He lowered his head. "If you take this home, Eli, you take it to her door. I have no ward on that house. I have no cat in that kitchen. And the first thing a champion does, when he cannot find the boy, is look for the people the boy loves."

Eli's throat had gone tight. "You think they'd go after her."

"I think she is safest where she is," Mordecai said. "A woman in another city, with no Sigil, no patron and no magic, is nothing to them. As long as you are not at her door, they have no reason to look at her. Bring the contest home, and she has no iron on her house, no salt on her sills, and nothing to turn it away. She would not be safe for an hour." His tail curled. "And there is the other matter. Your father was murdered. The one who did it is still walking in this city. You came back to find them. If you go, you will not find them. You will spend the rest of your life wondering who it was."

"I know."

"Then you know what I know. The rest is yours."

He was quiet for a long time, looking at the cat. He knew, with the cold clarity that came in the worst hours of that week, that Mordecai had not lied to him. He had told him only the truth. It was the most honest thing that anyone had said to him in days, and it was also the thing that he most wished he had not heard.

A floorboard creaked in the hall.

He looked up. Vex was standing in the doorway, with one hand on the frame, in her striped socks. She had taken off the hoodie, and she looked small and pale in the gray light, and her eyes were rimmed with red. He did not know how long she had been there. She did not come in.

"I heard," she said. "I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to listen." She pushed her hair behind her ear. "I think you should go."

"What?"

"I mean it." Her voice was brittle and bright. "It's safer. Your mom is right. You've been here a week, and you've nearly been killed twice, and there's a woman downstairs who just wants to take you home and make you pancakes. Go with her. You could even forfeit, you know. Give the Sigil back to Nye and walk away. You don't have to get yourself killed trying to avenge your dad." Her smile wobbled. "She seems like a good mom, Eli. A really good one. I wish I'd had a mom like that. You're lucky." She pressed her lips together. "I'll be fine. I've got the house. I've got the cat. I'll hold things together here, and when it's over, you can come back and tell me what happened."

She was lying. He saw that she was lying, and he saw why. She wanted the best for him, even if it cost her everything. Behind the bright voice and the shaking smile stood a girl who had lost the man she lived with, in a house full of his things, and who had spent a week laughing in the kitchen because someone else was there to fill the quiet. If he left, the quiet would come back. It would come back in every room, and sit in his father's chair, and she would be alone with it. She would not say so. She would hold the house together, as she had said, and wash the dishes and burn the soup. And when he came home, if he came home, there would be a little less of her.

He thought of the grave on the hill, and the board with its two black dates. He thought of the black card on the mat, and of a woman on a bench with her pearls beside her. He thought of a man in the dark, humming.

"I can't go yet," he said.

Vex's breath caught. For a second she looked like someone who had been handed something she did not dare to hold. "Eli..."

"I can't. Not yet." He stood. "I'm sorry. I need to find out what happened to him."

She did not answer. She only nodded, quickly, and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. Then she turned and went down the hall. He heard her feet on the stairs, and the kitchen door, and a long unsteady breath.

"That," said Mordecai, very gently, "was well done."

"Don't."

"I only meant..."

"I know what you meant." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I've got to go and break my mother's heart."

She was waiting at the foot of the stairs with her purse in her hand and her keys already out, and she saw at once that he had no bag.

"No," Claire said.

"Mom."

"No. Eli. Don't you dare."

"I'm not coming with you." He said it quickly, before his nerve failed. "Not yet. Please, just listen. There are things about Dad's death that I need to find out. I can't explain them. I can't tell you everything, not yet. But if I leave now, I'll never know. I'll spend the rest of my life asking. Please. Give me a few more weeks."

"Things like what?"

"I don't... I can't say."

"Is it your grandmother?" Her voice rose. "Is she doing something? Is she threatening you?"

"No. It isn't like that." It was almost true. "Mom, I'm not in danger from her. I'm not in danger from anyone I can't handle." He heard how thin it sounded. "I just need to stay until the end of the month."

"The end of the month," Claire said slowly.

"Until Halloween. I mean, until the thirty-first." He winced. "I mean, soon."

She was looking at him very closely. He felt her gaze like a hand on his chin. She was a small woman, and she had always been the most observant person he knew, and he realized with an awful, sinking feeling that she had heard the date. She had heard it, and filed it away, and she was not going to say.

"I could make you," she said, at last. "I could call the police. I could call my lawyer. I could drag you to that car, and you would let me, because you love me, and you'd hate me for it." Her mouth trembled. "I could fight the school. I could have you out of there by Monday."

"Please don't."

"Why?"

"Because I think I have to do this. I don't know how to explain." He took a breath. "I'm eighteen, Mom. You raised me to make choices. This is one."

The house was quiet around them. A clock ticked in the kitchen. In the doorway, a small, dark shape had settled with its tail around its paws, and Eli did not look at it.

Claire stood absolutely still. Then, slowly, as though her knees had given way, she sat on the bottom step, with her purse in her lap, and put her face in her hands. He sat down beside her. He did not touch her. He did not know if she wanted him to.

"I'm so scared," she said, into her fingers. "I have been scared since the day I married him. I have been scared for twenty years, and I don't even know what of."

"I know."

"You don't." She laughed, wetly. "You really don't. And I can't tell you, because I can't tell me." She lowered her hands. Her face was blotched and wet, and in the dim light of the hall, with the gray in her hair and the tiredness at her eyes, she looked every one of her forty-four years, and she looked like the strongest person he had ever known. "All right."

"Mom?"

"All right. I won't make you." She wiped her face. "I don't like it. I want you to know that I hate it. But I won't make you." She opened her purse. "I have conditions."

"Anything."

"You call me. Every night, at nine. Not a text. A call. If you miss one, I am in the car. I will drive back, and I will bring a policeman, and I will not care how embarrassed you are." She counted on her fingers. "You don't go up to that house on the hill by yourself. You don't take anything your grandmother offers you, not a drink, not a gift, not a ride. And if she offers you something, don't take it twice." Her voice cracked. "Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"And you shouldn't be alone in that big house."

"I'm not alone," Eli said. "I've got Mordecai."

In the doorway, the cat looked up with grave dignity. Claire almost smiled. "A cat doesn't count."

"He counts."

He did not mention Vex.

"And you take this."

She had taken something out of the purse. It was small, a little square of faded red cloth tied up with three knots of red thread, so worn that the fabric had gone soft as skin. She turned it over in her fingers. "It was my grandmother's," she said. "She used to say you should carry it when you were frightened. There's a bit of rowan in it, and a little iron. I don't believe in it. I don't believe in any of that. But I've carried it every day since the day you were born, and I've never once felt less afraid." She pressed it into his hand and folded his fingers over it. "Keep it on you. Please."

He looked down at the bundle in his palm. It was warm from her purse. He understood, quite suddenly, that this was a small, true piece of the old craft, carried through generations by women who had not known what it was, and that it had survived because someone, somewhere, had loved a child enough to hand it down. His eyes stung.

"I will," he said.

"And Eli." She took his face in her hands, as she had on the porch. "If you ever feel you're in danger, real danger, you tell me. You call me, and I will come for you, and I will protect you. No matter what. Do you understand? No matter what."

"I know," he said, and his voice cracked. "I promise I'll tell you." He did not know what he would be able to say. But he knew that she meant it, and that it was true.

At the door, she stopped. Vex was standing by the kitchen, a little behind the frame, with her arms wrapped around herself, and Claire looked at her for a long moment. Neither of them spoke. It was impossible to say which of them was more embarrassed.

"Thank you," Claire said, at last, stiffly. Then she did something that Eli had not expected. She reached out and laid a hand on the girl's arm, the way she had done with a hundred of his friends over the years, and her voice softened. "For helping him. And you look like you haven't slept in days, sweetheart. Make sure you eat something. Look after yourself, too."

"I will," Vex said. Her voice was very small, and her eyes had gone bright and wet. "I promise."

Claire nodded, once, and turned away. At the gate, she looked back at the house, at the iron nails and the horseshoe and the dark upper windows, and her lips moved, though he could not hear what she said. Then she got into the green hatchback, and started the engine, and the car pulled away from the curb. She did not look back again. He watched until she turned the corner, and the street was empty.

He stood on the porch for a long time with the little red bundle in his fist.

Vex came and sat on the step beside him. The wind off the harbor had gone cold, and she drew her sleeves down over her hands. "You could have gone," she said.

"I know."

"I told you to."

"I know." He looked at her. "Thanks for telling me."

She let out a small broken laugh. "I didn't mean it. I'm sorry. I'm so bad at lying."

"You're fine at it. You just don't like it."

"Thank you," she said abruptly. "For the friend thing." She stared at her hands. "I don't think I could have stood there and said it. I would have said something stupid. I would have fallen apart." She swallowed. "I know she'd have hated me. She'd have had every right to. I think I'd have hated me too. She was so nice to me. She told me to eat something. She called me sweetheart." Her voice broke. "I slept with her husband for three years, and she called me sweetheart."

"You're not a bad person, Vex."

"I know. That's what's so annoying." She wiped her face with her sleeve and laughed again, steadier. "Come on. It's cold. You still owe me a lesson."

He went in after her. At the doorway, Mordecai slid between his feet, and looked up with those amber eyes, as old as the harbor, and said, very softly, so that only Eli could hear:

"You lied to your mother."

"I know."

"You did it to protect her." The cat's tail brushed his ankle. "It is the oldest reason there is. I would not be too hard on yourself."

Eli closed the door. The wards hummed faintly in the frame, and he felt the little bundle of rowan and iron, warm in his pocket, beside the weight of the brand in his palm. He had eight days behind him, and twenty-three still ahead.

He went to find out how to build a better ward.

At nine o'clock, he called.

She picked up on the first ring. "I'm home," she said. Her voice was thick and tired, and the sound of a kitchen clock ticked behind it. "I'm sitting at the table. I'm not going to cry."

"I'm okay, Mom."

"Did you eat?"

"Yes."

"Is the door locked?"

"It's locked."

"Good." A pause. "Eli?"

"Yeah?"

"I love you."

"I love you too." He heard her breathe out, and the line went quiet, and he sat for a long time afterward with the phone against his knee.

The group chat buzzed a minute later. He had not realized there was a new one. Priya had made it that afternoon, with a name that she had clearly thought was funny. Harbor Light Emergency Committee.

Danny: where were u today?? priya said family emergency u ok??

Priya: You missed a pop quiz. Mina covered your name. I did not ask why.

Eli: Family stuff. My mom drove up. I'm fine. Sorry.

Danny: ur MOM!!! tell Mrs. Calloway i said hi. does she still make those orange slices

Priya: Tell her hello from both of us. And bring the sketchbook tomorrow. I mean it. I am not letting you off the hook.

He looked at Mrs. Calloway for a moment. He thought about correcting it, about telling Danny that she had gone back to Mercer, that she had been Claire Mercer for the last six years. He let it go. Danny had known her as Mrs. Calloway when they were kids, and the name belonged to that other life.

He smiled at the screen. It was an odd, light, startled feeling, like a window opened in a stuffy room. For just a moment he forgot about the Sigil in his palm and the thing in the dark and the woman who had smiled at his mother over a gate. There were two people in this city who wanted to see his drawings, and who would be annoyed if he did not show up.

He thought about school. He had skipped a day, and no teacher would dare to punish the grandson of their biggest donor for it, and he suspected that he could skip a month and not hear a word. Ophelia would see to it that he graduated, whatever he did. She had no further reason to take an interest in his schoolwork. He had chosen to stay in Port Verity. He was on the hook, and she knew it, and a boy who was on the hook did not need to be watched as closely. It was a cold thought. It sat in him like a stone. But there was a history test on Friday, and Mina's notes were color-coded and very good, and a girl in round glasses was waiting to see whether he could draw.

He decided to take the test.

Try to enjoy it while you still can, Vex had told him. It'll be over before you know it.

He took the old sketchbook from the bottom of the closet, and sat on the bed, and began, with some difficulty, to turn the pages. Most of it was old, a boy's drawing, dragons and spaceships and the cartoon faces of the people he had loved in middle school. Near the middle he found a page he had forgotten. It was done in crayon and pencil on paper gone yellow at the edges. Three people stood in front of a crooked house, holding hands: a tall man with a beard, a small woman with red hair, and a boy between them with an enormous grin. Underneath, in a child's careful block capitals, it said MY FAMILY. He had been eight. He looked at it for a long time, until his eyes blurred. A small, happy family. It had not lasted, but it had been real once, and he had drawn it. Then he turned the page, and found a blank one near the back. He picked up a pencil. On the foot of the quilt, a small black cat with a torn ear opened one amber eye and watched him, and did not say a word, and Eli began, very slowly, to draw something tall, with stars in its fur.