October 9: The Lady of Thorns

The smell reached him on the stairs.

It was a rich, buttery, slightly smoky smell, and for a moment, half asleep, Eli thought he was back in the old kitchen of his childhood with his father at the stove. Then he came around the corner and saw Vex standing at the counter in a cropped band tee that left her pale midriff bare, and a pair of pajama shorts, with her hair in a lopsided knot and a spatula held like a weapon, glaring at a pan.

There were two plates on the table. On one sat a stack of pancakes, golden on one side and a little black on the other, with a dusting of powdered sugar and a heap of sliced strawberries arranged in what was unmistakably a heart. Beside it stood a glass of orange juice, squeezed by hand. There was a pulp stain on the counter, and a few seeds had escaped into the sink.

“Don’t say anything,” Vex said, without turning. “I know they’re ugly. I looked up a video. There was a lot of flipping.”

“They look great.”

“They look like a crime scene.” She slid the last one onto the second plate and carried both over, and for a moment she stood by his chair with a flustered, uncertain look, shifting her weight. “I wanted to do something special. I wanted to thank you for yesterday. For telling your mom I was just a friend.” She said the last word carefully, as though it were something fragile that she was not sure she had earned. “You didn’t have to. I know it must have cost you something. She’s your mom, and you must hate lying to her.”

“It wasn’t a lie,” Eli said. “You are a friend.”

She went still. Then her face did something complicated, and she looked down at the table and sat, and cut herself a bite of pancake, very precisely.

“Don’t mention it,” he added.

“Eat,” said Vex, a little hoarsely. “Before they get cold. Or colder.”

They ate together, across the corner of the table, with their knees almost touching. The pancakes were slightly burnt, and the strawberries were a little tart, and he ate three and would have eaten a fourth. At some point she stole a strawberry off his plate, and he pretended not to notice, and then slid the whole heart across to her side, and she looked at him with a soft, startled gratitude that made the kitchen feel smaller. Syrup got on her thumb. She licked it off, and neither of them said anything about that either. It was the kind of quiet, ordinary tenderness that he had not known he could miss. Some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders. When they had finished, she set down her mug.

“We need to talk about training,” she said. “Seriously talk.”

“Okay.”

“It’s the ninth. We’re nine days in. Everyone who’s still alive has had a week to find their feet.” She counted on her fingers. “Cassius sent a hound to kill you at your father’s grave. Marguerite was the first death. The others have been circling each other and gathering information, and they’re not going to stay polite. From here on out, people will start trying to remove each other in earnest. If you want to be alive on the thirty-first, we can’t keep going at this pace.”

“I know.”

“I’m not trying to scare you.”

“You’re scaring me a little,” Eli admitted. “But it’s fine. I agree.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Today is the last day I’ll go to school for a while. I have the history test. After that I’m going to tell them it’s a family situation. I think they’ll buy it.”

“They’ll buy it.” There was a small, wry twist to her mouth. “You’re Ophelia Hale’s grandson. They’d buy it if you told them you’d been abducted by aliens.”

“I think the principal bows when he sees my name.”

“I’m pretty sure he does. I’ve seen a lot of important men in this city come up to Ophelia’s mansion and bow to her like she’s a queen.” She finished her coffee. “Come home right after. I want to try some new things tonight. Real things. There are rituals I’m especially good at, the kind that could give you an edge. I’ll explain it when you’re back.”

It sounded innocent enough, but Eli noticed that she looked at the table when she said it, and not at him. He could not have said why that bothered him.

He packed his bag. He put in the history notes, and the red pen, and the old sketchbook, and a black portfolio folder that held the best of his recent work, ink drawings, pencil studies, a few watercolors, work he had made at the kitchen table of the apartment in the city. It had come with him on the bus almost by accident. His early-action applications had been due on the first of November, and he had been polishing the portfolio every night for weeks, so when the phone call came he had packed in a daze, and it had gone into the duffel with everything else. He had not been able to look at it since. Then he slung the bag over his shoulder and went out.

They were waiting at the end of the walk, one on each side of the gate, like a pair of dark statues. Jonah was leaning on the fence post with his hands in his coat pockets. Mina stood straight, in her cardigan and boots, with her bag over one shoulder and her face composed.

“Good morning, Eli,” she said.

“Morning.” He stopped in front of her. “Mina. I wanted to say thanks. For the text yesterday. For the warning.”

Her eyes flickered. For a moment the careful blankness slipped, and he saw surprise, and something almost like alarm, as if she had not expected to be thanked and did not know where to put it. “It was not enough,” she said quietly. “I could not stop it.”

“You tried. It mattered.”

She lowered her gaze. He thought he saw the corner of her mouth move. “You’re welcome,” she said.

“Mistress Ophelia asked me to keep an eye on the house,” Jonah said, from the fence, “and to let her know if anyone of importance came to it.” He said it brightly, as though reporting the weather. “I saw your mother’s car, so I told her. I hope it did not cause any trouble. I am sorry if it did.”

He did not look very sorry. He looked, if anything, a little pleased, like a dog that has delivered a stick and is waiting to be told it did well. Eli had the distinct feeling that Jonah would do exactly the same thing again, and that it would never occur to him to do otherwise.

“It’s all right,” Eli said. He found that he was not angry. It was hard to be angry at a person who was so completely, so helplessly what he had been made to be. “Come on. We’ll be late.”

The history test was not as bad as he had feared.

He had stayed up late the night before, with Mina’s color-coded notes spread across the quilt and a pen between his teeth, and when the paper landed on his desk he found that the dates and the names had settled into place behind his eyes. He wrote for fifty minutes without stopping. When he handed it in, the teacher glanced at it, and at him, and said in a voice of cautious, unctuous approval, “I’m sure it will be excellent, Mr. Calloway.” Eli had the feeling that the teacher would have said so if he had left the page blank.

“How did it go?” Mina asked, in the hall.

“Better than I expected. Thanks to you.”

She did not answer. But she walked a little more quickly, with her head turned away, and he thought that if the light had been different he might have seen her blush.

He told the office, before lunch, that there was a family situation, and that he would be out for some time. The woman at the desk did not ask what kind. She said, with a bright, brittle sweetness, that of course, Mr. Calloway, whatever he needed, and she would see that his teachers were informed. Mrs. Hale’s office had already called, she said. Eli did not ask what they had said.

He ate lunch in the library, at the table in the corner by the window, with Priya’s laptop open beside a stack of folders and Danny unwrapping a sandwich the size of a small animal. Mina had taken up her place beside the window, with her hands folded. Priya glanced up and nodded at her politely, and Mina gave a small, cool nod in return, and neither of them said anything more.

“What’s her deal?” Danny whispered, around a mouthful of bread, leaning toward Eli. “Mina. She’s always, like, standing there.”

“She and her boyfriend work for my grandmother,” Eli said, quietly. “My grandmother told them to keep an eye on me.”

“Like bodyguards?”

“Something like that.”

“Your grandmother has bodyguards in high school," Priya murmured, without lifting her eyes from her screen, and Danny let out a small, awed whistle.

“It’s a long story,” Eli said weakly. “She’s very... protective.”

Priya finally looked up from her screen. “You didn’t come to school yesterday,” she said, “so I’m collecting today.” She held out a hand, palm up. “Sketchbook. And whatever else you’ve got.”

He handed over the old sketchbook, and the black folder. He felt, absurdly, as though he were handing over a part of his body.

They went through it together, Priya turning the pages slowly with her inky fingers, Danny leaning over her shoulder with his mouth full. There were the old drawings, the dragons and the spaceships, a boy’s scribbles. And then there was the folder, and it was a different thing altogether. There were drawings in ink of faces and rooms and the harbor in fog. There were pencil studies of hands, and a long watercolor of an empty street. There was a sketch of the old cannery, from memory. There was a drawing of Vex at the kitchen table, with her chin on her fist, done from memory, which he turned over quickly.

Danny and Priya had never been back to the house after the divorce. They did not know about Vex. They did not know that his father, in the last three years of his life, had found a girlfriend who was only three years older than they were. Eli would have liked to keep it that way. He wished that his mother, and his friends, and everyone he knew, would never have to learn what Vex had been to his father. It would save everyone a great deal of awkwardness.

Priya had stopped at the last drawing. It was the one of a tall figure with stars in its fur. She looked at it for a long time.

“That’s really good,” she said at last. “Eli. That’s really, really good.”

“Yeah, man,” said Danny. “I mean, I don’t know anything about art. I can’t draw a stick figure. But it makes my neck prickle.” He swallowed a bite of sandwich. “What is it?”

“A cat,” Eli said. “Sort of.”

“You’ve gotten so much better,” Priya said, tapping the old sketchbook and then the folder, and glancing from one to the other. “It’s like two different artists. Look at the line work. The shading is confident. You have a sense of composition. Look at how you’ve balanced the light here. You’re not just good, you’re trained. Who taught you?”

“Nobody. I just drew a lot.”

“You should apply to every art school you can find.”

“I know it’s not a practical skill,” Eli said. He had said it to himself so often that it came out like a recitation. “Nobody hires an illustrator. My mom’s practical. Art isn’t a real job, not in this age, and I know that. But it’s what I want to learn.”

“You’re Ophelia Hale’s only grandson,” Danny said.

Eli blinked.

“I’m just saying.” Danny held up his hands, with a sheepish grin. “Dude. She’s got, like, a billion dollars. She donated the gym. You’re her only grandson, right? When she dies, you inherit all of it. You could learn to paint with a hundred-dollar brush and never sell a single thing.”

Eli looked at him. He had honestly never thought about it. Death had always felt like a distant thing to him, an idea out of a book. It had been something that happened to old people in other cities, and to dogs, and to characters in movies, until a phone call in September had shown him how thin the wall was. He thought of the woman at the gate, in her charcoal coat, with her smooth unlined face and her red mouth. She did not look as if she had any plans to die. She looked a good deal younger than her seventy-one years, and she did not seem like someone who made plans she did not mean to keep.

“I don’t think she’s going anywhere,” he said.

“Everybody goes somewhere.”

“Not her.” He smiled, and it came out odd. “She’ll outlive all of us.”

“Anyway,” Danny said, mercifully. “Tomorrow. The shop. You’re still coming?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Cool. Come after work, around five, and I’ll walk you down to the pier. The lobster’s in the back tank. He’s this big.” He held his hands apart. “I swear he’s the size of a cat.”

“I’ll bring Mordecai,” Eli said. “We can compare.”

Both of them stared at him.

“Mordecai,” said Danny. “Your dad’s cat? The black one with the ear? He’s still alive?”

“He’s very old.”

“He was old when we were eight," said Priya. “I remember him on the porch. He bit Danny’s finger.”

“He did not."

“He did. You cried.” She was grinning. “I can’t believe he’s alive. We never went back to the house after the divorce. I always wondered about that cat.”

“He’s doing okay.” Eli thought of a creature the size of a horse, with stars in his fur. “He has a lot of stamina.”

Priya closed the sketchbook and handed it back, with both hands, as if it were precious. Her face had changed, and the light had gone out of it. She leaned across the table and said, in a low voice, “Be careful, okay? Tomorrow. Don’t stay on the docks after dark. Not with someone out there.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean it, Eli. Not even for the lobster.”

“I promise,” he said, and she nodded, and Danny put a hand on his shoulder, and for a minute the three of them sat in the sunlit library, in the smell of old paper, as though nothing in the world had ever been wrong.

Vex had pushed back the furniture again. She stood in the middle of the living room in a black cropped tank top and torn jeans, barefoot on the boards, with a line of salt drawn around her and an expression he had not seen on her before, a sort of lit, focused calm, like a swimmer at the edge of a pool.

“Okay,” she said. “New rules. We’ve been doing the basics. Wards, shields, lighting a candle without burning down the street. You’ve got those. You’re good at them, honestly. Your control is better than mine was at this stage.” She cracked her knuckles. “So now we try the real stuff.”

It was real stuff. She taught him to bind, first, a thin, bright thread of intention that could hold a door shut, or hold a person in place, and do far worse than that, if one were cruel. She taught him to call a wind, small at first, a cool breath that stirred the curtains, and then a crack of air that rattled the windows in their frames. She taught him how to read a room for the traces of recent magic, a faint, prickling residue like the smell of struck matches. By five o’clock, his hands were trembling and his head ached, and he had managed, with a long, white-knuckled effort, to hold three separate bindings in the air at once. She watched him do it, with her arms crossed and her head tilted.

“That’s enough,” she said, finally, very quietly. “You’re ready.”

“For what?”

“For the next step.” She sat down on the arm of the sofa. “Eli, I want you to listen. I’ve been thinking about it all week. Mordecai is still hurt.”

He turned. The cat was curled on the cushion by the window with his chin on his paws and the faint pink scar along his flank. He opened one amber eye.

“It has been four days,” Vex said. “A wound like that, on a familiar bound to a witch with a patron, would have closed in an hour. It’s taking him days, because you don’t have one. You’re drawing on your own strength to heal him, and your strength is still new. And that’s the least of it.” She looked at him levelly. “Every other champion in this contest has a patron. Every single one. Cassius has the Pallid Mask. Zara has Nodens. The surgeon has something with scalpels for legs, and I’d rather not guess what it answers to. They draw from it. They heal faster, they hit harder, they last longer. Without one, you’re running on an empty tank while everyone else is full.”

“Mordecai said patrons are dangerous.”

“They are.” It was Mordecai who spoke, from the window, in a low, dry voice. “I have said so, and I will say it again. But I will also say that she is right, and that I wish she were not. You have been lucky, Eli. A scout was turned back at the door by your father’s wards while you slept in this house. A hound was driven off at the grave only because your familiar and two acolytes happened to be there at the right moment. I would prefer it if you did not rely on luck a third time.”

Vex fetched the grimoire from the table and opened it on her knees. She turned the pages with a practiced hand, past the wards and the salt and the sigils, past a long section of diagrams he had never been able to follow, until she reached a page near the back that was marked with a thread of black ribbon. It was a chapter in Prinn’s crabbed old script, and below it, in his father’s small neat hand, was a long column of notes. A diagram of a circle had been drawn in the margin. At the top, in red ink, his father had written Works.

“It’s an old invitation,” she said. “A rite to open the door. A patron doesn’t just show up because you ask. You have to get their attention. You have to be interesting enough to look at.” She put a finger on the page. “There are a few ways to do it. This is the strongest. Your dad used it. So did I, with him. It’s how he spoke with his patron.”

Eli read. The language was old and formal, and the notes beneath it were dry, practical, almost clinical. He read the first line twice before it made sense. He read the second line, and a slow heat began to crawl up the back of his neck.

“This says,” he said, in a strange voice, “that it requires two practitioners.”

“Yes.”

“A man and a woman.”

“Yes.”

“And that they... that the...” He could not finish it. The words sat in his throat like stones. “That it’s a rite of union.”

“Yes.” Her voice was perfectly steady. “It’s a sex ritual, Eli. That’s what it is. It needs a man and a woman who are willing, and who are close. The more they want it, the stronger it is. It’s the oldest kind of invitation there is.”

The house was very quiet. Out in the hall, a clock ticked. Somewhere above them, a pipe knocked.

“You’re kidding,” Eli said. “Right?”

“I’m not.”

He felt his face go hot, and then hotter, until his ears burned and the tips of his fingers prickled. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m completely serious.” She did not blush. She sat with the book on her knees and her chin lifted, and she looked at him with that frank, level, unembarrassed attention that he had learned to recognize in the last few days, the one she used for anything that mattered. “It’s just sex, Eli. I’ve done a lot of rituals like this. I did plenty of them with your dad. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a tool. It’s like a ward, or a sigil. It’s a way of getting something done.” She tapped the page. “It’s one of the reasons Ophelia gave me to Thomas in the first place. Some rituals can’t be done alone, no matter how talented a witch is. They need a partner. Sex is one of the oldest forms of magic there is. Two people exchange sexual fluids, saliva and semen and wet, and spiritual energy goes with them. It’s sympathetic magic. Sex is what leads to childbirth, to a new soul coming into the world, the gate between the worlds cracking open a little. Witches have always used it that way. It’s not dirty. It’s just very old.”

“You’re my dad’s girlfriend,” he said.

It came out smaller than he meant it to. It sounded, even to him, like the last thin line of a defense that had already been breached. He stood in the middle of the room with his fists clenched and his heart pounding. He was eighteen years old. He had never had a girlfriend. He had never been on a date, or even held a girl’s hand in the dark. He had never kissed anyone. He did not know how to be casual about this. He did not think he could be casual about this if he lived to be a hundred.

“I was,” Vex said gently. “I was your dad’s girlfriend. He’s gone now. I’m single again. And we’re both adults, Eli.” She set the book aside, and rose, and came toward him, slowly, as one approaches a skittish animal. “You need this. Look at Mordecai. He’s been hurt for four days, and it should have been an hour. The contest is going to get worse, not better. The next one who comes for you won’t be a dog, and it won’t be alone. You need every edge you can get, and this is the best one I can give you.”

“I don’t...”

“And let’s not pretend,” she added, lightly, “that you haven’t been looking at me since the day you got here.”

The heat went all the way through him.

It was true, and there was no use denying it. Vex was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and he had known it from the first moment, from the red-and-black hair and the arm warmers and the half-smile in the kitchen on the morning after the funeral. He had hated himself for it. He had lain awake and told himself that she was his dead father’s girlfriend, and that it was disgusting, and that it was a betrayal, and each time he had told himself that, the thought had come back, quiet and obstinate. He had noticed how her hair fell on her neck. He had noticed her pale bare midriff. He had noticed the navel ring. He had noticed, God help him, everything.

And there was something else, a thing he did not want to think about, or say aloud, or even admit to himself. A part of him had felt a pang of jealousy toward his father, for having had a girl as beautiful as Vex in his bed for three years. It made him feel guilty, and ashamed. But the thought was there, and you cannot choose your thoughts.

“All right,” he said.

It came out as barely a whisper. He did not know when he had decided it. He did not know if he had decided it at all. He only knew that when the word was out, the whole room seemed to take a slow breath.

Vex smiled. It was a soft, real, surprisingly gentle smile, and there was no mockery in it at all. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll guide you. It’s your first time, isn’t it? I thought so. It’s better to have your first time with someone who knows what she’s doing. Trust me. I’ll go slow.”

She put her hands on either side of his face, and rose on her toes, and kissed him.

He had imagined his first kiss a hundred times. He had imagined it at a dance, or on a porch, or in the back row of a movie theater, with a girl from his class, clumsy and breathless and a little ridiculous. He had never imagined this. It was not clumsy. It was warm, and unhurried, and sure of itself, and her mouth tasted faintly of coffee and strawberries. It went on for a long time. When his knees began to give, she drew him down onto the sofa and settled herself in his lap, with her arms around his neck, and kissed him again, deeper, more slowly, her tongue sliding against his, and he understood that she was teaching him.

“Open your mouth,” she murmured, against his lips. “Let me lead. Don’t think. There’s no wrong way.”

He did not think. It was hard to think. She was patient, and thorough, and passionate in a way that made the world narrow down to a few inches of air. When he flinched, she stopped, and when he leaned in, she gave him more, and by the end of it he had stopped flinching altogether.

“Exchanging fluids is an important part of the work,” she said, when she drew back, a little breathless, her cheeks flushed and her lips red. “In any rite like this. It carries something of the person. Saliva works, that’s why we kiss like this, deep and full and thorough. Blood works too, but it’s harder to do right, and blood magic always takes something out of you. Some witches drink the blood of their servants, or bathe in the blood of what they sacrifice. I wouldn’t recommend it. Blood sacrifice leaves marks.” She tilted her head. “The strongest is the exchange of sexual fluids, freely given, what two people share in the act itself. A man’s seed, and a woman’s own wet. That’s stronger than blood, and it costs nothing but pleasure.” Her eyes were very dark. “The more we both enjoy it, the more we let go, the stronger the rite will be. That’s why I’m not going to hurry. All right?”

“All right,” Eli said. His voice cracked.

A thought drifted through the fog in his head, small and unwelcome. She had sat in a lap like this one. Maybe on this very sofa. She had kissed his father like this, with her tongue in his mouth and his in hers, the two of them wrestling and trading spit. He felt the thought go through him like a splinter. Then Vex wrapped her arms around his neck, and drew his hands to her waist, and the thought went out like a candle.

She drew back at last, breathing hard, and looked at him for a long moment with her hands still resting on his shoulders. “Not yet,” she said. “Tonight. After we’ve eaten, and after you’ve called your mom.” Her smile was a little crooked. “You promised her nine o’clock. I’m not going to be the reason you break it.”

They ate grilled cheese at the kitchen table. Neither of them said very much. The air in the house felt strange, charged and hushed, like the moment before a storm, and his lips still tingled, and every time he looked up he found her looking at him, and they both looked away. Mordecai watched them from the windowsill with his amber eyes unreadable, and said nothing at all, which was worse than anything he could have said.

At nine o’clock, Eli went out onto the back porch and called.

She picked up on the first ring. “Hi, sweetheart.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“How was school?”

“I took the history test. I think it went okay. I think it went better than okay.”

“Oh, I’m so proud of you.” He could hear her smile. “Did you eat?”

“Pancakes, this morning. And grilled cheese for dinner.”

“You sound a little tired, sweetheart.”

“Long day. The test wore me out.”

“Then make sure you get some sleep tonight. Is the door locked?”

“It’s locked.”

“Good.” There was the soft clink of a teacup, and the tick of the kitchen clock. “I love you, Eli.”

“I love you too.”

He stood on the dark porch for a long time afterward with the phone against his chest. The guilt rose in him like acid. He had just lied to her, again, by omission and by tone, while a girl waited inside who had been his father’s lover for three years, and who in a few minutes would be having sex with him. He was ashamed. He was also, undeniably, a little feverish with anticipation, and he hated himself for that, too.

When he came back in, Vex was waiting at the foot of the stairs. She had taken down her hair. “All right?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She held out her hand. He took it.

She led him up the stairs by the hand.

She did not say anything. The landing was dim, and the old boards creaked, and the door of the master bedroom stood at the end of the hall, a plain, dark, heavy door he had passed a hundred times. It was the room where his parents had once slept together, in this same bed, in the years before the divorce. He would not have been surprised to learn that he had been conceived on this very mattress. It was the room where his father had slept, afterward, alone. And for three years, it was the room where his father had slept with the girl who was holding his hand.

She opened the door.

The room was larger than he remembered. It smelled of cedar and old books, with a faint, warm, human trace of lavender and his father’s pipe tobacco, which Vex had never been able to air out, and had never really wanted to. The bed was enormous, wide and deep and soft under the old quilt he had slept beneath as a child, the sort of bed that seemed made for exactly this, comfortable enough to lose a night in, comfortable enough to lose a virginity in. On the dresser stood a framed photograph, turned face down. She had put it that way a week ago, and had not been able to turn it up again.

A thought came unbidden into his head. Vex had been his father’s girlfriend for three years. That was one thousand and ninety-five days. They must have had sex in this bed more than a thousand times. He tried not to think about it, but a pang of jealousy touched him anyway, sharp and shameful. It was gone the moment he looked at her.

She went to work. It was clear, in the first minute, that she had done this many times. She drew the circle in white chalk with a steady hand, a ring within a ring with sigils worked into the space between, and set the candles at the six points of its star. She laid a line of salt across the threshold and said something under her breath, and the air thickened, the way it does in a church. She moved with a calm, practical economy, and he realized, with a kind of astonishment, that she was talented, experienced, and very good at this. Whatever she had been when Ophelia found her, she had become something formidable. His grandmother, he thought, had chosen well for her son. She had chosen very well indeed.

“Eli.” She was standing in the middle of the circle, with her hands at her sides. “If you can’t, say so. I mean it. We stop, and we find another way. I don’t want you to do this if it’s going to hurt you.”

He looked at her. In the candlelight, with her hair loose over her shoulders and her eyes very dark, she looked younger than twenty-one, and also much older. He thought of the pancakes, and the burned soup. He thought of a girl on the front step with her sleeves pulled down over her hands.

“I’m ready,” he said.

She nodded. She pulled her top over her head and let it fall, and stepped out of her jeans, and stood before him in the candlelight with nothing on but the small silver ring at her navel. Then she came to him and reached for the zipper of his jeans, and undressed him with unhurried, practiced hands, the way she must have undressed his father, a hundred times, in this room. He should have minded. He found that he could not, with her fingers on him and her breath on his throat.

She was breathtaking. He had thought that he knew what that word meant. He had not. She was pale and strong and flushed, only three years older than he was, with the soft curve of her breasts the perfect size for her slender frame and her nipples dark against the white skin, and the silver ring catching the light at the hollow of her stomach. He had never seen a woman naked before, not like this, not in the flesh and the light. He stared at her with a kind of dazed reverence, and thought that he ought to look away, and could not.

She took his hand and drew him down onto the bed, and for a while they only kissed. It was slower than before, and warmer, and by the time her hands had finished learning the shape of his shoulders, he was not thinking about circles or patrons or anything else at all. He kissed her hungrily, as though he had been starving for years, and she made a soft, startled sound against his mouth and pulled him down on top of her. He learned her with his hands. He kissed her throat, and the hollow of her collarbone, and her breasts, taking his time because she had told him to, until she arched under him and her fingers knotted in his hair. He kissed the soft curve of her stomach, and the silver ring, and tasted the cool metal on his tongue, and she laughed breathlessly and said his name.

“Eli.”

Then she gently turned him onto his back, and moved down the bed with a slow, wicked, unhurried smile. She kissed the tip of him, and cupped him in her hand, and licked slowly along his length, and took him into her mouth with the ease of a girl who had done this many times. He heard himself make a sound he had never made in his life. She was very good at it. She brought him to the edge of the world, and held him there, and let him fall back, and brought him there again, until he gasped her name, “Vex,” and was only moments from coming in her mouth.

She stopped. She lifted her head, flushed and pleased. “Not in my mouth,” she whispered. “It has to finish inside me. In my womb. That’s what makes it work best, that’s how it worked with your dad. But not yet.” She smiled. “Your turn.”

He was clumsy at first. He did not know where to put his hands, or how to ask, and she laughed softly, and guided him, and the laugh turned into a gasp. After that, he learned quickly. He went down on her, with a dedication that made her breath catch, using his mouth and his tongue, and then his fingers, listening to every sound she made, doing what she showed him and a few things she had not, until she came apart under him, arching and shaking, calling out his name. He had never been so proud of anything in his life.

When she had stopped trembling, she drew him up beside her and kissed him, tasting herself on his mouth, and for a moment they lay together in the dim green-gold candlelight, breathing hard.

“Shouldn’t we use protection?” he managed, unsteadily. “A condom?”

“No.” Her fingers were in his hair. “Not for this. The rite needs it skin to skin, and what two people share has to be shared. That’s the whole point.” She smiled at him, flushed and glowing. “And don’t worry about knocking me up. I’m a witch. Birth control herbs and abortifacients are some of the first things we learn. I promise. I’ve got you.”

She drew him over her, and guided him to her, and he looked into her eyes as he pushed into her slowly, with a long shaking breath, inch by inch, until he was all the way inside her, and they were joined as man and woman, the oldest connection and the oldest ritual, and the whole world narrowed to a single bright point. He realized, dimly, that he had just lost his virginity.

It was better than anything he had ever dreamed. They fit together as though they had been made for it. He moved in her slowly at first, then harder as she urged him on, her legs locked around his hips, her nails in his back, her mouth at his ear whispering his name over and over, and he said hers again and again, as if it were a prayer. It was so good, so absurdly and overwhelmingly good, that the world fell away. The contest, the circle, the old dark house, the man whose bed this had been, every one of them went out like a match. There was only the girl in his arms. Somewhere at the edge of it, the candles began to burn green.

“Eli!”

“Vex!”

He did not know how long it lasted. It felt as though he were inside her for an eternity, joined as man and woman, outside of time. He knew only that at the end, the pleasure rose in him like a wave and broke over his head, so enormous and so entire that his mind went white, and that he came inside her with a cry he did not recognize as his own, while she held him through it, her arms tight around his shoulders. He felt her follow him, a long, helpless tremor from head to foot, and he understood, in the last clear corner of his mind, that she had enjoyed it as much as he had, and that it had not been a lie.

Then the circle woke.

The salt line flared white around them. The air smelled suddenly of pine and wet earth and green sap. A cold, sweet wind stirred through the room, though the windows were shut, and the walls seemed to fall back, and the ceiling to rise, until it was no longer a bedroom at all. It was a clearing in an immeasurable forest.

He saw her with his soul. He did not see her with his eyes. He felt her, the way you feel a mountain at your back in the dark, a vast, slow, ancient presence rising out of the roots of the world. She was a forest, and she was a woman. Her body was bark and bramble and moss, and her hair was a canopy of black leaves, and where her face should have been there was a lattice of thorns, glittering with dew, and a thousand small bright eyes among them. She was beautiful the way a wound is beautiful. She was older than the stars, and she was hungry, and she turned her great head, and she saw him.

Little one, said the Lady of Thorns.

It was not a cruel voice. That was the strangest part. It was a voice like wind in a briar patch, and also like a mother’s, low and warm and fond, the voice that says there you are to a child who has been gone too long. He knew her. He knew, without being told, that she was something older than the name he had for her, something that he had seen marked in the margins of his father’s book, in a hand that had trembled. She was the Black Goat of the Woods, the Mother of a Thousand Young. He should have been afraid. He was.

He understood, in the small steady part of his mind that was still his own, that she was not human, and never had been. What he was seeing was only the shape his soul could bear. Had he been an ordinary man, without the circle, without the blood, without the rite to hold him, the sight of her true form would have shattered his mind in a heartbeat, like glass struck with a hammer. Even as a witch, he felt his sanity creak.

You have grown, she said. I felt you do it. I felt you become a man. There was something in the voice that was almost tender, almost proud, the pleasure of a mother whose boy has finally come into his own. He thought of whose bed he was lying in, and what he had just done there, and understood with a sick lurch that she knew all of it, and did not mind, and was fond of him for it. You are sweet. You are new. I will remember you.

A thorn touched his palm.

It was a small, bright pain. When he looked, in the green dream-light, a thin black vine had curled around the brand in his left hand, and its tip, like a thorn, was sunk lightly into the flesh. A drop of blood welled up. It was taken. And a great, slow, golden power poured into him through the wound, up his arm and across his chest and down to the soles of his feet, a flood of heat and light that made every nerve in his body sing.

Go, said the Lady. Grow, my little one. And bring me something worth eating.

Then the forest was gone. The candles guttered, and the circle went dark, and he was lying in a rumpled bed in an old house with the smell of salt and sweat and cedar around him, and his heart beating like a drum.

He was ravenous.

It was the first thing he noticed. It was a deep, strange, gnawing hunger that had nothing to do with food, a hollow in the center of him that the golden power had not filled. It hummed behind his eyes. And with it came a second thing, quieter, and far worse. It was the feeling of being watched. He could not have said from where. It was a pressure at the edges of the room, in the corners and the shadows beneath the bed, like a great patient eye that had opened somewhere in the dark and did not mean to close.

From somewhere far below, in the living room, came a long, startled yowl.

Vex lifted her head. “That’s Mordecai.”

Mordecai stopped at the edge of the salt.

He had come up the stairs without a sound, as he always did, and he sat in the dark of the doorway with his tail wrapped around his paws, looking at the bed. The candles had gone out. The chalk circle lay cold and gray on the floorboards, with a faint green glow still clinging to its edges, and the smell of pine hung in the room. Vex had pulled the quilt up to her shoulders. Eli had done the same, and was acutely, painfully aware that they were both naked, and that neither of them had a thing between them and the other.

Mordecai did not seem to notice, or to care. He was not human, and he had lived a very long time, and the sight of two naked young people in a rumpled bed, with the smell of sex and salt thick in the air, troubled him no more than a pair of birds in a nest. He regarded them with the mild, level patience of a creature who had seen a great many nights like this one, in a great many centuries.

“I am mended,” he said.

His voice was quiet, and strange. The scar along his flank had vanished. In the dim light from the hall the fur lay sleek and black and whole, as though nothing had ever touched it, and his torn ear was a little less ragged than it had been that morning. “I felt it, Eli. A moment ago, in the sitting room. The bond between us thickened, as though someone had drawn a rope tight, and a warmth came down it that I have not felt in a hundred years. A patron’s favor flows through the witch to the familiar. It has mended me. It has done more than that. I am stronger than I have been in this shape for a century, as though I had drunk a river.” The amber eyes moved to Eli. “You opened the door, with her help, and something came through it. I must know what answered.”

“The Lady of Thorns,” Eli said. His voice sounded far away. He did not know how he knew that name. He simply did. And another name came to him, behind it, an older name, one that was not fit for a human tongue. “Shub-Niggurath.”

Mordecai did not move. For a long moment he did not speak at all. “I see,” he said at last. “A very strong patron. One of the strongest. And a very hungry one. She will demand to be fed, and you will be watched.” He gave a low, dry, weary sigh. “I will not say I told you so. I will say that I wish there had been a better way, that I had a better answer than this, and that I do not. I will be downstairs. Do not do anything foolish with the patron whose attention you have acquired.”

He turned and padded away, and the stairs creaked once under his weight, and the house settled into silence.

Vex lay on her back with her eyes on the ceiling. She had heard every word. She had not said anything since the yowl. Her hair was wild across the pillow, and there was a faint flush on her throat that had not gone, and she was trembling very slightly under the quilt, in a way that she did not seem to know.

“Vex?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I know.” She laughed, a small, unsteady sound. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s not the rite. It’s just... it was different.”

He waited. He had learned a little, in the last week, about waiting. After a while she turned her head on the pillow and looked at him, and her eyes were very bright.

“I’ve always been casual about sex,” she said. “Even before I met your dad. It’s like eating, or drinking, or breathing. A need your body has. I never saw it as anything more important than a physical connection. It’s what I told you the other night, in the kitchen, and it was true. I thought it would be like that tonight.” She drew a breath. “It wasn’t. It felt like I was with Thomas again.”

He went very still.

“When you were kissing me. When you were so careful, and you listened. When you were inside me, and when you went down on me, and you made sure I...” She broke off. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He was the same, Eli. He was always so attentive. He always made sure I was satisfied, unlike most guys, younger guys, guys closer to my age, who only care about themselves. And you did the exact same thing. It felt like I was with his ghost.”

“I’m sorry,” Eli said.

“It’s not your fault.” She shook her head quickly. “God, no. It’s not. You were good. You were really, really good. I loved it. I really did. But it’s also... it was weird, knowing who you are. Knowing you’re his son.” She pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes. “Shit. I didn’t expect it to be like this.”

He did not know what to say. So he did the only thing he could think of. He moved closer, under the quilt, and put his arms around her, bare skin against bare skin, and drew her against his chest. She stiffened, and then, all at once, relaxed, with her face in the hollow of his shoulder and her fingers curled against his ribs. They were both completely naked, and completely vulnerable, and it did not feel like a thing to be ashamed of.

It struck him then, holding her, how young she was. She was only twenty-one. She was highly experienced, and talented, and sure of herself in a dozen ways he would never match, but she was still, in some quiet and hidden way, a girl herself, still finding her way, still working out who she was without the man who had been her teacher and her lover and her roof. He had not thought of that before. He thought of it now, with a tenderness that surprised him.

“I’m not my dad, Vex,” he said quietly.

“I know.”

“I mean it. You’re my friend. It doesn’t matter who you were to him. I care about you. I don’t care about the rest. And I really, really liked being with you tonight. I’m glad you were my first. My first kiss, and the first girl I’ve ever...” He stopped, flushing.

She was silent for a long moment. Then, against his collarbone, she said, very softly, “I’m glad it was me. I’m really glad I was your first.” A pause. “I liked it too. Eli. You were better than your dad, honestly. Quite a bit bigger, too.”

He groaned. “Vex.”

“It’s just the truth!” Her shoulders shook. She was laughing, he realized, in great gulping, helpless gasps, and all the strain and the strangeness went out of her with it. “Okay. Okay, I’ll stop. I swear. I will never mention it again.” She wiped her eyes. “Seriously. I never should have teased you the way I did, that night, about what I did with him. Sometimes my mouth moves faster than my brain. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve it.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. But thank you.” She lifted her head, and her smile was crooked and exhausted and real. “We don’t have to talk about tonight again. We have more important things to worry about right now, like a contest of witches where you can get killed. And honestly, you’re right. I was just working through my own stuff. It’s not you.” She propped herself on one elbow. “I heard what you said to Mordecai. But I want to hear it from the start. What did you see?”

He told her. He told her about the green clearing, and the woman made of bark and bramble, and the voice that had called him little one. He did not tell her all of it. He told her about the thorn in the palm of his hand. He showed her the brand, and she turned it to the light. A fine black line now ran around its edge, like a hairline vine, and one of the thirteen points had a tiny thorn at its tip.

“Shub-Niggurath,” Vex said slowly, and the name seemed to chill the room. “That’s not a name to be taken lightly. The Lady of Thorns, the Mother who walks the dark woods. She’s one of the strongest patrons there is, and she doesn’t answer many people.” She let out a breath. “You’re lucky, Eli. You’re very lucky. And you should be very careful.”

“Mordecai said that.”

“Mordecai is right.”

“She said to bring her something worth eating.”

Vex went quiet. She did not say anything, but her hand tightened on his.

He lay for a while with his eyes on the ceiling. The hunger gnawed in him, low and patient. The sense of being watched had not gone. It was not as sharp as it had been, but it lingered in the corners of the room, a cold, steady attention that he could not shake. He thought that he would be tired by morning. He thought that he should go to his own room, and let her sleep.

“I should get back to my room,” he murmured. “Now that it’s done.”

“Don’t.” She said it quickly, and quietly, and then, after a moment, more softly. “Stay here. With me. Tonight.”

He looked at her. In the faint green light she looked small and tired, and very young. He remembered that she had been sleeping alone in this bed since the day his father died, in a house that was too large and too quiet, and that she had never once said so.

“Okay,” he said.

She settled against him, with her head on his shoulder and one arm across his chest, and he felt the tension go out of her, one muscle at a time. He lay with his arm around her and listened to her breathe. He did not think that he would sleep. He did not think he could. But somewhere in the long dark, with the old house ticking around them and the cat keeping watch on the stairs, he did.

Mina was watching the Calloway house.

She and Jonah had been sitting in Jonah’s car every night since Eli moved back, an old gray sedan that the matriarch had given him for errands, parked in the shadow of a maple across the road. The engine was off. The windows had fogged with their breath, and every few minutes Jonah wiped a clear patch in the glass with his sleeve and went back to watching. It was the work they had been given. A light came on in the kitchen, and went off. A light came on upstairs. The hour grew late.

“Stop fogging the window,” Jonah said.

“You stop breathing.”

“I can’t. I’d die.”

“It would be a mercy.” She passed him the thermos, and he took it with a grateful, bashful smile, the one he never used in front of anyone else. Out of the manor, out of the long coat and the polite voice, he was a different boy. He talked with his mouth full. He did impressions. He complained about the heater. It was a side of him she had known since they were small, a side of both of them, and she would have been embarrassed for anyone else to see it. “We could at least have brought sandwiches.”

“We have the granola bar.”

“That is not a sandwich. That is a cry for help.”

She laughed, quietly, in spite of herself. Then she turned her face to the window, and the laugh faded.

There was a light on in the upper story, at the end of the house. It had been on for a while, small and warm and yellow behind a curtain. She looked at it a little longer than she needed to. She turned on the radio, and turned it off again, and picked at the skin beside her thumbnail. The new master of the Calloway house had said thank you to her that morning, at the gate. It was nothing. Her face had gone warm anyway, and she had told herself it was the cold.

A little after ten, Jonah stiffened beside her. He drew one hand out of his lap and pressed two fingers between his brows, and his eyes rolled up behind their lids. It was an old magic, the third eye, a dim and difficult art that let a witch feel living things through walls, their warmth and their movement and the shape of their breath, and Jonah was the only one she knew who could do it properly. That was why the matriarch kept him. He was not a strong witch. He could light a candle, but anything more complicated, a binding, a ward, a working of any real weight, he struggled with. But he could sense what other people could not, and Ophelia Hale valued that more than any amount of raw power.

Thomas Calloway’s wards were very good. Neither of them could have gotten through them without being invited, and even a watcher as skilled as Jonah had to be careful, and quiet, and patient, to slip a thread of sense past them. He did it with a kind of reverent gentleness, like a man easing open a door on a sleeping house.

“They’re upstairs,” he whispered. His breathing had quickened. “I can feel them. She’s moving around the room, drawing something on the floor. He’s standing very still. Now they’re close. They’re kissing. She’s taking off her clothes.” His voice had gone thick and low. “They are fucking.”

Mina sighed. Jonah liked to watch. He had always liked to watch. She knew where it had come from, the way she knew most things about him. His mother had been an acolyte in the coven too, a pretty, quiet woman who had taken part in rituals with full male witches, the old kind, with sex at the center. And a small boy with a gift for sensing had crept out of bed one night and found a way to watch. He had watched her many times. It had done something to him that had never been undone. It had given him a taste for watching, and a hunger he did not know what to do with, and when he was older he had found that the hunger had a place in the world, and a mistress, and a use. His mother had been dead for six years. He still liked to watch. Most witches, Mina had come to think, were messed up in one way or another. Jonah was only more honest about it than most.

He sat with his pale face tilted toward a dark window and his lips parted, hot and shaking and thrilled, and one hand had slipped down into his lap, and she did not need to look to know what he was doing.

“Jonah.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He did not stop. “Mina. Please.”

“You are so gross.”

He let out a small, shuddering breath, and she saw him grow harder, pleased and flushed, at the insult. That was the thing about Jonah. He was a masochist. He liked to be punished, and insulted, and humiliated, and disciplined, and the more she said it, the happier he was. It was why he was such a perfect servant. A man who needs to be told what he is will do almost anything to hear it said.

She rolled her eyes and pushed his hand aside and took over, briskly and without ceremony, with the weary competence of a girl who had done this more times than she could count. When that was not enough, she bent and used her mouth, because they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and it was easier than arguing, and because it was what he wanted. She always did her duties. To Jonah, to Mistress Ophelia, to the coven. Her own first time had been on the night of her eighteenth birthday, in a ritual with an older male witch of the coven, under the matriarch’s command and watch. Jonah came with a small, shaken gasp, his head tilted back against the seat and his eyes still turned toward the dark window and whatever he could feel behind it. He was happy. He was always happy afterward. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked out through the clear patch in the glass, and thought, not for the first time, of what she wished they did instead. Movies. Dates. Dinner in a place with tablecloths. Netflix and cuddling on a couch, with a boyfriend who held her hand instead of spying on other people having sex while she jerked him off or blew him. A normal, healthy sex life, the kind other girls took for granted. She did not say so. She had never said so.

Then, a little before midnight, something struck the house like a bell rung deep under the earth.

Mina felt it, though she was not a watcher like Jonah, and had no third eye. It was not a sound. It was a pressure, a great slow wave that rolled across the street and went through her ribs and out the other side. Whatever was happening inside the house was so powerful that it broke through Thomas’s wards, and through her own plain senses, with nothing at all to help it. The wards on the house flared white, and then green. In the upper window, at the end of the building, a pale emerald light bloomed behind the curtain and pulsed, and pulsed, and went out. Jonah’s hand fell from his forehead. He had gone perfectly still, with his eyes wide and shining, as if he were listening to music.

“A patron,” Mina whispered.

“A big one.”

“They’ve done it.”

“They’ve done it,” Jonah said. He sounded almost reverent. He turned his face toward the window, and for a moment she thought he was going to say something else. Then he only closed his mouth, very quietly, and swallowed, and she saw that his hands were trembling.

The summons came before they had started the car. It arrived as a single line on her phone, from a number with no name. Come. The matriarch ordered, and her acolytes obeyed. They drove up through the Heights in silence, and Hargrove, at the door, took their coats with a face like a closed book and led them up the long stairs to the study, where a fire burned in the grate and a green-shaded lamp cast a circle of gold over the desk. Ophelia Hale sat in the wing chair with a book open on her knee. She did not look up when they came in. She finished the page. Then she closed the cover, and laid the book aside, and turned her head.

“Tell me, children,” she said.

It was a small thing, that word, and it made the room feel colder. Children. Mina told her. She stood with her hands folded and her eyes on the carpet and gave the report as she had been taught, in short, factual sentences, without adornment. The surge of power at eleven forty. The green light in the master bedroom. The pulse through the wards. The sense of a presence. She did not know which patron. It had been very large. Jonah, beside her, added in a flat, helpful voice that the boy and the girl had begun the rite a little after ten, and that it had gone on for nearly two hours.

“The Lady of Thorns,” Ophelia said.

Mina looked up. “Matriarch?”

“I know that one.” The old woman’s eyes were bright in the firelight. She did not seem surprised. She seemed deeply, profoundly satisfied, like a woman who has seen a long-planned move land exactly where she meant it to. “An old and hungry mother, older than men. Thomas never dared to call her. Not once, in thirty years. His son called her on his first attempt. Elias is not his father. He did not call a safe choice, like Bast. What he called is far more powerful, far hungrier, and far more dangerous. I am very pleased with my grandson.”

She rose, and went to the fire, and stood with her back to them, her hands folded at the base of her spine.

“I am also glad that he has had Vesper,” she said, “despite her being his father’s former lover. I had planned for her to be my son’s second wife, and to bear his children, and continue the line. Instead, she may be Elias’s wife. She may bear his children, and my great-grandchildren will be stronger than any Calloway in a hundred years.” She turned. “She is no longer mine. She has her own loyalties now. But she is gifted, very gifted, and I have not forgotten it. I may yet draw her back.”

“Yes, matriarch,” Mina said.

“He is not his father,” Ophelia went on. “I had feared that he might be weak. A sentimental boy, raised by that woman. But he has taken to the work, and he has taken to the girl, and he has not flinched. That is as it should be. He will need to learn, as I learned, that power is a thing which is taken, and kept, and that it is held by those who are willing to be held in turn.” She looked from one of them to the other. “You and Jonah are at his disposal. Physically, magically, sexually. In any way that he asks. Do you understand me? In every way. And if he should wish for other girls from the coven, for the purposes of ritual, or for pleasure, they are at his disposal as well. Young boys as well. I will see that they are made available.” A pause. “It is how I have always held powerful men. It is a very old and very reliable method. He will come to see it.”

“Yes, matriarch,” Mina said.

“I confess I had my doubts,” Ophelia said, almost idly. “My agents told me that he had never had a girlfriend, not at eighteen. I feared that Claire had raised a soft, weak, effeminate boy. But no. Elias is far more impressive than that. He has my blood in his veins, and I want heirs.” She tilted her head. “I am glad that he does not seem to prefer boys. But I shall not mind if he wishes to amuse himself with them. Men have needs. Young men more than most. If he should want a boy, there is always Jonah.” She did not look at him. “You will both obey my grandson in whatever he asks. Is that understood?”

“Yes, matriarch,” said Mina. And from the shadows beside her, in a low, dreamy, eager voice, Jonah said it too.

It was a thing she had always known, the way she knew the shape of her own hands. She had been sent to Mayor Whitcombe in the spring, the silver-haired man with the ruddy face and the practiced smile, who kept turning the wedding ring on his finger even while he undressed her. He had taken her slowly, thoroughly, greedily, like a man making up for lost decades, and she had lain there and looked at the ceiling. Jonah had sat in the armchair beside the window, with his hands folded in his lap, watching, as he did every time. He enjoyed it. He enjoyed it very much. And he touched himself. She had been sent to Chief Drummond, and to a senator, and to a banker whose name she had never learned. Some of the men had wanted him too. The chief had wanted both of them at once, her mouth and Jonah’s, and then each in turn, in every way a man could want, and he had not laughed. He had moaned, a low, broken, shuddering sound, full of guilt and shame and lust, and a satisfaction so deep that it frightened her, the satisfaction of a man crossing the forbidden line he had denied himself for most of his life. She had learned, in time, that his hunger for young boys was something he had hidden and denied his whole life, and that he hated himself for it. Behind the lust there was guilt, and shame, and a constant, sick fear of being found out. There was sin in that room, and desire, and the thick, sour sweetness of the taboo. They were old men, and married, with wives at home and reputations to keep. That was what the matriarch needed. It was a lever, and a very old one. A man who has been given what he cannot have, and has been ashamed of it, can be moved a very long way.

Mina had done what she was told. She had always done what she was told. She had been raised to it, since before she could read. And she had been paid for it, well, in a hundred ways. Ophelia paid the living expenses of both their families. She paid them salaries for what they did for the coven, and bonuses whenever they were sent to please an older man, more money than any other teenager in the city could dream of. She paid their school fees. She paid the rent on the house where Mina’s mother lived. Everything they had, they owed to the matriarch, and they both knew it. That was why they could never go against her. She knew how to own her servants, in every way that counted.

“You are an obedient girl, Mina,” said Ophelia, without turning from the fire. “You know your place. I have always admired that in you. And you were born gifted, far more so than half my coven.” Her eyes came around, and rested on Mina’s face, and then on her dark skin, with a cool, thoughtful appraisal. “In another life I might have chosen you for my grandson’s bride. But the main line has never had the blood of your kind in it. I will not begin now.”

Mina inclined her head. “Yes, matriarch.” She had heard it in a hundred forms since before she could read, and it fell on her the way rain falls on a roof.

“Come here, child,” said Ophelia.

Mina went. She stopped in front of the matriarch, and the old woman’s eyes went over her slowly, from head to foot, with a cool, proprietary attention, as one considers a horse.

“Take off your top,” said Ophelia.

Mina stood still for the length of a breath. Then her hands went to the buttons of her cardigan, and then to the shirt beneath, and she folded both over her arm. The old woman waited. “And the rest.” Mina reached behind her and undid the clasp, and set the last of it on the arm of the chair. She stood bare to the waist in the firelight, with her arms at her sides and her eyes fixed on the dark window, and the room was very quiet. There was nothing in it but the fire, and the old woman’s cool, slow gaze, which traveled over her from throat to waist with no heat in it at all, the way a woman considers a horse she means to buy. It was not desire. It was something worse, a flat and calm possession. It was meant to remind her what she was, and to humiliate her in front of the boy who sat and watched. She knew exactly what it was meant to do, and she let it do it.

She took the thin steel blade from the pocket of her skirt, where she kept it for the purpose, and drew it across the skin above her left collarbone in one shallow line. It did not hurt very much. She had done it so many times. The blood welled up, dark and bright, and ran slowly downward.

Ophelia stepped close. She laid one cool hand on Mina’s bare shoulder, and let the other drift downward, over her breast, and her ribs, and the flat of her stomach, to the small curve of her navel. It was not the touch of a lover. It was the touch of a mistress, idle and unhurried, taking inventory of something that was hers. Mina had always known that she was. She thought, without wanting to, of the old stories her grandmother told in the servants’ kitchen, in a low voice, when the matriarch was away. She thought of the plantation, and the white men of the Hale line, the masters on the veranda, who had taken what they wanted from the women in the slave cabins. They had raped them, and got children on them, and never once acknowledged the children as their own. They had probably never even thought of it as rape. It was only a master amusing himself with his property. Some of those children had been her great-grandmother’s line. Some of them had carried the Hale blood, and the Hale gift, in their veins. Mina was one of them. And the old woman’s hand was cool and possessive on her bare skin, as if she had never needed to think of that at all.

Then Ophelia bent her head, and her red mouth closed over the wound.

She took her time. Her mouth lingered longer than it needed to, and her fingers tightened at Mina’s waist, and a small, low, satisfied sound came out of her throat that Mina had heard before, and had never allowed herself to name. There was an intimacy in it that was more than hunger. There was something old and patient and predatory in the way she held her, a want that had nothing to do with blood alone. Mina stood very still and looked at the window.

Jonah watched from the shadows, with his hands folded, as he always did, and she heard his breathing quicken.

She thought, for no reason she could name, of a boy at a gate, with his hands in his pockets and his face open. She wondered how different things would be if he were the head of the clan, and not his grandmother. Would he still see her as a possession? Or would he see a girl his own age? She did not know. She did not think it was a question she was permitted to ask.

Then the old woman lifted her head, and licked a last bright thread of red from her lip, and smiled.

“That will do,” said Ophelia. She took a thick envelope from the drawer of the desk and pressed it into Mina’s hand, the way one pays for a purchase. It was heavy. It was more money than Mina’s mother earned in a month. It was the price of her blood. “Dress. Go home. Watch the house.”

They drove back down through the Heights in the dark, without speaking. Jonah slumped against the passenger window with his eyes closed and a small, contented smile on his face. Mina drove. She buttoned her cardigan to the throat, and the cut at her collarbone stung under the cloth, and the envelope lay in her pocket like a stone. At the bottom of the hill, she turned onto the street that ran past the old house, and she slowed, without quite deciding to, and looked up at the dark upper window at the end of the building. A single candle was still burning there. In the cold black air above the roof, something green and faint hung like a held breath, and it was a long moment before it faded.

She watched it go. She and Jonah were only background figures in this, she thought, servants who obeyed the players who mattered, and nothing more. Somewhere inside that house, a boy was asleep in a bed that was not his, with a girl who was not his, and a patron that was no one’s friend, and he did not know yet what any of it would cost. She did not know either. But she had the odd, unwelcome sense, like a coin turning over in her pocket, that it would cost her something too.