To keep her alive.

The voices reminded her of that every day.

If you leave, he can use his parlor tricks to impress Mortal girls, and you can do what you were born for.

She shook the voices out of her head, but the words left a shadow, a phantom image that never entirely disappeared. The voices were the strongest when she was watching things burn—the way she was now.

Before she realized it, the kitchen towel was smoking, blackened edges curling inward like an animal recoiling in fear. The smoke alarm screamed.

Sarafine slapped the towel against the floor until the flames turned into a sad trail of smoke. She stared at the charred towel, crying. She had to throw it away before John saw it. She could never tell him about this. Or the voices.

It was her secret.

Everyone had secrets, right?

A secret couldn’t hurt anyone.

I sat up with a start, but my room was still. My window was shut, even though the heat was so stifling that the sweat running down my neck felt like the slow crawl of spiders. I knew a closed window couldn’t keep Abraham out of my room, but somehow it made me feel better.

I was overwhelmed by an irrational panic. With every settling board, every creaking stair, I expected to see Abraham’s face emerge from the darkness. I looked around, but the dark in my room was simply the dark.

I kicked off the sheet. I was so hot, I’d never be able to fall back to sleep. I grabbed the glass from my nightstand and poured some water on my neck. For a second, cool air swept over me, before the heat swallowed me back up again.

“You know, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

When I heard the voice, I almost jumped out of my skin.

I looked over and my mom was sitting in the chair in the corner of my room. In the chair I had laid out my clothes on the day of her funeral, then never sat in again. She looked the way she had in the cemetery the last time I saw her—kind of blurry around the edges—but she was still my mom in all the important ways.

“Mom?”

“Sweetheart.”

I crawled out of bed and sat on the floor next to her, my back against the wall. I was afraid to get too close, afraid I was dreaming and she would disappear. I just wanted to sit by her for a minute, like we were in the kitchen talking about my day at school or something trivial. Whether or not it was real. “What’s going on, Mom? I’ve never been able to see you like this before.”

“There are…” She hesitated. “Certain circumstances that allow you to see me. I don’t have time to explain. But this isn’t like before, Ethan.”

“I know. Everything is worse.”

She nodded. “I wish things were different. I don’t know if there is a happy ending this time. You need to understand that.” I felt a lump in my throat, and I tried to swallow it away.

“I can’t figure this out. I know it has something to do with John Breed’s Eighteenth Moon, but we can’t find him. I don’t know what we’re supposed to be fighting. The Eighteenth Moon? Abraham? Sarafine and Hunting?”

She shook her head. “It’s not that simple, or that easy. Evil doesn’t always have one face, Ethan.”

“Yes, it does. We’re talking about Light and Dark. Things don’t get any more black and white than that.”

“I think we both know that isn’t true.” She was talking about Lena. “You’re not responsible for the whole world, Ethan. You aren’t the judge of it all. You’re just a boy.”

I reached up and threw myself at my mom, into her lap. I expected my hands to pass right through her. But I could feel her, as if she was really there, as if she was still alive, even though when I looked at her she was still hazy. I clung to her until my fingers dug into her soft, warm shoulders.

It felt like a miracle to touch her again. Maybe it was.

“My little boy,” she whispered.

And I smelled her. I smelled everything—the tomatoes frying, the creosote she used to cover her books with in the archive. The smell of freshly cut graveyard grass, from the nights we spent there, watching those light-up crosses.

For a few minutes she held me, and it felt like she had never left at all. Then she let go, but I was still holding on to her.

For a few minutes, what we had, we knew.

Then I started to sob. I cried in a way I hadn’t since I was a kid. Since I fell down the stairs racing Matchbox cars on the banister, or off the top of the jungle gym in the schoolyard. This fall hurt more than any physical one ever could.

Her arms encircled me, as if I was a kid. “I know you’re angry at me. It takes a while to feel the truth.”

“I don’t want to feel it. It hurts too much.”

She hugged me tighter. “If you don’t feel it, you won’t be able to let it go.”

“I don’t want to let go.”

“You can’t fight fate. It was my time to go.” She sounded so sure, so at peace. Like Aunt Prue, when I was holding her hand at County Care. Or Twyla, when I saw her slipping away to the Otherworld on the night of the Seventeenth Moon.

It wasn’t fair. The people who were left behind never got to feel that sure of anything.

“I wish it wasn’t.”

“Me too, Ethan.”

“Your time to go. What does that mean, exactly?”

She smiled at me as she rubbed my back. “When the time comes, you’ll know.”

“I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m afraid I’m going to screw things up.”