Chapter 1 The Pretender

1

The Pretender

Eating devils is thirsty work.

More than the magic itself, it was that raging thirst in the aftermath that took clients by surprise. Most of those who called on me, Thistle Grove normies and witches alike, came in expecting occult accessories of a more sinister bent. Pungent curls of henbane smoke wisping from a tarnished censer, clusters of crystal shards bundled with dried herbs and feathers, arcane mutterings. (To be fair, I was more than down for the odd bit of arcane muttering when the exorcism called for it, or when an occasion demanded a sense of heightened drama. Even an outlier like me couldn't resist the Avramov family flair for the theatrical.)

It barely even fazed me now, the way their apprehension clouded over into bemusement once I unzipped my black Patagonia backpack to pull out a hefty water bottle, embellished with shrill exhortations to HYDRATE! in two-hour increments. Then came the parade of apple juice boxes more appropriate for a middle schooler's backpack, followed by strawberry Pedialyte, just in case the ritual threw my electrolytes too far out of whack. And, as a last resort, those miniature liquor nips you found tucked away in hotel room minibars like guilty secrets.

Those didn't exactly help with the thirst, but with some of the nastier specimens I came across, nothing burned away the shitty aftertaste quite like a slug of Wild Turkey tossed back sharp.

But today, the client's unusual composure was throwing me. When I'd arrived at the Arcane Emporium and drawn back the burgundy velvet curtain that veiled this divination enclosure, secluding it from the rest of the occult store and the series of identical nooks on either side, she'd been sitting across the table from Amrita in a posture I knew well. Head bowed, tendons standing out like steel cables in her neck, thin hands clasped on the tabletop so tightly the knuckles had paled into skeletal knobs.

Fear made flesh.

Yet the appraising glance she'd shot me when I slipped in, a keenly scrutinizing sweep of my entire person, had been shrouded by only the faintest film of uncertainty. Nothing like my normal clients.

"Hello," I said, setting my sloshing backpack down and extending my hand. I'd found that a courteously detached demeanor, the kind of brisk professionalism you'd get from a doctor, served me better than any cultivated aura of mystique when it came to setting them at ease. The worst of the haunted only wanted to feel that they were in capable hands. "Good to meet you. I'm Daria Avramov, Amrita's colleague. Dasha, if you like."

"Right," the woman said, with a crisp nod that made her glossy cap of chin-length brown hair sway, its caramel highlights glinting in the candlelight. She looked in her mid-to-late thirties, a handful of years older than me. Not my type, but a fresh-faced pretty, with the kind of dewy skin that meant either excellent genes or the budget for premium skincare and cosmetic intervention. Her handshake was cool but surprisingly firm; I was accustomed to a much clammier and more tremulous greeting experience. "The…the specialist. I'm Emily Duhamel, but just Emily's fine."

I withdrew my hand, considering her more closely. Anyone who required my niche services tended to show up beside themselves with terror—and unsure of whether they should be more afraid of whatever it was that plagued them or of me, yon fearsome exorcist witch. Given the breakdown of Thistle Grove's normie population, they were also often the love-and-light types who drove me especially batty. The low-effort, high-commitment kind who outsourced their chakra cleansings and flung indiscriminate amounts of money at the spiritual life coaches they invariably found through social media.

Alas, this insufferable subgroup came with the territory. Many Thistle Grove transplants were drawn here by the allure of living in a town steeped in witchy history, as if the act of paying property taxes in a place ostensibly founded by four witch families might awaken some dormant psychic talents of their own. Even the Arcane Emporium's signature herb-and-incense scent wasn't enough to mask the patchouli they seemed to emanate aspirationally rather than physically. The irony of it was, when something sly and eldritch did come creeping in at their open-ended invitation, it often turned out that these were definitively not the vibes they'd been looking for.

That was when they came running to Avramov diviners at the Arcane Emporium—the only game in town that cut their teeth on shadows, specialized in dealing with manifestations from the other side of the veil.

But this woman wasn't so easily rattled. And I didn't catch so much as a whiff of figurative patchouli drifting off her, only the sweet, floral notes of some top-shelf perfume by a designer I'd never recognize, much less be able to name.

"Thank you for coming out for this, especially on a weekend," she added, with a light laugh and a semi-incredulous shake of her head, as if the absurdity of her circumstances—the fact that the "specialist" in question was an alleged witch, with the alleged power to banish whatever monster it was that lurked under her bed—hadn't escaped her. "I, uh, I'm looking forward to your expert opinion."

"Glad to hear it," I said, even more taken aback. For one of the haunted, this Emily had her shit impressively together, I decided, revising my estimate of her upward by several more notches. Despite the deceptively soft, flower-embroidered cashmere sweater over a preppy collared shirt and distressed jeans, I suspected she did something high-powered in her weekday life. The kind of demanding work that left her encased in an enamel shell that never really chipped off. "And happy to help with your problem, of course. I assume Amrita has discussed our rates with you?"

"Oh, yes." She suppressed a tiny smile, as if she found our hourly rate laughably low but didn't want to offend. I felt my first twinge of annoyance with her; whatever it was she did, not all of us were in the business of fleecing people by overcharging for essential services. "It won't be an issue."

"Perfect. In that case, let's get started. Amrita?"

I glanced over at my half sister, who, though her everyday role was store manager, was bedecked in the clichéd fortune-teller regalia we all wore for our divination shifts—plummy lipstick, a cascade of gauzy maroon shawls shot through with shining thread, elaborate earrings, stacked rings on every slim finger. With her huge, thickly kohled dark eyes and lacquered spill of black hair loose over her shoulders, Amrita looked like my polar opposite, as if the entire palette of decadent color that should've been split between us had somehow ended up hers alone. Her hair inky dark to my white-blond; skin a warm golden brown to my year-round pallor; clothes a bright riot of color to the black cowl-neck sweater, black jeans, and black knee-high suede boots that comprised my fall uniform.

Compared to her, sometimes I thought I looked like a shade myself. A living ghost.

Appropriately enough, maybe.

Unlike me, Amrita blended seamlessly into the arcane décor. Three wooden chairs sat around a small table draped with a silky altar cloth, styled after the tarot starter deck we all grew up using, the one that had been designed by Oksana Avramov two centuries ago. On the tabletop, an ornate silver platter held a gray pillar candle with a high-licking flame, anchored by a dried pool of its own wax—along with an onyx scrying plate, a bowl of black salt, and a scattering of crystals mostly for appearances' sake. A maroon damask canopy swooped over the tops of all the cubicles in the divination area, to blot out the Emporium's brighter overhead fixtures. In here there was only candlelight and the soft bluish glow of a Turkish mosaic spiral lamp tucked into one corner, its azure glass-chip globes swaying on their brass chains every time one of us shifted in our chair.

"Catch me up on the details?" I said to Amrita. She'd summoned me by text once she realized Emily had a problem more in my wheelhouse than hers, but she'd been vague on the specifics.

My sister gave a smooth nod, though I caught the flicker of concern that flitted across her delicate features, the same disquiet I often saw in the mirror. Sometimes her expressions were unsettling replicas of mine, a side effect of us both having inherited most of our father's face. "This is the tainted object," she said, sliding a velvet jewelry pouch to me across the table, touching it as gingerly as she could. "I believe it's the locus for whatever has attached itself to Emily."

"So it's definitely an entity, not a curse?" Sometimes our clients came in with heirlooms that had, either by accident or ill intent, become infused with malign spellwork that affected the wearer. The effects could appear similar to a haunting, but unpicking that kind of nasty tangle was a completely different undertaking, and not my forte.

"An infestation for sure," Amrita confirmed, with a shudder so faint that someone less familiar with my sister's poise wouldn't even have caught it. "A pestilential one, too, I'd guess."

"There's no need to put it that way," Emily cut in with a startling edge of reproach, a flash of temper flaring in her brown eyes. Under closer scrutiny, she looked worn-out beneath that tasteful makeup, the skin under her eyes the tender, predawn hue of purple that came from more than one restless night. Something was disturbing her sleep. "So crudely. Like she's evil . An affliction. I told you, it isn't like that. I'm not afraid of her."

She , I noted. Her. So Emily thought she already knew what had taken up residence inside her jewelry.

Also unusual.

My sister drew the inside of her lower lip between her teeth, clearly refraining from comment. "Then why don't you tell Dasha the story, Emily?" she suggested delicately, cocking her head. "It's better that she hear it from you, anyway. More precise."

Emily gave a clipped nod and relaxed back into her chair, appeased; as per usual, Amrita had struck the perfect note. The idea of precision obviously appealed to Emily, and I marveled again at the strangeness of it, of someone so stable and collected needing our services. Most of the people who traipsed through the Arcane Emporium were tourists chasing the giddy thrill of having their cards or palms read—though unlike your standard carnival experience, Avramov diviners never lied or sugarcoated unpalatable truths. Only a small handful of our visitors came afflicted with actual paranormal manifestations that had glommed on to them, made them desperate enough to seek the kind of help they likely didn't even really believe in.

And an even smaller segment had acquired the sort of malevolent hitchhiker that I specialized in.

"It was my aunt's," Emily began, untying the pouch's drawstring and fishing out a heart-shaped locket on a delicate chain, letting it pool in her palm. Candlelight caught its links with a sinuous, flickering gleam. Again, I saw Amrita stiffen with distaste, but Emily's fingers curled protectively around the locket, betraying no trace of fear or distress. She toyed with it fondly, running her fingertips over its edges as she spoke. "Passed down from my maternal grandmother, her mother before that, and so on. It's belonged to the women in my family for at least four generations."

I nodded, committing this to memory. The age of the substrate mattered when it came to infestations. Something old, infused with decades or even centuries of emotion, tended to be a more attractive and sturdier medium, a better home for malevolent entities than an item without its own patina of history.

"How did it make its way to you?"

A fine tremble of emotion rippled over her features. "My aunt passed away, a little over six months ago," she said, swallowing hard, a corner of her mouth twitching. "An aggressive cancer; we had almost no warning. Most of her estate went to debts, the rest to me and my mother. This piece in particular, she left to me."

"Your aunt didn't have any daughters of her own, I take it?"

"Not anymore." She licked her lips, tightened them against the slight quiver in her chin. "But she used to. My…my cousin, Scarlett. Lettie. She died when I was fifteen. We were almost the same age; my mom and Aunt Percy, they had us less than a year apart. They used to call us Irish twins. And that's what it felt like to us, too. Like we were sisters instead of cousins."

"So you were close," I prompted. The mention of a dead cousin as well as a dead aunt had piqued my interest, but I didn't want to lead her or bias myself. Still, any kind of tight entanglement with the departed was promising.

"Yes." A faint smile ghosted over her lips. "I lived with them for a while before Lettie died, for almost a whole year back when I was twelve. My father wasn't in the picture, and my mother was weathering a rough patch. She has bipolar disorder, with a panic disorder on top of that, and meds back then were even more of a guessing game. It took a while for her to reach something like an even keel. So we agreed I'd move in with Aunt Percy and Lettie, just until Mom found her footing."

"How was that? Living with them?" Emily seemed willing enough to reminisce about her cousin and aunt, but two teenagers circling each other in close quarters could create a frothy turbulence. The sort of psychic turmoil that sometimes left a contrail, a delicious impression that drew some entities like bees to nectar.

"Wonderful," she said wistfully, no bitterness whatsoever. "I'd been living with my mom in Boston before that, in one of the college student neighborhoods she could afford. It was pretty much what you'd expect. Loud, crowded, parties at all hours. But Aunt Percy, she had this gorgeous restored farmhouse in Vermont. Acres and acres of land, a few horses. So much quiet and sky, exactly what I needed at the time. And Lettie and I, we had the run of the place. I even went to school with her that year, and it was like…I don't know, an endless sleepover with your best friend in the world. Like I'd fallen into this cozy fairy tale."

"What happened after that?" I asked.

"My mom got better, and I went back to Boston." Emily's face darkened like a storm front. "I'd been gone for almost three years by the time Lettie died, but I visited every summer, sometimes even for holidays. It was a drunk driving accident, the kind where everyone else walked away practically without a scratch. Just awful, cosmically shitty luck."

Amrita flicked a subtle glance at me, gauging my reaction. My mother had died in a car accident, too, six years ago, though that had been a highway pileup caused by an ice slick rather than any human recklessness.

I gave Amrita a tiny, reassuring nod in response. Corkscrew twist in my stomach aside, I'd come a long way since the days when the slightest reminder of my mother's absence could send me spinning out, where nothing and no one could reach me.

"I don't think my aunt ever really recovered. If you even can, from a loss like that." She toyed with the locket again, turning it over and over between her fingers, her drawn features softening a little. "That's what's in here. A lock of Lettie's hair. I assume that's partly why Aunt Percy left it to me. She knew…she knew the way I loved her, too."

My interest sharpened almost tangibly, like a lens focusing. So there was an organic component involved, which could be a powerful locus for sympathetic magic.

"Then weird things began happening," I guessed. "Once the locket passed to you."

Emily nodded, a rapid bob, throat spasming as she swallowed. "It was just the odd thing here and there, at first. Lights flickering, creaking noises, thumping in the walls. The kind of stuff you can write off as faulty wiring, an old house settling, maybe mice. Or, you know. Pipes."

"Pipes," Amrita and I deadpanned in long-suffering unison. As far as explanations for the paranormal went, crappy plumbing really played an outsized part. Sometimes I wondered if we even needed the oblivion glamour that was cast over Thistle Grove to prevent its normie residents from retaining memories of magic, when eighty percent of the time you could blithely pin the blame for anything from a rogue demon to a rampaging poltergeist on "pipes."

"But then," she went on, a little smile tugging at her lips, "I started feeling her. Lettie."

My shoulders tightened by reflex. Now we were really getting somewhere. "How do you mean? Cold spots in certain areas of the house? A sense of presence?"

"No cold spots, nothing like that. But a presence, yes. It was only in my dreams at first. Lettie and I'd be lying together by our creek at sunset, like we used to." Her brow furrowed. "She'd be talking and talking to me, telling these long, winding stories. Holding my hand, or with her head resting on my stomach. Always touching. And I…I've missed her so much, for so long now. It was like really being with her again. I'd try so hard to remember what she said to me after I woke up, but I never did. I could never hold on to the words."

A chill trickled down my spine, and I could feel the prickle of the sideways glance Amrita stole at me, to confirm that I'd registered this aberration, too. Normal shades didn't behave this way, not even the punchier ones. They didn't have the bandwidth or the cohesion to affect the living like this, trespassing on their dreams.

But other things did.

"You said ‘at first,'?" I probed, resting my forearms on the table's edge. "What happened after that?"

"Um." She licked her lips again, strained gaze darting between the two of us. "After that…well, a few months ago, Lettie started getting into bed with me."

"I see." I strove to keep my tone neutral, though even as someone on first-name terms with a variety of chthonic entities, the notion of something inhuman slinking into my bed gave me an instant case of the willies. "Did you feel a dip in the mattress, something like that? Or has she made physical contact?"

"Contact." She smiled, an expression of such sheer joy and affection that it only unnerved me more. "She spoons me sometimes. Snugs her arms around my neck, all warm. Exactly the way we used to sleep, the nights I snuck into her bedroom so we could stay up and freak each other out with ghost stories."

All warm. That wasn't right at all. Shades felt like nothing to most humans, completely incorporeal—and on the rare occasion where they manifested an ectoplasmic form dense enough to emit a temperature, the living experienced it as a freezing, bone-burrowing cold. I should know. As an Avramov, ectoplasm had been my magical clay since I began casting, and decades later I still wasn't immune to its slimy, icy texture.

"And this happens every night?" I asked, my pulse kicking up.

"No, but it's gotten more frequent. And I'm not—I'm not saying I have a problem with it, per se," she added hastily, lest I get the wrong impression about nighttime snuggles with Alleged Dead Lettie. "It feels so precious to be close to her again, after all these years of missing her. Like a gift. Like she's missed me, too, so much that not even death could keep her away from me forever." She huffed out a tearful little laugh, tucked her lips behind her teeth. "You're…This is the first time I've even told anyone else. Believe me, I know exactly how unhinged this all must sound."

Amrita reached across the table and gave Emily's free hand a quick squeeze, her eyes warm with compassion. I noticed that Emily's cuticles were raw and inflamed, as if she had been worrying at them while avoiding the glossy coat of her polish. "Not at all," my sister assured Emily. "It's your experience, and you're doing a wonderful job describing it for us. That's what we're for—to hear stories just like this. And then help, if we can."

"That's the thing," Emily said, mouth twitching in a brief, pale smile. "I'm not completely sure I even need help. For the most part, I love having her there. It's just that…I've been waking up so tired, the mornings after she spends a night with me. And I used to run hot, but now it's like I'm freezing all the time. It's gotten bad enough that I went in for a check-up, but everything seems fine. And I—I guess what I'm asking is, would that be normal? In, in situations like this?"

That posture I'd seen when I first arrived hadn't been fear, I suddenly realized, but a desperate, ferocious hope. Emily didn't want to be saved, delivered from any evil—she wanted confirmation of what she hoped was the truth. That this was truly the ghost of her beloved cousin reaching out to her from beyond the veil, wanting nothing more than to cozy up against her living kin's back. That sounded sublimely fucking creepy—even to me, someone who, not that many years ago, would have given anything for the smallest sign of my mother reaching out to me from beyond that depthless dark.

But part of Emily—the part that had her gnawing at those ragged cuticles—at least suspected that something here was terribly wrong.

"And I can handle it," she continued before I could reply, gaining conviction. "The fatigue and the cold, whatever else happens. It's a ridiculously small price to pay for having gotten her back, in any form. If this is what I can have of her, then I'll take it. But…I want to be sure. That it's really her, and not…I don't know. Something else."

"It's very brave of you," I murmured, holding her eyes. "On both fronts. To be willing to make that sacrifice, and to be willing to know the truth. But I do have to tell you, even if it is Lettie's shade—what you might refer to as her ghost—that's attached itself to the locket, I wouldn't advise allowing her to stay with you. For one thing, it isn't really her. Shades are only shadows, echoes of unresolved emotions. Not the person you knew."

I could see from the unyielding defiance on her face that this wouldn't be a convincing line of argument; she didn't care which part of Lettie she might have gotten back. Grief could be like that, hollowing you out enough to make you starved for crumbs you could barely see, much less taste.

"More importantly," I went on, trying another tack, "the living and the dead aren't meant to mingle, to entangle so closely. Their presence wears on you. Long term, there would be both spiritual and physical consequences. Progressively more severe."

Without conscious thought, my fingers drifted up to the hollow of my neck, where the protective Avramov garnet hung on a slim silver chain. It was the gem ward we all used to keep ourselves grounded, given the way our mere existence attracted anything of an ectoplasmic bent. Because we Avramovs weren't just necromancers, or speakers to the dead—something in our blood made us into living beacons, the human equivalent of standing stone circles. A walking invitation for possessions and infestations of every stripe.

My own especially volatile nature meant I sometimes needed the garnet's anchor even more than most.

"I'll make that decision for myself," Emily said, with a stout lift to her chin. There was such a vibrant energy to her, an electric sense of leadership, loyalty, and fearlessness that burned in her like a brand. Luminous enough that even I could see it, having known her for all of fifteen minutes. I could understand why something would have wanted to feast on that vibrant part of her. Maybe even I wouldn't have minded just a little bite of all that zest. "That's why I'm here. I want to know for sure."

"Understood." I reached a hand across the table, palm up. "May I?"

Reluctantly, as if she was just a tiny bit afraid I might steal it from her, she relinquished the locket, letting the chain pool onto my palm. It was a vintage heart etched with whimsical little flowers drawn from curlicues, its edges rubbed lopsided by years of handling, the raw brass still warm from her skin. A sweet curio, with a warm, feminine energy to it. Likely just as appealing to whatever now lived in it as Emily herself was.

I closed my eyes, grasped at the locket with my mind, and tumbled headfirst into darkness.