Chapter 2 The Other Side

2

The Other Side

I staggered in place, struggling to gain my bearings. The transition to the other side of the veil always felt vertiginous, a sickening lurch followed by crawling panic as my senses acclimated. Red clouds, every shade from rust to velvet cake, stuttered overhead—hovering in place, swirling like mist, flashing across the sky in fast-forward. As though time here moved not regularly, but in ragged, leaping, senseless increments. Aside from those bloody clouds, the sky was a watery smear of grayscale with no hint of color, no bright sliver of moon or sun.

Stillness reigned absolute, an absence of movement alien to someone used to a world rife with circulation, its air whipped into currents and cross breezes. Nothing stirred here, not even the profusion of pitch-black flowers that sprawled over this field—orchids, lilies, roses, and peonies, laced with strange, angular little sprays of baby's breath. Alongside them grew a riot of bulbous blooms and trumpet-shaped blossoms dangling from thick vines, unnatural specimens unlike anything I'd ever seen. All of them that same sleek and glistening black, the centers an even deeper, void-like dark. I'd knelt to touch them a few times before, rub them between my fingers; they felt chilly and brittle and somehow dusty. And they smelled like nothing, too, as though scent required hot-blooded reality to underpin it, not just a flat mimicry of life.

Spindly trees poked up in the distance, naked black skeletons hung with faceted, geometric approximations of fruit. Big and heavy as gourds, in crimsons and purples so wine-dark they were also nearly black. I'd never seen these trees change in any way, sprout buds or leaves, let their fruit drop or rot. Everything here was like that, besides the clouds. Immutable, ever abiding. The opposite of the living realm, where nothing could be counted on as a constant, not even oceans or mountains or the bedrock itself.

I looked down at my hands, like I always did to steady myself. Tracing my eyes over the familiar shape of my fingers, the road map of lines on my palms, the crosshatched texture of my skin. But even though I appeared and felt corporeal to myself, I wasn't really here. Only my soul and awareness passed over when I visited, the fiery, enduring core of my spirit and consciousness. The essence of who I, Dasha Avramov, truly was. Enough of me to create this lifelike avatar, to lend me shape and matter on this side.

As soon as that initial sense of terrible dislocation passed, a flood of shimmering euphoria rushed in to take its place.

In a land of death, of a vast, flat nothing, I was stunningly alive. The only truly living thing. And this awareness felt wonderful , like a river of warm honey crashing through my veins. An all-encompassing ecstasy that surpassed any human high I'd ever felt.

Fighting it was useless, I'd learned long ago, not that any part of me had ever truly wanted to resist. I tipped back my head and let the elation rollick through me, yielding to it until it reached a nearly unbearable crescendo, a deluge of gamey, decadent pleasure that felt too much in every respect. I'd tried to describe it to Amrita once, and the closest I'd come had been telling her to imagine the most mind-blowing orgasm of her life, crossed with a mouthful of dark chocolate and melted butter and caviar, all washed down with some bloodred wine.

And even that didn't graze the surface of how sublime it felt.

Once it waned enough to let me master myself, I opened my eyes to see the Lettie pretender watching me, head cocked.

"Hello," it said, its voice a triple-pitched harmonic warble, a malicious smile playing on its lips.

It looked convincingly like a teenage girl, the way it must have appeared in Emily's dreams. Big hazel eyes under thick, straight slashes of brows, long brown hair parted down the middle, chipmunk cheeks and a pointed little chin. I could even see some of Emily in her, the shared bone structure that in Lettie hadn't been given the time to surface. It wore low-slung jeans that sat beneath the hip bones, and a lacy cami under an unbuttoned flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the fabric juddering like static with the effort of trying to be blue and green; most color didn't fare so well here. A pair of sparkly Skechers were on its feet, and rows of chunky friendship bracelets clustered around one wrist. This must have been a favorite outfit for Emily to have remembered it in such lovingly meticulous detail.

"How are you here?" As human as it looked, its eyes glittered with the shellacked gleam of a wholly alien curiosity. "You should not be."

"I was born to death, and I have an appetite for it," I told it, lifting my chin. "So I'm given leave to visit."

That was the truth, as far as any of us knew. As the only living Avramov devil eater, there hadn't been anyone to teach or guide me. My father had suspected what I'd become when I was born en caul, the slippery film of amniotic sac clinging to my face—though, given my Harlow mother, even he hadn't been sure what might happen until my magic began manifesting as Avramov. We had records of a few others like me, but I was the only one to be born in Thistle Grove. Even for a family of necromancers, witches like me were an aberration, travelers who could briefly cross the diaphanous border of the veil. Where the rest of the family took every precaution to ground themselves firmly in the mortal world, I straddled the realms, one foot on either side. As if I wasn't exactly human myself.

It made even seasoned necromantic practitioners uncomfortable. And while I normally wouldn't be so forthcoming with an entity like this, I wanted this one to consider the wisdom of being afraid of me.

"Curious," it replied instead, its overbright gaze shifting between my eyes. "I have never heard of such a thing. Are you some abomination, then? Do you mean to try to eat me?"

I tilted my head from side to side, like, jury's still out , though I took a lot of exception to being called an abomination by something wearing a dead girl's shade like a hide. "That would depend on what your intentions are. Toward Emily Duhamel."

"Emily." The thing all but purred her name, stretching its syllables out like taffy, its eyes rolling back with pleasure. "Have you met my delectable Emily, my ambrosial trifle? My pretty, sticky pudding fresh from the oven?"

Fury roared up in my belly, helpfully blotting out all that distracting euphoria. "I've met her. And she isn't your dessert ."

"Oh, of course she is," the thing crooned, mimicking my emphasis as it bared its teeth in a terrible imitation of a smile. "She likes me close, allows me in her bed like a favored cat. Shares her honeyed mortal heat with me, bite by little bite. And all I must do in return is present this face to her, and sweeten her dreams with stolen memories while she sleeps."

My suspicions crystallized with a hard snap. I knew exactly what this entity was—a revenant demon. They were notorious shape-shifters and siphoners, taking on the guise of some well-loved departed to ingratiate themselves with their prey, while they sucked the living's memories and life essence away exactly as it had said, bit by precious bit. It might take years for Emily to die with this thing stuck to her like a leech, maybe even decades. But she would die, withered and hollow eyed and long before her time. With only a scrap of soul left.

There was no way to know when it had affixed itself to the heirloom locket. But now it was using the locket as both an anchor and portal, whenever it wanted to cross the veil to feed on Emily.

"So she gets to be tricked into believing that part of her cousin is still with her, and you get to feed until you burst like a tick." I shook my head, flexing my hands into fists by my sides. "Afraid that's not going to work for me."

"Why not? It is a fair enough bargain," it said, flicking one shoulder in a repulsive shrug, like the twitching of an antenna. "Fairer than many others I have seen struck. And if you had ever tasted her for yourself, death hungerer, I am certain you would agree."

"You will leave her alone," I ordered, swaths of ectoplasm coalescing around me like a cloud of billowing dark fog as I began drawing on my magic. Ectoplasm hung thick in the air here, ripe for the shaping, much more readily available than it was on my side. Sometimes I wondered if this entire lifeless world might be made of it. "She isn't for the likes of you."

"Or what?" it whispered mockingly, taking a slow, dragging step toward me, scuffing a sneakered toe through the black flowers. Then another step, this one at uncanny stutter speed—bringing it less than a foot away, close enough that I could make out the details of its features, down to the pollen smattering of freckles. The visual memories of Lettie it had stolen from Emily.

Over its shoulder, the outline of a towering black castle sprang up from nothing, its tapering, needle-thin spires spearing into the charcoal sky like finials. The only shape on the horizon besides the jagged mountain range looming in the far distance, like the serrated vertebrae of this world.

Besides the cloudscape, the castle was the one other mutable feature of this side. Sometimes it appeared like a mirage, other times it never showed itself. I had no idea what it was—or who it might belong to—the same way I didn't know the true nature of this place. Was it an entirely separate realm of its own, existing in parallel with ours; maybe one of the many netherworlds of Avramov mythology? Or was it what we thought of as purgatory, a way station for shades on a journey that ended in some other destination?

All I knew for sure was that along with shades, devils roamed here, too.

"Or I'll be the final death of you," I replied with measured calm, though my heart thundered furiously in my chest. The electric adrenaline of facing down a demon never really dulled, no matter how many of them you'd dispatched. Now I could feel the scorching heat coming off the thing, in rolling, infernal waves that baked my face like desert wind. It wouldn't have been this hot curled up against Lettie's back, but here it was in a more natural habitat, closer to its innate form. "For a change."

It chuckled at that, a guttural sound between a cackle and a rasp. "I think not," it replied, that grotesque smile spreading until its girlish cheeks quivered with strain. "You, who do not even know my deepest name, could never cause me harm. But such sterling human hubris does always make my day."

"I don't need your name, you devious, hungry little shit ," I shot back through clenched teeth. "All I need—"

Without another word, it pressed a searing palm to my sternum and gave me a brisk, hard shove that sent me reeling back.

My eyes flew open, and I was in my chair at the Emporium once again, a fist clutched against the burning spot on my chest where the demon had forcefully expelled me from the other side of the veil. Though my body hadn't been there, the lingering heat felt very real—as disturbing as the realization that I'd underestimated this entity's strength. Very few denizens of the other side had the firepower to dismiss me in such a casual way.

For a moment, I leaned into the sweeping sense of loss that always accompanied return, heaving ragged breaths as the despair of no longer being a bright torch of life in a dead world settled over me, like some funereal cape. Amrita reached over and gripped my wrist, giving it a grounding squeeze. She knew these first few moments back could be devastating. "You okay?" she asked, low and calm, not wanting to frighten Emily.

"Fine," I said curtly, swallowing against the chalky dryness of my mouth. "It was stronger than I expected. Made for a more abrupt departure than normal."

"So?" Emily demanded, gripping the table's lip, eagerness blazing in her eyes. "Is it her? Is it Lettie?"

"I'm sorry, it's not," I said, as softly as I could, my gut clenching in sympathy as disappointment drowned the hope in her face. "I'm afraid you've been infested with something called a revenant demon."

"Demons aren't real," she said, but gingerly, as though testing the waters of an unlikely theory. Already halfway to belief.

"Unfortunately, they're very real. And very dangerous." I gritted my teeth, infuriated once again by how easily the demon had expelled me. "And this one wasn't exactly open to civil discourse. Its kind are siphoners—they feed on the heat of your life, and the sweetness of your memories. Tell me, have you been forgetting things? Things to do with Lettie, or other pleasant aspects of your life? Memories you cherish?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it, a thoughtful, fear-tinged expression settling over her face as she tested her memory for gaps. "I would've said no, because it's nothing overt. But, yes. I was trying to remember something about an old friend the other day, a road trip I took with her our sophomore year for spring break, and it was just…blank. A bunch of nothing, like it had never even happened. I know we had a wonderful time, we always talk about it when we get together. You know, the glory days of 99 Apples and fake IDs and Forever 21 under fleece jackets. But now…"

"The memory's gone. And it'll only get worse," I finished for her. "It's already eaten many of your best memories of Lettie; you just haven't noticed because you have so many. But this entity…it wants to kill you, and slowly. It's a parasite, and it can't coexist with you in any other, less lethal way, even if it wanted to. Which it doesn't. I talked to it just now. It spoke about you like you were food."

Her face went taut with revulsion, even as confusion brewed in her eyes. "What do you mean, you talked to it? When? You only held my locket for a few seconds!"

"It's hard to explain. You came here for our expertise, and this is it. You'll have to take my word for it that what I'm telling you is the truth." I leveled a solemn gaze at her, because I wasn't going to do this against her will, without her active consent. If she wanted to die because an ersatz dead cousin was better than none, then that was her choice to make. "Knowing that it means you harm, will you let me exorcise it? Once it's gone, you'll be able to safely keep the locket. But the thing you've thought of as Lettie…it'll never be back."

She gazed at me, wavering. Part of her wanted to keep on going as she had, clinging to the beautiful illusion the beast had conjured for her. But that other part, the staunch, burning warrior who intuitively understood that something here was badly amiss, wouldn't be so easily swayed. And I knew that in situations like this, my appearance helped lay skepticism to rest. I'd always been an otherworldly kind of beautiful, with the filigree of my features and the creamy pallor of my hair and skin. The ghostly tracery of violet veins at my temples and eyelids, the silvery blue-gray of my white-lashed eyes. A pale, pale girl with shadows swimming in her irises, like black minnows in some frozen-over pond.

I personally credited Vera Farmiga for normalizing the idea that an exorcist worth their salt might look more like me than a male Catholic priest. In my case, the overall pallor gave more Victorian Consumptive Chic × The Exorcist , but it still seemed to do the trick.

"Okay," Emily said in a deflated whisper, dropping her gaze. "Do it. Whatever it is you do."

I released a pent-up breath, and beside me, I could hear the soft exhale of Amrita doing the same. It went against our Avramov grain to leave something baneful unexorcised; both of us would have hated watching Emily walk away with that locket curled like a sleeping snake around her neck.

With a nod, I set the locket on the table and began unloading my hydration supplies, unscrewing caps and stabbing in straws so that after the exorcism, I could suck down my liquid of choice with the least amount of fuss. Emily watched, only slightly bewildered, a wrinkle appearing between her neat brows. "You must be very thirsty," she said, wryly enough to make me smile despite myself.

"Not yet, but I will be soon," I said, glancing over at my sister. "Amrita, if you would?"

Amrita scooted her chair toward a corner of the enclosure, gesturing for Emily to do the same, until they both sat huddled near the mosaic lamp, a healthy distance away from me and the table. I could feel the glittering dome of the protection spell my sister cast under her breath as it settled around them, making sure the demon couldn't lash out at her and Emily once I drew it out of its cozy little lair. My sister was an expert at this kind of protective ward—part of the reason we worked together as often as we did. Someone needed to act as my foil, the shield rather than the sword.

As soon as they were safely settled, I began my work.

As far as I knew, all Avramovs could banish or exorcise both shades and demons, though with wildly varying degrees of success. But they needed spells to do it—premade magical workings gleaned from the Grimoire, the spell repository used by the four witch families of Thistle Grove. A series of words and gestures, sometimes helped along by the use of occult arcana, in formalized rituals they committed to memory.

For other kinds of spells, I also relied on words and tools crafted by others, handed down over the centuries. But to eat demons out of existence, I'd only ever needed myself.

First, I pushed my chair away and knelt on the floor; these workings were always easier when I felt connected to the earth, the loamy soil beneath the pour of the Emporium's concrete foundation. Then I cast a circle just wide enough to encompass me and the table, above which the demon would manifest—though this was just a precaution, since it would be bound to my will as soon as I summoned it. Next, I reached out to the locket with my mind, sensing the now-familiar shape lurking just beyond the veil, the way its malignant essence entangled with the locket in an ugly snarl. And I instinctively knew just where to push and press with my magic, the psychic lockpicking I needed to pry it loose.

It resisted as soon as it sensed the insistence of my call, its struggle like some ferocious thrashing, a giant squid flailing against a harpoon. But I didn't give it so much as an inch, not a moment to wriggle itself free, though I could feel the sweat springing up along my hairline at the tremendous effort I was expending, a flush traveling like brushfire down my spine.

Arm wrestling matches with chthonic creatures were not for the faint of heart.

Once I'd loosened its sucking hold enough, I shaped my will into a snare and looped it around the revenant demon's nebulous form. Then I raised my hands and made a come-hither gesture so forceful it ended with my nails digging into my palms—accompanied by a colossal wrenching of my will, the single-minded intent of dragging the demon into our plane.

Ectoplasm began roiling out of the locket in a raging river, swirling like a maelstrom over the table and emitting a furious hiss. The demon churned like poisonous smoke above a boiling cauldron, before settling into a manifested form—something between a leech-like blob and an octopus, with twitching stubs of tentacles instead of full-length limbs. A hideous approximation of a face protruded from its soft underbelly; two gelatinous black eyes like clumps of roe, a circular lipless mouth lined with rows of gnashing teeth. Its slick hide glittered like black mica, as if it were studded with tiny stars.

I had to hand it to the beast—the shimmer was a nice cosmic touch. I'd definitely seen uglier.

"Cut-rate Cthulhu," I remarked, screwing up my face in mock disappointment. "Huh. You know, I would have put good money on your true form being, well…more original than this."

"Oh my god," I could hear Emily repeating in the background, in a high-pitched tone somewhere between full-fledged panic and wild laughter, though I didn't dare shift my gaze to her to check. Amrita could manage it; that was her role. "Oh my fucking god, that's been getting in bed with me? That's what I let in?"

"It's not your fault," came my sister's low reply, and though I couldn't see it, I knew this would be when she'd draw Emily against her into a side hug. "You didn't know. And you still knew enough to come to us, which is what counts."

"LET ME LOOSE, YOU INSOLENT MORTAL BITCH !" the revenant demon roared at me in that hellish timbre, ear skewering and bone rattling all at once. Hopefully someone on duty would have drawn an aural privacy glamour over our enclosure by now; everyone at the Emporium knew the kind of work I did and how noisy it could get. Even if not, they'd probably just blame it on sound effects bleeding through the walls from our haunted-house experience next door. "BEFORE I SUCK YOUR EYES OUT OF YOUR HEAD, AND BURST THEM BETWEEN MY TEETH LIKE BOILED JELLIES!"

I feigned a bored yawn, though my blood had whipped up into a screaming gale of exhilaration and terror, the taste of metal tanging in my mouth. The hotter I could stoke its fury, the more easily I could break it down. I knew that from long experience.

"Right, right, your teeth are so very sharp, et cetera," I said, stifling another yawn. "Slurp up my brains like crème br?lée, blah blah. Though I'm pretty sure I run more savory than sweet, which doesn't seem to be your thing."

"FOR YOU I WILL MAKE A JOYOUS EXCEPTION, YOU DECAYING SLU—"

"And that's enough," I cut in, splaying my hands open before clenching them back into fists. The demon's roar stopped as if it had been sheared off, severed by my will. In the sudden silence, broken only by Emily's harsh breathing and the heavy thudding of my own heart in my ears, I drew a shining thread between my intent and my devil-eating magic—the coil of raw, dark, ravenous power that curled tight at the very center of my being like something hungry and serpentine. I could feel it stirring with interest at the prospect of a treat. As if it were almost sentient, something that existed both as an integral part of and independently from me.

Then I channeled the full force of my will into dissolving the revenant demon into something it could eat.

This deconstruction demanded such single-minded strength and focus that the real world around me seemed to recede, take several steps back. Leaving me stranded in some liminal space, a tiny amphitheater that contained only this small battle, this intimate face-off between the demon and me.

It fought me hard. This was an ancient entity, likely born before the cosmos had even begun contemplating the possibility of my own existence. The souls it had fed on were legion, fattening it up and strengthening it. And as I whittled it down bit by bit, imagined its form breaking down into an inky slurry of ectoplasm, it resisted me with every iota of its own formidable will. Whatever concept of "alive" this beast possessed was just as precious to it as mine was to me. It wasn't about to go gently, not when it was used to being the one snuffing out other lives on a whim.

I could feel it battering ferociously against me, even as its form began to lose material cohesion, becoming translucent and gelatinous as it thinned down into a floating sludge.

"EAT ME, THEN!" it roared directly into my mind, no longer able to vocalize aloud. My focus wavered at the colossal drone in my brain, like a clash of cymbals shot through with a keening whine, though a glance at Emily and Amrita confirmed that only I could hear this. "IT WILL NOT SAVE OUR MILK-SWEET EMILY IN THE END. BECAUSE HE IS COMING, THE ROUGH BEAST brEACHING THE HORIZON. FOR HER ABOVE ALL, AND THE REST OF YOU ALONG WITH HER!"

Who the fuck was this approaching "he"? I thought wildly, my heart bucking in my chest. And what did it want with Emily? Normally I'd have thought it was only trying to scare me; demons spewed whatever lies worked best to foment despair and fear. But there was a note of awestruck reverence to the words that felt troublingly sincere.

" And when he comes… " it hissed, its voice in my mind abruptly dropping to a sibilant whisper. Somehow the quieter timbre registered as infinitely more sinister, sending a chill scuttling down my spine. " When he comes, all of you will fall to your brittle human knees and weep, a flood of salty, futile, delicious tears for him to —"

"I said, enough ," I repeated, in a ruthless whisper of my own, clamping back down on my focus and bringing it to bear. Even halfway unraveled, the demon was still strong, and the raging of its struggle might have blown some weaker witch's soul to smithereens.

But unlike almost anyone else, I'd been born for exactly this.

Even though my garnet burned against my throat—my talent might have been something I was born with, but that didn't mean using it was good for me—I refused to give in. Indomitable as a steamroller set to pulverize, a boulder rolling downhill.

With a final squelch, the demon melted entirely. What came next was the trickiest part. If I hesitated, left the slightest gap in my resolve, I'd give it a chance to recoalesce, gather up the free-floating fragments of its own will and manifest again. Demons were resilient like that, tenacious as cockroaches. You had to stamp them out, brutal and quick.

So as much as I hated what came next, I had to fully commit.

I let my head fall back, my jaw hinging open, and drew the demon's sludgy remnants toward me in thick gray skeins that spiraled through the air. For a moment, they hung above me like an ominous thunderhead. Then the ectoplasm began to drip into my mouth, drop by drop like a slow rain, before merging into a sluggish stream that sluiced directly down my throat. As always, I fought to swallow, to keep my mouth levered open. In its living form, the demon had been heat incarnate—but inert, ectoplasm as a substrate was a bone-chilling cold, the essence of death. And it tasted fouler than foul, like acrid venom infused with dry ice. The world's shittiest artisanal cocktail.

Whatever force had seen fit to instill me with this "gift" could've at least tweaked my palate to match, I'd thought more than once. But life wasn't that kind of fair.

And while the human part of me—most of me—loathed every moment, that dormant hunger yawned wide open like a living chasm. I drew strength from it, let it gird me, so I could do what had to be done without allowing the revulsion to overwhelm me.

As if from a distance, I could hear Emily pose some shrill question to Amrita that I couldn't catch, followed by the low murmur of my sister's reassurance that, despite all alarming evidence to the contrary, everything was actually proceeding according to plan!

Once the last of the demon had dripped into my mouth, I choked it down with a final, convulsive gulp. Then I pitched forward unsteadily, swiping the back of my hand across my mouth.

The world snapped back into place around me, a bath of warmth and candlelight and sound, an oasis of normalcy. Amrita hurried over to help me up, warm hands closing around my upper arms. The thirst was already raging inside me, a desperate need for mundane liquid, anything to counteract the deathly matter I'd just absorbed. I lunged for the apple juice first, crushing box after box, pulling so hard on each straw that the cardboard sides crumpled in on themselves. Then I chugged two-thirds of the water bottle, eyes fluttering closed at the soothing cool coursing down my ravaged throat. When Amrita held out a Wild Turkey nip, eyebrows raised, I shook my head.

"Not this time," I said hoarsely, head still swimming a little. "It tore up my throat too much. I'll take the Pedialyte, though."

With the salty sweetness of strawberry-flavored electrolytes sloshing in my belly, I finally felt steady enough to shift my attention back to Emily. She still sat hunched in the farthest corner, her face leached of color, tear tracks glistening on her cheeks. I noticed, a little giddily, that her foundation had managed to hold through what must have been a full-blown existential crisis crossed with a nervous breakdown. The hells kind of primer did rich people even use ?

"That…" Her voice broke, throat working. "That was fucking horrible. Was it…was it as bad as it looked? For you?"

"Yes," I said simply, seeing no reason to sugarcoat it for her. "Not that it's ever enjoyable, but as they come, this infestation was pretty vile."

"Thank you," she whispered, wet, dark eyes fastened on mine. "For doing that for me. I…I really think maybe I'm not paying you enough."

I chuckled through the rasping pain in my throat. "Well, tips are very welcome. But it's what I do, and I'm glad to have helped."

"We do recommend you cleanse your home with purging and protective herbs, as a prophylactic measure," Amrita added. "Sometimes the negative energy of it having fed on you can linger, draw other psychic predators."

"Other psychic predators," Emily echoed with a weak burble of a laugh. "Of course. Why not."

"I'm happy to set you up with our purification bundle, if you'd like. It's the routine protocol."

She nodded, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a knuckle. "But she…I won't see Lettie again?"

"The revenant demon's gone for good," Amrita said, with infinite gentleness. "So, no, you won't be exposed to any more illusions of your cousin. No more dreams or nighttime visits. None of that."

Though I'd known it was coming, it still hurt to see Emily's face contort, the renewed gush of tears. "This is so stupid," she said damply, thumping a vicious fist against her thigh. "I don't even know what I'm crying about. It wasn't ever really her, I know that now. It was that awful thing the whole time. But I'm…I'm just…"

"You're going to miss her," Amrita finished. "You were tricked into believing you'd been given something precious, and now you have to come to terms with the loss anew. Of course it's hard. Of course it hurts. Don't judge yourself for it too harshly. Or at all, if you can spare that much grace for yourself."

With a beckoning glance at me, she crossed the enclosure to sit next to Emily, taking her hand and folding it between both of hers. I moved next to them to kneel by Emily's other side, head bowed. Lending her my presence as she wept, bookended by the two of us, her shoulders racked with sobs. Just the way Amrita, my niece, and my stepmother had once done for me.

Because this was part of it, too. We didn't just deal with ghosts, walk dark paths that wound deep into the forest gloom.

Tending to grief, bearing witness to the ponderous weight of loss, was just as much what it meant to be an Avramov.