back pocket for my mirror pendant. It was a parting gift from Lara.
She would be furious at me for keeping the pendant in my pocket instead of out around my neck. She says people like us aren’t only hunters; we’re beacons for specters and spirits. Mirrors work on all ghosts, including Jacob, which is why I don’t wear the pendant. Lara would probably say that’s why I should.
Needless to say, she doesn’t approve of Jacob.
“Lara doesn’t approve of anything,” he quips.
They don’t get along—call it a difference of opinion.
“Her opinion,” he snaps, “is that I don’t belong here.”
“Well, technically you don’t,” I whisper, wrapping the necklace around my wrist. “Now, let’s go find Jean.”
Jacob scowls, the air around him rippling ever so slightly with his displeasure. “We were having such a nice night.”
“Come on,” I say, closing my fingers over the mirror charm. “Aren’t you curious?”
“Actually, no,” he says, crossing his arms as I reach for the Veil. “I’m really not. I’m perfectly content to never find out if—”
I don’t hear the rest. I pull the curtain aside and step through, and the world around me—
Vanishes.
The carnival lights, the crowds, the sounds and smells of the summer night. Gone. For a second, I’m falling. Plunging down into icy water, the shock of cold in my lungs. And then I’m back on my feet.
I’ve never gotten used to that part.
I don’t think I ever will.
I straighten and let out a shaky breath as the world settles around me again, stranger, paler.
This is the Veil.
The in-between.
It’s quiet and dark, full night. No carnival, no crowds, and thanks to the deep shadows and the tendrils of fog rolling across the lawns, I can barely see.
Jacob appears beside me a second later, obviously sulking.
“You didn’t have to come,” I say.
His foot scuffs the grass. “Whatever.”
I smile. Rule number twenty-one of friendship: Friends don’t leave friends in the Veil.
Jacob looks different here, fleshed out and colored in, and I can’t see through him anymore. Meanwhile I’m less solid than I was before, washed out and gray, with one glaring exception: the ribbon of light shining through my rib cage.
Not just a ribbon, but a life.
My life.
It glows with a pale blue-white light, and if I were to reach into my chest and pull it out, like some kind of gruesome show-and-tell, you’d see it’s not perfect anymore. There’s a seam, a thin crack, where it got torn in two. I put it back together, and it seems to be working well enough, but I have no desire to test how much damage a lifeline can take.
“Oh well,” says Jacob, craning his head, “looks like no one’s here. We better go.”
I’m as nervous as he is, but I hold my ground. Someone is here. They have to be here. That’s the thing about the Veil: It only exists where there’s a ghost. It’s like a stage where spirits act out their final hours, whatever happened that won’t let them move on.
My hands go to the camera around my neck, and the mirror pendant wrapped around my wrist chimes faintly as metal hits metal. The sound echoes strangely in the dark.
As my eyes adjust, I realize that buildings outside the park are gone, erased either by time—if they haven’t been built yet—or simply by the boundaries of this particular in-between, whoever it belongs to.
The question is, whose life—or, rather, death—are we in?
The night sky is getting brighter, tinged with a faint orange glow.
“Um, Cass,” says Jacob, looking over my shoulder.
I turn and stop, my eyes widening in surprise.
There’s no Jean the Skinner, but there is a palace.
And it’s on fire.
The fog isn’t fog at all, but smoke.
The wind picks up, and the fire quickens, the air darkening with soot. I can hear shouting, and carriages rattling over stone, and through the smoke I see a huddle of figures on the lawn, faces turned up toward the blaze.
I step closer, lift the camera’s viewfinder to my eye, and take a picture.
“Cass …” says Jacob, but he sounds far away, and when I turn to look for him, all I see is smoke.
“Jacob?” I call out, coughing as the smoke tickles my throat, creeps into my lungs. “Where are—”
A shape crashes into me. I stumble back into the grass, and the man drops the bucket he was hauling. It topples onto the ground, spilling something black and viscous. I know instantly that this is his place in the Veil. The other ghosts are just set pieces, puppets, but this