I am downstairs. On the floor. My back against the cold hearth.

  A nerve-deep pain starts in my left palm. With my right hand, I probe the spot. A slow, exploratory press. My fingers come away wet.

  Not blood. The fluid is thin. Clear. It smells of salt.

  Bile climbs my throat. Hot. Sour.

  My left hand tries to make a fist. To crush it. To blind the thing in my hand. My fingers will not close. The eye holds my hand hostage.

  My right hand tightens, ready to smash it. But the air turns thick, the taste of bile coating my tongue. My arm goes slack. My body will not let me touch it.

  I sit still, breathing through the nausea. My body braces for the familiar warmth behind the ribs, for the presence that was Nora. Nothing answers. A draught whistles through the empty space where she used to be. And the thing that warmth kept buried now opens its eye in my hand.

  Let me earn that peace again. Give me something to do. Please.

  A pressure gathers behind my eyes. A slow thickening in the quiet of my skull.

  Oh, little Vessel. I thought we were done with games. Were you not the one who saw the strings? Now you are begging to be a puppet again? How disappointing.

  My posture collapses, my spine curving as if to fold me into myself. A wish to be dust on the floorboards.

  I need it. I cannot live with this.

  A long beat of silence. So long I think my prayer has been ignored.

  My stare falls to the floorboards. To the thin line of grey light cutting across the planks. Anything but the eye in my hand.

  Very well. If you need a distraction, I will give you one. Go to Darkwater. Find your father. Kill him.

  I can't. Belladonna's watchers are a wall around the village. They'd stop me.

  Then I suppose you will have to get used to your new eye. Perhaps you will even grow to like it.

  The eye in my palm gives a slow, wet blink.

  Three sharp knocks puncture the quiet. Evenly spaced.

  Knocks this early mean only one thing. Not a neighbour. Not a friend.

  My gut clenches. Evangeline appears from the hallway in her nightdress, her hair a wild tangle. Her hand finds the wall to steady herself.

  I open the door.

  Gwendolyn and Reginald are two grey smudges against the morning. The roughspun cloth of their uniforms drinks the weak light. Gwendolyn's smile is a small, bright stitch in her pale face. Reginald is a hunched shadow behind her, the ledger a dark slab against his chest.

  "James. Evangeline," Gwendolyn says. "Time for your assessment. May we come in?"

  They step inside. Her steps are silent. Reginald's are a soft, apologetic scrape on the wood.

  Evangeline's fingers dig into my arm.

  Gwendolyn's eyes go straight to the portrait, to the small, fragile square of our family hanging on the wall.

  She stops before it. Close enough that her shadow swallows it whole.

  The plaster behind it is clean. But the muscles in my back remember the stain. They seize.

  "This," Gwendolyn says, gesturing to the portrait with a dismissive finger. "This is a wound. A home cannot move forward when it is tethered to a painful past."

  From her satchel, she pulls out a new frame.

  The woman in it is a study in pleasant emptiness. Her silver hair is a perfect, sculpted helmet. Not a single strand is out of place. Her hands are folded in her lap, the skin smooth as polished stone, the nails unstained by garden soil or kitchen work.

  But it is the mouth that is the real horror. It is smiling, but it is a closed smile. The lips are a thin, bloodless line of contentment, a mouth that has never had to argue, or grieve, or shout a child's name in fear.

  She is not Nora.

  "There," she says, shoving it into my grip. "A better memory."

  I stand there, holding the lie.

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  Evangeline is a statue by the hearth, her breathing a shallow, bird-like thing.

  Reginald will not meet my eyes.

  Gwendolyn leans in, her voice a warm breath against my ear. "Replace her."

  The frame in my hand is a cold, smooth plane of wood. The one on the wall is a life. Splinters. Dust. The memory of Nora's hand, guiding a nail into the plaster. To obey is to spit on her grave.

  Gwendolyn's smile does not move. It waits.

  My right hand is a knot of useless meat at my side, frozen by James's grief.

  My left hand moves. A traitor. Its fingers close around the frame.

  The eye in my palm contracts, its pupil a pinprick. A cold, wet pressure leeches from it, a silent pull toward the faces in the frame. As if to a source of warmth. Or food.

  A shape flashes behind my eyes. ?

  I lift the portrait from the wall.

  I hang the replacement. The smiling stranger stares down at our broken home. A terrible silence settles, heavier than before.

  Gwendolyn turns from the portrait. Her smile is bright. Expectant. Her eyes sweep from my face to Evangeline's. It searches. It finds nothing.

  Her smile falters.

  "The wound is closed," she says, her voice a thin, tight thread of disappointment. "But the sickness lingers."

  She claps her hands together. The sound is the snap of a bone in the dead quiet of the house.

  Her voice, when she speaks, is too bright. "Well then. If the environment resists, we must treat the spirit directly. Come now. Let us fill this space with joy."

  She saunters to the hearth. She runs a hand over the new mortar, a look of approval on her face. "Strong work," she says. "A solid foundation."

  Then her smile tightens. "But so... joyless."

  She extends a manicured finger. She presses her nail into the still-wet mortar and begins to drag it. She draws a perfect, curving smile in the stone. Then she adds two quick, brutal jabs for the eyes.

  "There," she says, wiping her hand on her grey uniform.

  With a soft contented sigh, she sinks into the chair at the head of the table. James's chair. She sprawls, her arms thrown wide.

  Gwendolyn beams at us. "A joke," she announces. "A man with one leg and a woman with a broken heart live in a sad, grey house."

  Her eyes flick between me and Evangeline. "One day, a beautiful healer comes and tells them to laugh. The man says, 'I cannot, for my leg is gone'. The woman says, 'I cannot, for my love is gone'."

  She pauses, her smile widening. "The healer says, 'Perfect! Now there is nothing left to lose'."

  I taste blood. I have bitten the inside of my cheek. Hard.

  Gwendolyn's smile widens. "That was the punchline. You were supposed to laugh."

  She rises from the chair. She stalks towards Evangeline, her movements slow. "Perhaps you did not hear me correctly, dear."

  She stops, her face inches from Evangeline's. "I said," she says, her voice lowering to a guttural purr, "laugh."

  Evangeline flinches.

  Gwendolyn's eyes narrow. "No?" she asks, a look of disappointment on her face. "Then we will try a different method."

  She reaches out. Her two index fingers, gentle as a lover's touch, find the corners of Evangeline's mouth.

  "The body teaches the mind," Gwendolyn whispers.

  And she begins to pull. She forces Evangeline's lips upward, stretching them into a grotesque grin. The skin around her mouth goes white with the strain. A tear breaks free from Evangeline's eye and traces a path down her cheek.

  "No crying!" Gwendolyn's hand shoots out, faster than I thought possible. She grabs a fistful of Evangeline's hair, yanking her head back, exposing the pale, terrified line of her throat.

  "Sing," she says. "Sing your joy."

  A roar, ripped raw from my throat. "Get your hands off her!"

  A click.

  The door to Pip's room opens. He stands there, his small wooden wolf clutched in his hand, his eyes shifting from his mother's tear-streaked face to Gwendolyn's smiling one.

  Gwendolyn stops pulling. Her head turns. She sees him. And the light in her eyes ignites. It is a new, and terrible, kind of life.

  "Oh," she breathes. Her voice is a sound of pure, ecstatic discovery. "The purest blossom of joy."

  She discards Evangeline's face. She swoops toward Pip, her hands outstretched, scooping him up.

  He lets out a small, surprised cry.

  Her fingers are worms, burrowing into the soft flesh of his ribs, his stomach.

  Pip's laugh is a clean, bright thing. For a second.

  But Gwendolyn does not stop. She digs in deeper.

  The clean sound of his laughter chokes. It fractures into a series of thin, desperate, hiccuping gasps.

  His small chest seizes. His feet kick against her shins.

  Her smile does not falter.

  "Isn't it wonderful?" she says, her voice calm and even. "He's purging the sorrow!"

  Pip's panicked gasps are a lit fuse in my gut. A raw, murderous rage boils up, a shared snarl from the ghosts of two fathers. My body sinks, ready to erupt and tear her throat out.

  A blur of motion stops me. Evangeline.

  Her voice is a low, guttural thing I do not recognise. "I will kill you."

  Gwendolyn and Reginald's smiles falter, then collapse. They take a unified, involuntary step backward.

  Pip's sobs are small, wet, and real. He burrows into Evangeline's arms. Her eyes are locked on Gwendolyn.

  She takes a half-step sideways, placing her body fully between Gwendolyn and her son. "You will not touch him again."

  Gwendolyn's eyebrows lift. "My dear, I was only helping him find his joy."

  "That was not joy." She takes a step forward, closing the distance until she is breathing Gwendolyn's air. "That was torture. You are a monster."

  Gwendolyn's mask cracks. For a heartbeat, the woman beneath is visible. A shard of pure, black hatred in her eyes. Then it is gone, smoothed over, buried.

  She turns from Evangeline, a slow pivot. She looks at Reginald.

  "Make a note," she says. "The female displays a primal, territorial aggression when the offspring undergoes emotional purging."

  Her stare drifts back to Evangeline, to the child in her arms. "Her love," she says, her voice a soft, pitying sigh, "is a cancer."

  "You will stay away from my family," Evangeline says, her voice a low, dangerous promise.

  Gwendolyn's eyes linger on her, on the way her arms are a cage of love around Pip. A slow, almost appreciative smile touches her lips.

  She turns. She walks out of our home.

  Reginald follows, a hunched shadow in her wake. The only sound he makes is the final, sharp scratch of his charcoal. The sound of a line being drawn under a name.

  A single, violent tremor wracks Evangeline's body.

  I take her hand. My thumb moves, a slow, steady rhythm. Her ragged breathing steadies. The rigidity in her hand softens.

  A small sound from beside her. Pip. His face is buried in her side, his small body trembling.

  I reach across, my hand finding the small space between his arm and his chest. I feel the frantic, bird-like flutter of his heart against my palm. I hold my hand there. A quiet, steady pressure.

  The frantic rhythm beneath my palm begins to slow, matching the steady stroke of my thumb on his mother's hand.

  I look at Evangeline. The fury has drained from her face, leaving it pale and slack. I see the dawning horror in the way her spine, which was a rod of iron, has collapsed, her body folding in on itself.

  Her love for him. Her fury. The look on Gwendolyn's face.

  Oh gods. She just put herself in the bag.

  I stand in the wreckage of our home, watching the woman I love hold our crying son. My own rage, my own strength, is a useless, broken thing. To fight a monster like Gwendolyn, I need a poison.

  I need Ursula.

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