Dad had shown Evie that the trick to breaking and entering was to hide in plain sight. They approached the chained-up gate openly, carrying clipboards and wearing high-visibility work vests. Dad pretended to open the padlock with a key, but he’d charmed the lock long ago so that it would open at a touch for any who bore their blood. He swung the gate wide open, and Evie strolled in and stared up at the house while he made a show of closing and relocking it. Dad triggered another spell macro that blinded the CCTV to their presence. Then he began his rounds, pacing the perimeter of the overgrown garden, pushing through the knee-high grass and the wildly overgrown hedge to check on the bones and ribbons and the skeins of silver wire fine as cobwebs that bore the charge of stored magic, or mana, that deflected curiosity and dampened desire in anyone who crossed the threshold of the grounds.
Eleven pottery urns were buried in two rows, flanking the path leading to the front door. For generations their family had grown up with dogs: their loyal pets lived on in a tenuous afterlife, penning in the Lares that haunted their humans. Eve had helped Dad bury Nono here about four years ago, the most recent (and the last) arrival in the canine cemetery. The security company who patrolled these buildings had long since stopped trying to bring dog patrols round: the mutts went bugfuck, whining and trying to bolt. As for Evie, she felt a sad and tremulous comfort, as of a wooly presence leaning an imaginary shoulder against her hip, shaking at the specific frequency of a dog wagging its tail. There’d be no new additions. Not unless Evie or Imp started families of their own and brought puppies home to play with a new generation of Starkeys. And that couldn’t be allowed to happen.
“Let’s do it round the back,” Dad proposed after they finished walking the perimeter. “Keep watch while I set up.”
Evie nodded, and stared at the boarded-up windows at the back of the house. The high stone wall between the garden and the park was capped with broken bottle glass embedded in cement to keep trespassers out. Just inside the wall, trees that had barely been saplings when Grandpa sold the manse had matured, growing up warped from the weight of the walls. They spread their branches above Dad’s workspace, a flattened square of grass where he’d spread a tartan rug weighted down with the paraphernalia of his trade: a small brass bell, an athame, his latest notebook—a continuation of the family spell book—and a skull. Eventually he opened his day pack and lifted out a lunchbox and a stainless steel flask, the ritual offerings of food and wine for the Lares. Rather than scribing a pentacle or summoning circle as he would on a hard surface, he laid it out carefully using skeins of braided silk cord. Then, with Evie anchoring one corner of the ritual space, he took up his own position and began the opening propitiation.
The rite was familiar and her part came easily to Evie. It was the first thing they did, every time—an offering of food and drink and a symbolic re-establishment of the ties that bound the Lares to the Starkey family. There was no set time or season for it, nor any significant sacrifice or purification ritual required. It was more like watering a plant or feeding the family dog than actual magic. This time, however, Dad followed it with a more alarming rider. “Lend me your mana,” he politely requested, “to aid us, your family, in our time of need.” He raised the skull and turned in place, presenting it to the four quarters, and Evie could swear that faint green striations glowed in the recesses of its eye sockets. “Lend me your blood, your bone, your sinew, your spirit: your blood to live, your bone to strengthen, your sinew to bind, your spirit to drive the hungry ghosts from the soul of my wife.” For a moment Evie felt a tightening in her scalp and a buzzing tingle in her fingertips, almost as if she had been brought before the regard of something ancient and unsleeping. Then it passed, and her father bowed his head. “Thank you,” said Dad, and he returned the skull to the crimson velvet bag it lived in. “And so, the contract is sustained.” Evie’s skin crawled as if someone had cast a handful of soil across the mouth of her future grave.
Dad was uncharacteristically quiet on the way home. Usually these rituals put him in a cheerful mood. As often as not he’d stop in a pub for a pint by way of unwinding. Evie found these refreshment stops useful, because he relaxed enough to explain what they had just done, both the superficialities (which as often as not she already understood) and the deeper significance. But this time Dad headed straight for the tube station, lips drawn tight and crow’s feet deepening around his eyes.
“Dad, what was that at the end about sustaining the contract?” she asked as they turned the corner onto their street. A fine rain had started, tickling her face and the backs of her hands. “Is there something I should—”
“You needn’t worry about it.” Dad shut her down casually, irritating her: as with most parents, he sometimes forgot that his offspring were adults and reverted to treating her like a six-year-old. He wasn’t totally oblivious—there was no pretty little head to talk down to here—but Evie knew a snow job when she heard one, and the tension in his jaw
