“Can we just talk about the fact that this Oliver bozo is definitely lying to us?” Jordan had maybe had a little too much of the sangria Uncle Steve had put out at dinner. He weaved as they walked the familiar route to Berkley & Daughters, gesturing wildly and colliding with Dan every few steps. “He lives here, right? He runs an antique shop. How could he not know about this bone-thingie legend?”

“I’m sure he has an explanation,” Dan grumbled.

“Are you?” Abby had brought along their combined research—both the articles and pictures she had gathered on Jimmy Orsini and the papers Dan had collected about his parents. “I know he was Micah’s friend, but that’s not much to go on. If we can trust him, why would he give us only half the story?”

Dan wanted badly to answer, but there was nothing to say; his friends were right. Oliver and Sabrina owed them answers, and more than that, they owed him that box and whatever was inside it.

Berkley & Daughters sat shuttered and dark, but they were expected. Dan strode up to the door and went in without knocking, determined to show Oliver that he was leaving with that box, no matter what.

And then what?

The question haunted him as he stepped into the simmering candlelit darkness of the store.

“Really? Another séance?” Abby muttered. She sighed and skirted around Dan, then walked briskly to the counter, where Sabrina and Oliver were counting the cash register money and locking it away in a small deposit box.

“We need to talk,” Dan said, following her.

Oliver shushed him. “Later.”

“No, now.”

“We’re in the middle of something here,” Sabrina whispered testily. “You can wait fifteen minutes, Crawford, it won’t kill you.”

“Trying to commune with your dear old granddad again?” Jordan slurred, not bothering to lower his voice. Dan winced.

“That’s real sensitive of you. And no, for your information, we are not.” But Oliver shifted uneasily; it was hard to tell in the low light, but he might have been blushing. “We’re trying to reach Micah.”

“Have you tried sending a text?” Jordan shot back.

“Would you just give it a rest? I know it might seem silly to you, but there are energies in this world, real, tangible energies that can be tapped into.” Oliver disappeared into the back room for a moment to lock away the day’s money. When he returned, he handed Dan a bowl. It smelled strongly of flowers.

“It’s just rosewater,” Oliver said in response to Dan’s perplexed expression. “Dip your hands in and dry them off, then join us.”

“That’s not why we’re here. We have questions for you,” Abby replied. “We want Dan’s box, and we want to know why you pretended not to know what the Bone Artists are.”

“Look,” Oliver said with a sigh, “you can have your goddamn box, all right? But Micah was reaching out to you, too, Dan. I want you sitting in on this with me.”

It was a waste of time, but if fifteen minutes of playing along got him that box, Dan would do it. He flopped his hands around in the rosewater and then dried them on his T-shirt. Abby and Jordan stayed at the counter, watching, while Sabrina and Oliver escorted Dan to the round table in the corner.

He took one of the empty chairs, sitting between Sabrina and Oliver, looking down at the clean, white tablecloth and the strange symbol drawn across it. A handful of carved runes had been spread across the table, and a small basket with trinkets sat in the middle—a scrap of fabric, car keys, a curled-up canvas belt, and a picture of Micah and Oliver together as teenagers. Dan tore his eyes away from the photo. The two boys looked so happy, so innocent, arms around each other as they posed in front of Oliver’s car. It was probably the day Oliver first got it, a monumental day in any boy’s life.

Dan’s hands were taken and grasped, then rested on the table.

“What do I do?” he whispered.

The other people sitting around the table regarded him solemnly. There were seven of them, including Dan. One of the two girls to his right looked like she could be Sabrina’s sister. The others he recognized from the séance he’d witnessed on the previous visit, including the woman with the ginger hair. He shuddered.

“Just close your eyes and focus on memories of him. If I sense his presence, I’ll ask him where his bones are being kept,” Oliver instructed. His hand was warm and slightly sweaty, but Sabrina’s was cool in Dan’s grasp.

As a last measure before they began, Oliver put his phone faceup on the table, perhaps thinking Micah might forego the usual shaking shutters and overturned chairs for more modern means of communication.

Dan inhaled deeply, preparing simply to sit and endure. For so long he had gone out of his way not to think about Micah or what had happened last fall; the further away it was, the easier it became. The warden, the Scarlets, Professor Reyes, Brookline . . . He had almost reached the point where he could live with the memories, and now he was being asked to bring it all back.

But thoughts of Micah came to him immediately. For a second, it felt as if the low, rhythmic chant of Oliver’s voice asking for Micah’s help was working like a spell, conjuring images of the school and the last seconds of Micah’s life—the punishment he’d received for helping Dan escape. Despite the overabundance of candles in the room, Dan fought off a chill. The air in the room thinned, as if it were being sucked out by a vacuum. He felt something brush the back of his neck and gasped, convulsing, his eyes opening by sheer instinct.

His vision returned in time to see something silver shooting across the table toward him. Cold and final, it slammed into his eyeball, sending him toppling to the floor. He crashed with a shout, crumpling against the rickety chair back.

“Dan!”

Abby and Jordan were there, kneeling next to him while he frantically ran both hands over his face. There was nothing. No spike through his eye, no wound. Nothing.

“I felt . . . God, I could swear. . . .”

He rolled away from the chair and got to his knees, raising his head to meet the astonished gazes of Oliver and Sabrina.

“You felt it, too,” Oliver said, nodding. “He was here.”

“Something was here.” He tried to catch his breath, tilting his head back and letting it fall loose on his neck. But something in the window caught his eye. The curtains had been pulled mostly shut, but in one small gap he noticed a face—a stark white face that made his blood run cold.

He had seen that face before, not in his nightmares but in photographs at the archives, at Uncle Steve’s. . . .

“Something is here.”

Oliver pulled back the curtain over the window, revealing a man whose face was hidden behind a crude rabbit mask. The candles in the window glinted off a sliver of silver in the rabbit-man’s hand, a bone saw that glittered with a hundred sharp teeth.

Dan stumbled to his feet, shouting, but it was too late, the man was already sprinting away from the window, rushing to the door.