I dig my hands in my pockets and find a couple of coins, but one is a pound from Scotland, and the other a euro from Paris. I’m about to ask my parents if I can borrow some cash when Dad appears like a shadow at my shoulder.

“What have we here?” He looks down at the cards. “Ah, tarot,” he says, his face unreadable. “Come on, Cass,” he says, tugging me gently away from Sandra and the Two of Swords.

“I need to know,” I say, and he must be able to tell how shaken up I am because he stops and turns back, not toward the fortune-teller, but toward me. Dad kneels, looking up into my face.

“Cassidy,” he says in his steady scholar’s tone, and I expect him to explain that fortune-telling isn’t real, it’s just a trick, a game. But he doesn’t say that. “Tarot isn’t a crystal ball,” he says. “It’s a mirror.”

I don’t understand.

“Tarot cards don’t tell you what you don’t already know. They make you think about what you do.”

He taps the spot, just over my heart, where my mirror pendant sits beneath my shirt.

Look and listen. See and know. This is what you are.

Words I’ve only ever said to ghosts.

But I guess they do apply to living people, too.

“Those cards just make you think about what you want, and what you’re scared of. They make you face those things. But nothing can predict your future, Cassidy, because futures aren’t predictable. They’re full of mysteries, and chances, and the only person who decides what happens in them is you.” He kisses my forehead as the rest of the group comes over.

“Oh, tarot cards!” says Mom, beelining for the fortune-teller.

“The first one’s free,” says Sandra, fanning out the weathered deck, but Dad catches Mom’s hand.

“Come along, dear,” he says. “Those graveyards won’t visit themselves.”

Jacob and I fall in step behind them.

I hold the card in my mind.

The girl, blindfolded. The two swords crossed before her chest.

You cannot win without losing, too.

And I know what I’m afraid of.

That I don’t know how this ends.

Chapter Ten

I don’t mind cemeteries.

They’re usually pretty peaceful, at least for me. See, ghosts in the Veil are tied to the place they died, and most people don’t die in graveyards. They just end up there. Every now and then you get a wandering spirit, but on the whole, they’re quiet spaces.

“So are libraries,” says Jacob, scuffing his shoe on the sidewalk.

I roll my eyes as we pass through the gates of St. Louis No. 1. To my surprise, there’s no grass—just gravel and stone, interrupted by weeds. Pale crypts crowd the space, some polished and others grimy with age. Some even have wrought-iron gates.