A middle-aged man in a bow tie is napping on a sofa, while an ancient woman with wild gray curls sits beside him, fingers folded over a cane and staring at the wall as if it were a window.

An older Black man with a mustache looks up from his book.

A young white woman with a pixie cut wanders through the room, gripping a mug of coffee that reads THINK OF A NUMBER.

“Oh, hello!” she says, as if the sight of two new in-betweeners is perfectly normal.

She pokes a finger toward the blue-white light in my chest, and I pull away on instinct.

She cackles.

“A Veil-walker.” She looks from me to Lara. “Two of them! What a Wednesday! Is it Wednesday? It’s so easy to lose track.”

“Does it matter?” asks the girl with the Rubik’s Cube, her accent pure Louisiana, syrup and sweet.

“Time always matters,” says the older man with the book.

“Until it doesn’t,” says the ancient woman.

“Look at us, chattering away,” says the woman with the coffee mug. “Where are my manners? I’m Agatha.”

Lara and I introduce ourselves.

“Sit, sit,” says Agatha, “make yourselves comfortable.”

There’s not a lot of space, but we perch on the edge of the dusty furniture.

“That’s Theodore,” Agatha says, gesturing at the old man with the book. “Hazel,” she says, nodding at the girl with the sundress and the Rubik’s Cube. “Charles—wake up, Charles!” she shouts toward the napping man with the bow tie. “And Magnolia,” she finishes, nodding to the ancient woman bowed over her cane.

“Are—were you all in-betweeners?” I ask.

“Goodness no. And we use the present tense here, child. Makes us feel a bit more up to speed. Hazel and I are mediums.” The girl’s gaze flicks up from the Rubik’s Cube. “Charles—somebody wake him up?—is a historian. Magnolia handles the voodoo, and Theodore here, he is—or, sorry, Theo, I do have to say was—a Veil-walker.”

I look toward Theo’s chest, where the light would have been. It’s gone now, of course.

“And you all just stay here?” asks Lara.

“We’re on shifts. Some of us are a bit more lively than others. But let’s see, Harry and Renata are out patrolling, Lex was supposed to be shoring up the wards on the shop after someone tried to get in”—she raises a meaningful brow as she says it—“and knowing Sam, she’s probably drinking gin and listening to jazz in the square.” She takes a swig from the mug. “And what about you two? You’re awfully young to be Society members.”

Hazel clears her throat. She doesn’t look any older than us.

“Well, yes, but yours was a tragic end,” Agatha tells her, and then examines me and Lara again. “You’re not dead, though. Just visiting. So what can we do for you?”