“Excellent,” says Renée. “Who did you meet? Agatha? Theo?” She leads me and Lara back through the black curtain and into the brightly lit store. Jacob is sitting on a stool by the counter, having a staring contest with the cat and chatting with Philippa.

But he looks up as soon as I come through.

“Lucas Dumont is in the Society!” he announces.

“Yeah, I know,” I say, nodding at the curtain as Michael and Lucas follow us out. “I guessed that when I saw him in there.”

Jacob’s shoulders slump. “Well, you weren’t here to be surprised with me,” he sulks, “so I had to save it.” He hops down from the stool. “Well? What did you learn?”

“You couldn’t hear me thinking?”

Jacob shakes his head. “No. It was just … quiet. Like white noise.”

“That would be the warding,” says Philippa, and I wonder, just for a second, if there’s a way to ward my thoughts all the time.

Jacob scowls, reading my mind, and I say, a little too loudly, “Privacy is important!”

And even though Renée, Michael, and Lucas can’t see Jacob, and it must look like I’m having a very tense discussion with empty air, they don’t seem thrown. I guess it’s probably not the strangest thing they’ve come across.

“We learned,” explains Lara, “that Emissaries are drawn to those marked by life and death. That’s how this one caught Cass’s … scent.”

This is the part where Jacob would usually make a joke, but he doesn’t, and when I glance his way, he looks … pale, what little color he has draining out of his face.

“Was it because of me?” he whispers.

“What? Don’t be silly,” I say. “I’m the one who’s an in-betweener.”

“The Emissary must have caught your scent in Paris,” says Lara. “And followed you here.”

“What if it’s me?” Jacob murmurs.

“It doesn’t matter how it found me,” I say. “What matters is that it’s here, in New Orleans. And it’s going to keep coming after me until we send it back. Or on. Or wherever Emissaries go when they aren’t—”

“Listen to me!”

Jacob slams his hand down against the display case, and I hear the crack, the splinter of glass. We all stop talking then and look, in shock, in horror, in surprise.

Before this, Jacob has turned pages and fogged windows.

But this is the first time he’s broken something.

He looks down through his palm at the cracking starburst in the glass, the damage spreading from the shape of his fist.

There’s no triumph on his face, no glee, only fear.