I hoist him up and look into his sleepy green eyes.

“Are you my brave protector?” I ask.

Grim looks at me for a moment, and then opens his mouth wide, and for a second, I think he’s displaying his rows of tiny sharp teeth. But then I realize it’s just a yawn.

Punctuated by a burp.

Dad laughs, and I sigh and set the cat on the chair, where he promptly sinks into a puddle.

“Good thing you have me,” says Jacob. “I’m pretty sure that cat is useless.”

Grim twitches one ear, already asleep.

“Well, I don’t know about you,” says Mom, pulling the pens from her messy bun, “but Cemetery Day has made me famished! Shall we go find dinner?”

*  *  *

There’s a kind of restaurant Dad calls a “hole in the wall.” I think it’s supposed to mean a cozy little place, the kind you only know about if someone’s told you, or you’ve been there before. Like the Society, but for food.

Tonight we eat in the Marigny, a neighborhood just north of the Quarter. To get to the restaurant, we don’t have to step through an actual hole in the wall, but it’s pretty close. We go through a gate and down an overgrown courtyard, across a threshold that looks like it was a wall once, before someone knocked the center out.

But the food—the food is amazing.

Bowls of gumbo, and shrimp étouffée, jambalaya, and other dishes with winding, musical names, full of heat and spice.

I forget the one-bite rule and dig in, tasting everything.

Lara reaches out a fork and takes a dainty bite of each, and despite the messy nature of the meal, she never spills a spoonful or loses a grain of rice. I bet she could eat a beignet dressed in black and never get a speck of powdered sugar on her.

All through dinner, I keep the evil eye charm nestled in my palm, bracing for trouble, jumping at the slightest scrape of a chair or strange angle of light. But Lara smiles and chats as if nothing’s wrong. She’s so good at pretending everything’s okay. I watch her, wishing I was better at it. But it also makes me sad, that she has so much practice at it.

And even though we’ve only known each other a couple of weeks, having her here feels right.

Even Jacob has softened toward her, and more than once I catch him and Lara exchanging looks, not even murderous ones, but the kinds of glances that pass between friends.

It makes me feel happy, and full.

“I met my first ghost in London,” Mom is saying to Lara. “When I was about your age. Not in the Tower, or in one of the graveyards, or anything like that. I was on a double-decker bus.”

I sit forward, realizing I’ve never heard this story.