“Are you kids lost?” he asks.

Lara bristles visibly at being called a kid, but I just shake my head.

“We have a date with Death,” says Jacob, but thankfully the waiter can’t hear him.

“School project,” I say, holding up my camera.

The waiter eyes us with suspicion, but then someone somewhere drops a tray, and he waves us on and says, “Just don’t touch anything.”

“Of course not,” says Lara, in her best, brightest British.

As we climb the staircase, a couple comes down the other way, arm in arm, drinking and chatting about how spooky it is up there, what wonderful ambience. We pass them, and Lara looks back over her shoulder.

“Is this part open to the public?” she asks me.

I nod, and she looks around, then grabs an EMPLOYEES ONLY sign on a chain and hangs it across the top of the stairs behind us.

“This way,” I say, leading her past the cushioned lounge, into the red light of the séance room, with its eerie darkroom glow.

“Well, this is charming,” says Lara, scanning the old paintings and the grinning masks, the strange combination of statues and animal prints and fancy furniture.

“Ten out of ten for atmosphere,” agrees Jacob.

A quick survey, and I’m satisfied that no one else is up here with us. For right now, at least, we have the séance room to ourselves.

“Ready?” asks Lara, and the question feels so much bigger than it is, but I nod.

“Let’s do this.”

We dump the supplies out of Lara’s red backpack, matches and oil and grave dirt tumbling out onto an ottoman. There’s an ornate silk rug on the floor, and I pull it aside, exposing the bare wood floors beneath, mottled with age.

The last thing we need is to start a fire.

“I thought that was exactly what we’re doing,” says Jacob.

“You know what I mean,” I say. “A bigger fire.”

The kind that gets out of control.

Lara opens the pouch of grave dirt and tips some out into her palm. It looks more like sand than soil, dry and gray, but there’s a faint odor, not like something rotting, exactly, just like something gone. The lifeless smell of old, abandoned places.

She traces out a circle with the small black stones, roughly the size of a séance table, then begins to pour the grave dirt out onto the floor, not in a pile but in a thin line, the way Magnolia told us to when we were in the Veil.

“I have to admit,” Lara says, dusting off her palms, “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

She hands me the bottle of oil, and I tug the stopper out.

“Which part?” I say as the room fills with the scent of sage. “Co-opting a séance room, preparing a ritual ceremony, or banishing an agent of Death?”