Eleanor had a bad feeling she knew the answer to that. Katie Rhodes was the mistress of the Wending. She knew how to open the way between worlds. Eleanor would bet that she was the one who’d eventually figured it out for her parents.

“But people fought back,” Otto said. “They locked the Pallid Kingdom away completely. The People Who Look Away—uh, that is . . .”

“Me and my brother and sister, you mean,” Thea said softly. “We did all those horrible things to you to let Mother and Father back out. Even though we hated them.”

“The People Who Look Away are very, very old,” Eleanor said. “Centuries old. A lot can happen in hundreds of years.”

“Does it have to?” Thea asked. She looked at Eleanor pleadingly. “Do I have to be wicked? Or can I stay me?”

“We won’t let anything happen to you,” Eleanor pledged, taking her hand. “You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”

“Maybe,” Otto said. Eleanor gave him a withering look. He spread his hands. “I’m just saying, we don’t know how any of this works. Maybe it’s her destiny to be evil. Or maybe not! We just changed the past. Who knows what that’s going to do!”

“Weird, weird things,” Pip said. Eleanor sat up, startled by her approach. The hedgewitch was with her, looking grim.

“You’d better come see this,” the hedgewitch said.

Eleanor got to her feet. Her legs still felt like rubber, but the rest had helped. Thea took her hand as they followed the hedgewitch and Pip down the street to the town square.

“So,” Otto said mildly, “does anyone remember there being a giant statue of Mr. January in the middle of town?”

The statue had to be twelve feet tall. It showed what could only be Mr. January—he had his cane, his formal clothes, his smirk. It had been designed so that there were two Mr. Januarys looking both forward and back, merged at the middle.

“ ‘In honor of our beloved mayor,’ ” Otto read from the plaque on the base of the statue.

“What is going on here?” Eleanor asked, aghast.

Movement caught her eye. She turned just in time to see someone ducking inside a shop. She looked around again, slowly. Here and there, she could see faces peering out at them from behind curtains and between blinds.

Claws clicked on cobblestones behind them. Eleanor turned with a gasp, expecting the umbral hounds. But it wasn’t them.

It was the graveyard dog.

Mr. January’s hulking beast of a dog was advancing down the street toward them, ears pricked forward, breath huffing out in great plumes of smoke.

“You,” he rumbled. “Was looking for you. Found you.”