She crouched, settling herself as a ghost would, halfway into the wooden floorboards. “You aren’t old. That’s the world talking to you, telling you that you have no value because of your age. Darling girl, stop trying to be young and stupid. Own yourself, my girl. Own your wisdom and the things you’ve learned that brought you here, back to me. Back to where you’ve always belonged. Those twenty-somethings . . . they don’t know the power of a woman who owns every part of herself. The good, the bad, the ugly.

“Take it from someone who made it to a hundred and two. A woman of age has far more power and strength than anyone else. Far more than anyone will give you credit for, and that makes you dangerous. Because no matter how amazing you are, they will always underestimate you.”

Gran brushed a ghostly hand across my face, and a chill whispered across the tracks of my tears. Her words strummed chords of truth up and down my spine, reminding me who I was, all I’d survived.

I drew a breath and brushed my own hands over the now semi-frozen tears, knocking them from my skin. I pulled her red leather-bound book out of my bag. “Do we have time to find what we’re looking for in here?”

She smiled and nodded, her face crinkling up. “I think we do.”

The next half hour, I scoured the book, turning the pages as she scanned them, looking for the notes she knew to find better than me.

“Here,” she pointed at the page and I brushed my fingers over it, the “recipe” scribbled into the top corner in tiny print. “This is what I think they are trying to do, to open a doorway.” The spell wasn’t particularly complicated, but did require the death of a ghost with the knife made from demon steel. Two items that were so particular, there really couldn’t be anything else.

A doorway? “To what?”

“If you already have demons, then they are looking for more power, a bigger demon, I think,” Gran said softly. “That’s all I can think. Now that you know what they are doing, it will help you stop them. Take any one of the items out of play, and you will stop them.”

“Thanks, Gran.” I paused and stuffed the book back into my bag. “I still don’t know who to trust.”

“What does your womanly intuition say?” She rose from her spot in the floor until she was floating once more, closer to my height than her true five foot nothing.

“Eammon,” I said his name and knew it was true. Of all the mentors, I trusted him. He didn’t know Sarge had attacked Luke. Even if he was pissy about Crash. Even if he thought I was trouble, he was honest. That was worth trusting.