“I’m never going to leave you. Ask me for something else.”

“If you won’t leave me, don’t leave me alone. Not even if you die. Follow me as a ghost, haunt me.”

“Of course,” I answered. “I’d do anything for you.”

Florence asked that the Ceremonial be held quickly and Juan agreed: he understood that she needed to see in order to believe. She had almost fainted when we told her there was a Place of Power on Cheyne Walk. It’s not possible, she kept repeating. In Chelsea? You would have sensed it. He looked for it and he found it, I told her. We never told her exactly how or why Juan had found it. We’d forbidden ourselves from talking about the Other Place. It was ours. What for, we still didn’t know, but it belonged to us.

The Initiates lit the candles. It looked so much like a Christian vigil: it had the same tenuous and sinister beauty as those streets lit with amber light, the village churches and the murmuring faithful. It was dangerous to do it in London, Florence said, and so she had asked everyone to come dressed for a party. They arrived wearing masks and silk dresses, exquisite cravats and vertiginous high heels. Some people kept their clothes on. Others, like Stephen, waited in the nude. I envied the scars on his back. I wanted them too, but it wouldn’t be possible that night. Juan had asked me not to participate. The scribes settled in to one side, as always. There wasn’t enough room for many Initiates. Graciela was relocated to another house nearby. Because she was the medium’s doctor, she wasn’t allowed to attend the Ceremonial. My uncle never missed one. It was unwise, but he was of blood.

Juan lifted up his arms in the room we’d chosen for his preparations. He would descend the stairs and preside over the Ceremonial. My mind strayed to Laura and I thought: if only she could be the one to receive Juan’s scars tonight, his medals; she deserves them. I dressed him, covered him with a beautiful tunic of black lace that obscured his face and draped over his chest. My mother was present among the Initiates, her nearly bald scalp visible through her sparse gray hair, her horrible, withered body with its meager fat distributed in all the wrong places. I took Juan by the neck without any delicacy—it wasn’t needed—and I could feel his pulse in the palm of my hands. Do not die today, I ordered him, and I looked into his eyes that were a little green and a little yellow. Don’t die, and if you can, take my mother.