Then Talia turned from the window to look at me like some lovely harlequin, half her face submerged in shadow, the other half limned by the moon, each feature flung into cameo relief. Her pale eyes glittered like something out of a Billie Eilish song; a starlit ocean, or the sky above some frozen alien world, much colder than ours but maybe even prettier.

“Smells like rain out there,” she said, tipping her temple toward the window.

“It’s going to rain very soon,” I replied without thinking. “It already is, over by Hallows Hill.”

She cocked her head, giving me a questioning look. “And how would you know that?”

I frowned, wondering how the hell I did know. More than know, I felt it, with just the tiniest bit of effort; the surface of Lady’s Lake trembling as each droplet struck the water, the quivering of the needles and leaves of the surrounding trees as their branches shook under the chilly onslaught, even the clammy saturation of the soil itself. Even stranger, there was nothing at all odd or out of place about this extracorporeal sensation; it felt like a natural extension of my own senses, as commonplace as if I were feeling my own skin and hair drenched during a storm.

“Must be leftover mantle magic, I guess,” I said, releasing the feeling. It faded just as effortlessly as I’d summoned it up.

“Pretty weird, Emmy,” Talia replied in lilting singsong, lingering over the syllables.

“Definitely weird, Talia,” I sang back at her, my heart bucking at hearing my first name on her lips again.

So here we were once more, circling each other. And no matter what it did to my fragile peace of mind, how it compounded my already-complicated turmoil, I found I couldn’t even imagine wishing myself anywhere besides this close to her.

“Emmy,” she repeated, shifting a little in her seat, gaze never leaving mine. “You look beautiful by moonlight, Emmy Harlow.”

“Only you could deliver such a cheesy line,” I said, pretending like I hadn’t just been thinking along the same lines myself, “and make it sound like grade A game.”

“That’s because I completely mean it.”

She leaned forward, eyes intent, reaching out to delicately trace the outlines of my face. Running her fingertips over the arches of my eyebrows, the space between my eyes; then the long swoop of my nose, philtrum, and Cupid’s bow. And then finally my mouth, her fingers drifting to cup my chin as her thumb grazed over my lower lip.

“You, Emmeline Harlow,” she said, eyes locked on mine, “are so extremely fucking beautiful it hurts my soul.”

“So are you, Natalia Avramov,” I said, half sighing, tipping my head forward to close my lips around her thumb and draw it into my mouth.

She gave a sharp gasp, her eyes dropping heavy lidded. “Emmy,” she said again, in that rasping whisper I liked so much, rock candy rough and just as sweet.

Things happened very quickly after that, in a tumbling cascade I could barely follow even as I was a pretty integral part of it.