“I suppose.” I nibbled on the inside of my cheek, trying to figure out what integral piece it was that I felt might be missing. “The narrative just feels a little lackluster, that’s all. Like there’s not enough heart.”

Letha tilted her head, flicking me a bemused look. “Unless you mean that literally—which, yes, no bloody ventricles currently featuring in the program—I’m really not following, Iss. This is one of our most elaborate takes yet. And the Yelp reviews bear it out, too. Whatever we do next, we’d be smart to keep it along similar lines.”

She was right; we’d noticed a significant uptick in ticket sales over the past six months, much more revenue pouring in from the haunted house than we’d seen in years. Part of it was the fact that, since Emmy Harlow had won the Victor’s Wreath during the Gauntlet of the Grove last Samhain, the town’s magic was no longer exclusively favoring the Blackmoores—Thistle Grove’s wealthiest and most powerful magical family, and our primary competitors for immersive entertainment. As a result, the rest of us were finally getting our fair slice of the tourist pie again. And now that we were well into spring, we were considering a redesign for the upcoming Flower Moon Festival, a town celebration organized around Beltane, the pagan holiday that usually brought the most tourists we saw outside of Halloween.

I should have been stoked to launch into a revamp; there’d been a time when there was nothing I loved more than bringing a new horror story to life, especially the costumes for the cast. I used to lose myself for weeks in the design, even dreaming in fashion sketches, their flowing lines and splashes of color weaving through my delta waves as they stitched themselves into full-blown garments while I slept.

Managing the haunted house may have been my day job, but for a long time, designing those costumes had also been my joy.

Maybe the real problem wasn’t that Fiendish Eighties Murder Prom didn’t have enough heart; maybe the trouble was that my heart wasn’t in it anymore. A thing I felt guilty enough about that I hadn’t even mustered up the courage to share it with Letha, who knew everything else worth knowing about my life, and had since we were creepy toddlers together.

“I guess I’ll have to talk it through with Elena,” I said, suppressing a reflexive wince. I had a debrief and planning session scheduled with her at the Emporium right after this. To say I wasn’t looking forward to a dialogue with my mother, especially in her role as Avramov matriarch, barely brushed the surface of understatement. “It’s her call in the end, anyway. Maybe she’ll want to keep a successful show in place for another season, make it easy on us.”

Letha stopped dead, so abruptly that one of the ghastly dancing couples bumped into her. She shot them a glare so concentrated and intimidating that they hastily sidled away, discarding any budding plans of drawing her into the scene. Maybe they recognized her as one of their bosses, or maybe it was just the intense Capricorn energy Letha exuded. Despite her filigreed features and general pastel-goth aesthetic, Letha had that effect on people, like one of those gorgeous tropical frogs that actually signal their danger with pretty colors.