She bent to set the lantern down, then tugged off the fringed shawl draped across her shoulders and spread it over the damp ground. Then she lowered herself cross-legged amid the oak’s leviathan roots, gesturing me down across from her until we sat knee to knee. With a soft sigh, she pressed a palm against the peeling bark.

“The veil is very thin here,” she said quietly, her eyelids dropping to half-mast as she focused on something beyond my perception. “Even if you don’t make a study of the liminal boundary like we do, you can probably feel that much instinctively. And places where the veil is sheer . . . they belong to us.”

“How do they belong to you?” I asked, echoing her hushed tone. I knew that of the families, it was the Avramovs who dealt most easily with the spirit world, but it wasn’t like they were known for being chattily forthcoming about their affinity. If anything, most of them were notoriously secretive, shrouding themselves in very deliberate—and occasionally insufferable—mystery.

“Something about us naturally attracts the other side,” she said. “We’re extra alive, somehow. Bright in spirit, I guess you could say, very cheesily. It makes the denizens of the other side drawn to us—almost like our presence thins the veil wherever we happen to be.”

I considered this; the idea of Avramovs as paranormal lightning rods felt somehow viscerally right. “You’re like ghost magnets.”

Her lips quirked with repressed amusement. “If you want me to take back what I said earlier about your poet’s soul, then sure. But if you’re into less banal metaphors, we’re closer to beacons, or lighthouses. The dead can see us more clearly from beyond the veil than they can see other living; a moth-to-a-flame type of deal. It’s part of our magic—the part that also lets us manipulate ectoplasm.”

That much I did remember from Baby Emmy’s eager perusal of the Grimoire, though I’d never understood it in any meaningful way. “So, you work with spirit stuff, basically. I take it that’s what you used as your suspension medium at the lake today?”

“That’s right. It’s a pretty cool material, naturally malleable and versatile.” She wrinkled her nose a little. “Once you get over the inescapable ick factor, that is. It is not the nicest texture imaginable. Like some raunchy mix of spiderweb and eel skin. From what our oldest accounts say, not even Yaga completely loved working with it.”

“Intriguing, yet also gross,” I said, making a face. “So if ghosts are inclined to flock to you, how do you keep from being haunted? Or even possessed?”

“Well, we do have a fair amount of activity at The Bitters, which can’t really be helped.” She touched the jewel suspended above the hollow of her throat, still aglow. “That’s where our garnets come in. The living and the dead can’t—or shouldn’t—mix too much, and the same goes for working with ectoplasm. The garnet fixes us here, stabilizes our living energy like an anchor. Makes sure we don’t risk our own essence when fraternizing with the other side.”