Maybe she’s the one messing with me. Either way, I don’t have the energy for this, so I stay quiet and follow her up the stairs. All I want is to collapse onto a bed and shut the world out until Liam gets here.

“Some quick rules for your stay.” She throws up three fingers and lowers them as she speaks. “One, don’t damage the house. It damages back. Two, never make a bargain with anything in Wick. Of any kind. Just don’t, trust me. And three, if you get lost, call for Max.”

She swings right at the top of the staircase. “Oh! And if the mirror on the third floor asks you a question, don’t answer it.” She pauses, her face falling. “Actually, just don’t go to the third floor. It has a tendency to disappear.”

Okay, she’s definitely messing with me. Ask Max? Disappearing floors? Maybe this is some kind of gimmick they do to keep up the psychic rumors and attract guests. Whatever it is, I’m not in the mood.

“What happened to your shoulder?” she asks abruptly, leading me down a hall. “Pay attention, by the way. I don’t actually want you getting lost at night with no one but Max to show you the way.”

I glance down at the cat, who flicks his tail intently from side to side, then absentmindedly rub my shoulder. “I’d rather not confabulate about it.”

She casts me a sidelong look, and I add, “It means discuss.”

A smile tugs at the corner of her lips. “Okay. No confabuwhatevering.”

We take turn after turn, the inside of the house as strange and mismatched as the outside. Some hallways are narrow and bricked; others are tall and sweeping, with great sunlit bay windows and delicate wallpaper of bloodred vines and fairies. The place is one turn short of a maze.

“Why is the house so…different everywhere?” I ask as we pass a reading alcove draped in midnight red velvet fit for a vampire’s mansion. An elderly person sits in it reading a book.

“My family has lived here a really long time,” she says. “People just kept adding on. The house hates it.”

“You say that like it’s alive.”

Anna slows to a stop. “It is.”

We stare at each other, but I resist the urge to call her a liar. This is all probably part of her family’s act. Get people off guard. Gather info about them. Then use it all to make reasonable deductions about the guests so they can pretend they’re psychic. I’d seen people do the same thing in the TV shows I used to watch before my life became an endless carousel of motels.

She wrinkles her nose and gestures to the last door in the hall. “That’s your room.”

“Don’t I need a key?”

“The house will lock it for you,” she says pointedly.