They leave after we thank them, and Colin and I regroup at the base of the stairs. “What was a donut employee doing attacking people?” I ask.

Colin shrugs before inspiration lights his expression. “Now that we know their name, we can look up their business online. They might have a staff page.”

I clap my hands together. “I can do you one better. My sister Kara is a computer whiz.”

“Why didn’t we just ask her from the beginning?” Colin asks as I slide past him up the stairs.

I hold up two fingers. “One, because even Kara can’t make something out of nothing, and two, because it’s Kara, and I’d rather ask a Grindylow for help.”

“A what?”

“Water demon. Drowns kids who come too close to the water. Though really quite sweet if you feed them Hawthorne berries in the winter mont— What?”

Colin only sighs. “Your life is even stranger than mine.”

I grin.

The twins’ room is down the hall from mine, before a tall stained-glass window depicting the tree of life. Everyone in my family has a room in Ravenfall, but only the twins, Nora, and I are here full-time. My aunt and uncle go back and forth between Wick and Ireland, and Gran lives above her tea shop.

You’d think that’d mean I could have a little independence and move into a room far, far away from the twins’, but the house wants to keep all our rooms close together and separate from the guests. It’s one of the few ways it finds order in its messy halls.

The fast-paced beat of Irish music floats out from inside the room, and I enter without knocking. Kara already knows we’re there anyway.

“Morning!” she calls without looking up from her computer.

Rose lies on her stomach upon a plush lavender throw rug, organizing pieces of sea glass. She waves.

Rose and Kara’s room looks like someone split it in two and tried to pack an electronics store on one side and a greenhouse on the other. Kara’s walls are lined with computers and monitors, different agendas flitting from screen to screen that she uses to handle day-to-day scheduling for the inn, from keeping track of open rooms to booking readings. Her desk is scattered with keyboards, wires, and flash drives, while Rose’s is a step away from a planter box, filled to the edge with small pots of bright flowers and grids of herbs. Hanging pots take up most of the ceiling, filled with bundles of fennel and the gemstones our dad always brings her back from his trips.

I know Kara’s absurd amount of electronics bothers the house to no end, but she refuses to do anything about it. She’s eighteen now and her war with the house started the day she was born.