“Something felt off about that man,” Rose says wonderingly.

“I couldn’t hear his thoughts.” Kara absently brushes some glitter stars off my dress. “Anna?”

But I barely hear them. I can’t get the look on the dead peoples’ faces out of my head.

“Anna?” Kara says more softly, but I only shake my head and pull away, fleeing from the party.

My pencil flashes across the page, trying to capture the look on the dead man’s face. I can never get the eyes right, the way they empty when someone dies, like a candle flame smothered by its own wax. I smudge his iris with my finger, making the color steelier, more ghostly.

“Still wrong,” I mutter. “He doesn’t need eyes, right? Who needs eyes?”

I toss the sketch pad past the cup of Earl Grey on the kitchen table. It goes sliding off the edge, but a chair shifts aside to catch it before it can hit the floor. I give the house a halfhearted thank-you wave before dropping my forehead onto the table. Usually drawing helps me deal with my visions, but there’s something about this one that won’t let go of me.

“It was terrible,” I say to Nora. “Like the time Max caught that faerie trying to poison the garden level terrible.”

The faerie had survived, but there’s still a spot in the garden where nothing will grow from all the blood.

“You were three. How do you remember that?” My mother doesn’t look up from the already spotless counters she’s wiping down.

The wood practically sparkles in the gold-red sunlight, but the house has been in a bad mood all day after straightening up from last night’s party, and nothing cheers it up more than clean countertops and a cup of Earl Grey. The house could do it itself, but it’d be kind of like massaging your own shoulders.

“I’m a sponge of death,” I mutter into the table.

She sighs, looking tired, and I wonder if a migraine kept her up last night. “Did you see anyone’s face, sponge?”

“No, the vision was weird and fuzzy.” I scratch the edge of one of the many sets of initials carved into the tabletop until the house scoots it out of my reach. I nearly tumble out of my seat, and I glower at the nearest wall until the house grudgingly slides it back. It’s not my fault the worn wood is scarred with knife marks.

Nora makes a sound of consideration. “That can happen when there’s strong magic nearby.”

“Whoever I bumped into didn’t even care about them dying,” I add with a shiver.