The first urn’s in the parlor, locked inside a small glass cabinet, the kind that used to display odd Victorian artifacts like narwhal horns or monarch butterflies. It’s the quietest urn in the house, and when I run my fingers along the outside of the clay, looking for cracks, for any sign of weakness, it barely quivers in reply.

When I get to the next one in the kitchen, I’m not so lucky. This urn’s in the wall behind the decommissioned icebox, nestled in the horsehair plaster, and as I yank it free, it shivers in my hands, practically sighing in ecstasy, the brush of my fingertips giving it a cheap little thrill. I hold back a gag, scanning it quickly for flaws. A chip on the rim perhaps or a half-unscrewed lid or a thin fracture in the clay like the fault line beneath Los Angeles. Fortunately, there isn’t anything to worry about tonight. No cracks, no movement, nothing alarming at all. I place the urn back where it belongs, inside the wall.

That leaves the last one. The worst one. It’s always waiting for me, pushed to the back of the cellar. Because I’ve got no excuses left, I go to it now, through the door at the end of the hall and down the stairs, dread clenching in my throat.

In Los Angeles, basements are rare as coelacanths. It’s something about the waterline along the coast, the way the sea pushes in toward the land, stealing into places where it doesn’t belong. Bee and I got lucky with this house—or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. It’s not a very pretty cellar. The stone walls are slime and grit, and the splintered wooden stairs have no risers, the backs open to the darkness, to anything that wants to reach out and take hold of you.

I descend deeper into the bowels of the house, the gloom creeping closer. This single candle isn’t nearly enough to light my way, but it will have to do. Especially since I’m almost there.

The final urn is on the floor, trapped beneath an upside-down milk crate, the rusted wire like prison bars. I edge forward, but I don’t touch this one. I don’t even get too close. It isn’t safe, the outside of it hotter than the others, like a gas lantern left to burn all night. It never tries to speak. It only seethes, the rage in it so potent it chokes the air out of the room.

My head spins, and I steady myself against the oily stone wall. The weight of his wrath always makes me seasick standing still, everything in me heavy and dizzy and outsized.