“I send these,” he says, passing them so close Amara might touch him if she stretched out her arm. “With these beans, I redeem me and mine.”

Amara watches Philos, knowing the shades of the dead will be curling around his ankles like smoke, scenting blood, but contenting themselves with the offering instead. Or at least she hopes so. Juventus starts to strike his pot, and they all follow suit, Victoria most lustily of all. “Ghosts of my fathers and ancestors,” they yell. “Be gone!”

All down the street, others are doing the same, everyone’s timing out of rhythm, so that their neighbors’ clanging drifts over the night air, while Philos repeats the incantation. The more chaos the better, to set the spirits in confusion. Philos walks around the house, casting the beans, and they accompany him, clashing away any shades who dare to linger. Amara’s voice grows hoarse from shouting. She remembers performing this rite at home, her father in Philos’s place. Back then, the thought of having unburied kin was unthinkable, the threat less tangible. She tries not to count up all the unhappy dead she knows now. Her mother, surely, would not have left Attica. Her father would have found some way to claim his wife, to take her with him to the underworld. She glances at Victoria who is pale beside her and knows what she is thinking. Amara tries to shut out the memory of the way the murdered man fell, blood spilling from his neck, his life cut short by a shard of broken pottery. And then there is Cressa, unburied, her bones rotting in Pompeii’s harbor. Would she envy her two old friends from the brothel their good fortune?

The ritual is almost finished. Philos returns to do a final circuit of the atrium, his face calm, letting the dark hail fall behind him. Not Dido, Amara thinks, shutting out the image of her crawling after the black beans, a hideous, shapeless form. He buried her. Felix buried her.

Amara sits on the edge of the bed, wide awake, waiting. She wonders if Philos will be too afraid to come tonight, whether he will balk at creeping alone across the hall, where the dead might still be scavenging. Not that he seemed concerned earlier. She strains to hear him, but there is only silence. He is always so quiet; by the time she is aware of his presence, it is usually because he is already in the room. She is just wondering whether she’s brave enough to sneak to the atrium to look for him, when he finally slips inside the doorway and makes her jump.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, bolting the door. “I had to be sure Juventus was asleep.” He turns to her, his diffidence entirely at odds with the authority he held earlier. “You’re not too tired, are you? I don’t have to stay, if you don’t want me to.”