Danny cringes, a recoil that the Grays notice a little too late. They don’t mean to keep pushing her away; they’ve just been a group for so long that it’s bound to happen sometimes. Especially when Danny whips out something that sounds so much like an accusation.

“So there is a reason Lelia knows so much about this,” Danny says, standing with her back to the ridge known as the High Point. She looks less interested in the view than in glaring at the Grays.

“You should stop talking,” June says, inserting herself between Danny and Lelia. June doesn’t look like an imposing physical presence — until she does. She’s bigger than all of the Grays except for Rush, with significant muscle under her soft skin and fluttering dress.

Lelia looks up from the slim, snappable bones of the rib cage, taking one more glimpse of Danny before she tells her. “I was obsessed with anatomy freshman year. It lasted exactly as long as my mom dying.”

Danny shuts up.

The Grays were Lelia’s friends before cancer did its evil, predictable thing. Lelia’s not that much of a witch, and she knows it. She likes making little piles of stones and spending her spare time pressing and drying moss and petals, and hanging out with ravens instead of people, but that’s not the same as having big-time magic. Being a Gray keeps her connected. To the world. To humans she doesn’t hate.

Which is why she needs to figure out what’s going on, what kind of trouble won’t leave them alone. People are turning up dead, and she can almost smell how unnatural it is. Salt water in the woods. Bones in the tourist shop. This could eat up her friends the way cancer ate up her mother, ate up her life, made it impossible to be around people without them looking at her with a weird mix of pity and pure selfish fear, as if what happened to her might be something they can avoid if they don’t stand too close.

Danny can’t keep quiet. “I shouldn’t have said . . .”

“No,” Lelia says. “You shouldn’t.” She slides the last rib into place, forming a slender cage. “But you get points not for giving some mealy excuse.” She looks up at Danny, the blush already scraped off her cheeks, the glow of her magic dimmed by so much death. “I can see how much it’s bothering you.”

“Saying the wrong thing?” Danny asks.

“Being the one who finds them.”

“We need to ask the bones who they belonged to,” Hawthorn says.

Heads swivel. Eyes pin. The Grays are all looking at Danny as she dances back and forth. Finding a lost name sounds like a job for their dowser. “You make that sound like a thing,” she says, “that a person can just do.”