Ebb, who has been hovering at the edge of the crypt, looks at me sorrowfully. Homer falls into silence, wincing as if what he’s about to tell me will be the hardest part of all. And then, instead, the corner of his mouth lifts into a kind smile.

“But there’s hope, merely because there are people who’ve fought back. And this brings us to your family.” He looks at me for a long time, and my arms begin to swim with chills.

“The women in your family have all had the gift of sight. People call it ESP, or being psychic, or whatever else. Mostly living people are”—he shrugs in a defeated kind of way—“oblivious to the unseen things all around them. A few are more aware, but they use their abilities for small things: telling fortunes, finding missing socks, stuff like that.”

Germ nods sagely beside me and interjects, “Reading pets’ minds.”

Homer blinks at her for a second, then looks at me. “Your family has used it differently,” Homer continues. “You are the last in a long line of women who used their seeing abilities—abilities they could have used to find socks, or read fortunes, or read pets’ minds, I suppose—to seek out witches and how to hunt them.”

“Like, with swords and stuff?” Germ asks.

Homer shakes his head. “Witches can’t be wounded by any mortal method. Lunging at a witch with a sword is like fighting air. But the women in your family, they have invented their own weapons, capable of hurting witches—and killing them—though to our knowledge that only happened once, in Sweden in 1612, when your way-back-quintuple-great-grandmother killed a witch called the Trapper.”

He shakes his head again as if trying to shake the image out of his mind.

“Since then, no one has managed it.” He pauses. “Because, well… the witches can no longer be found.”

“Can’t be found?” I echo.

Homer tilts his head to look at us solemnly.

“Witches, as powerful as they are, are cowardly creatures. After that first killing, they disappeared somewhere beyond this world—nobody knows where, or how. They only return once a month at the dark moon, when the moonlight can’t find or burn them, to lay their curses, before fading back to wherever they hide. The few witch hunters on earth haven’t even had a fighting chance of killing witches because they haven’t been able to track them down. One by one, they’ve been found instead, and cursed.”

Homer looks out over the horizon at the sea. A shadow creeps across the crypt as a cloud crosses over the moon.

“But the Memory Thief…,” I say.

“It’s rumored that the Memory Thief is an exception—that somehow, while the others hide far away, she was left behind to lurk on earth for some reason we don’t know.”