Here Lilith trailed off, bending to chart their path by the angle of a moonlit shadow.

When she spoke again, she didn’t even bother to look back.

“Bluma,” she said into the darkness, “what have you got in your pocket?”

Bluma felt a warm blush spill across her face. The spoon hung low and heavy in her apron.

“I—I’m sorry,” said Bluma.

Now, for the first time since Bluma had joined her company, Lilith turned the full force of her unblinking gaze on her, and the world seemed to drop away.

“Whatever for?” said Lilith.

Bluma had no answer for this question.

Slowly, her eyes never shifting from Bluma’s own, Lilith crossed the snow between them, raised the fingers of one thin hand, and dipped them down into Bluma’s apron.

Bluma felt disinclined to breathe.

Lilith smiled as she drew the spoon from Bluma’s pocket. There was something right, almost symmetrical, about the sight of it between her fingers—they seemed to catch the moonlight in the same way.

“Yes,” she said. “It is very beautiful.”

Perhaps this was the answer. Perhaps the spoon would leave Bluma and go to Lilith instead.

But as right as it felt to Bluma to see the spoon in Lilith’s hand, it felt just as wrong that it was not in hers.

Something dark and confusing began to blossom in Bluma’s chest.

Something like jealousy.

“I do not generally relish the feeling of cold metal on my skin,” said Lilith. “But this is different: metal and not metal all at once.”

Lilith lifted the spoon to examine it more closely, and Bluma saw her eyebrows rise.

“The reflection,” said Bluma.

“Yes,” said Lilith. She held the spoon up to Bluma’s face like a looking glass. “What do you see?”

At first the reflection showed what Bluma expected—the empty moonlit cemetery and, before long, Bluma tramping up, surrounded by a corralling knot of cats.

But Bluma’s blood ran cold.

There was someone else in the reflection too.

An old woman in black, hunched, shrunken, empty, looming up behind her.

She was reaching out, as if to seize Bluma by the hair.

Swiftly, Bluma wheeled about.

There was no one behind her but the cats.

Turning back, she had just enough time to catch sight of herself startling and wheeling in the reflection of the spoon. But already she could see there was no one behind her. Or at least no one who meant to be seen.

“It is an altogether uncommon object,” said Lilith, withdrawing the spoon. “Very old. In truth, I do not believe it to be a spoon at all.”

Bluma swallowed hard, trying to calm her pounding heart.

“Why do you think that?”

Lilith fixed Bluma with her eyes.