Lilith was nowhere to be seen. Flakes of white danced through the night, but which had been Lilith and which were ordinary snow was impossible to tell.

Bluma was terribly upset.

Lilith had taken the spoon, and Bluma’s face with it.

Oh, how she hated that spoon and longed for it, needed it and wished it had never been.

Bluma wheeled about to ask where Lilith had gone, but already the Sisters of the Lileen had dispersed, fanning out about the cemetery like the fingers of a fist spread wide.

They had business to attend to.

Bluma swallowed hard. All around her, the crowd of demons barred from Lord Azazel’s fete roiled with restless energy. Before long, squabbles and skirmishes began to break out, and Bluma grew afraid that she might inadvertently be smashed against a gravestone.

No one seemed to notice her.

In fact, none of the demons seemed able to hold her in their minds for more than the few moments they spent looking at her: as soon as their eyes slid away, she seemed to slide from their awareness, as if she had never been there.

And, little by little, Bluma began to wonder how far this new anonymity extended.

Perhaps she no longer needed Lilith’s help to outrun what pursued her.

Perhaps she already had.

Heart pounding, Bluma made her way to the hulking ogre at the entrance of the pavilion. If she was wrong about this, she was taking a terrible risk.

But if she was right…

“I’m afraid this is a closed gathering,” said the doorkeeper.

“Y-yes,” said Bluma. “I know.”

The ogre sucked in slobber from between his great tusks. “Let me be clear,” he said. “It is a closed gathering to which you are not invited.”

“I know,” said Bluma again.

She had to get him to look away from her face.

“But he wasn’t invited either,” she said, pointing at no one. “And you let him in.”

The doorkeeper smiled condescendingly and turned to look over his shoulder. Bluma could almost see the moment in which he forgot her, and without pause, she trotted into the party.

The light in the pavilion was strange, the blue moon filtering oddly through the red-and-black silk. At the far end of the pavilion were the wrought-iron cemetery gates that held the demons back from Zubinsk. Two liveried goblins stood guard before them, ostensibly to keep the reveling demons from inadvertently coming into contact with the cold metal, but in truth to protect Lord Azazel’s privilege: first through when dawn broke in Zubinsk.

Every so often, the voice of the ogre at the tent flap would ring out and someone new would arrive: Lord Uzza the Fallen, sweeping in beneath an impeccably styled powdered wig, each hair of which had been plucked from a different human king or queen; Lady Agrat of the Abyss in a sleek evening gown spangled thick with blinking eyes like rhinestones.