This sent a flurry of murmurs through the crowd, and it took Belial an undignified amount of effort to raise his voice above the hubbub.

“How, how, how ever do you think, Lord Mammon, that you shall be able to make your way into the territory of the living tonight without the help of a mortal’s invitation?”

Mammon chuckled, and he leaned toward Belial in his chair with all the condescension he could muster. “I don’t need a mortal’s invitation, Belial.”

“Oh?” said Belial, blundering forward. “And whyever not?”

“Because,” said Mammon with a smile, “I have a mortal of my own.”

Now the crowd exploded with chatter. A living mortal was a precious thing—perhaps the most precious thing a demon could ever acquire—and immediately, the onlooking fiends and devils began to speculate, craning their necks to see: Who was it?

It was only bare moments before she heard—her name was bouncing about from lip to lip:

Bluma.

The rumor had spread quickly: a living girl loose in the cemetery. She must be the mortal of whom Lord Mammon had spoken.

Bluma, they said. Bluma. Bluma.

She could not stay here. Slowly, careful to keep her head down, Bluma began to edge backward toward the tent flap.

In the midst of the chattering crowd, Lord Mammon flicked his hand forward. “On, boy,” he called, and without thought, Yehuda Leib began to move, rolling the wheelchair at the end of his hands toward the heavy iron gates. All he had ever known, his whole life through, it seemed, had been to push: pushing, pushing, pushing a wheelchair through the thick clogging snow, dodging and swerving between gravestones.

He had never known anything else, it seemed.

But no.

He had.

He had seen her, there in the crowd—he knew it. She had been off, somehow—skewed, like the right shoe on the wrong foot.

But it had been her.

Only who?

With a clink, Yehuda Leib’s fingernail footrest met the iron gates; at a shove, the gates groaned open.

A heavy hush fell over the assembled demons. It was a terribly dangerous thing, to try to pass into living territory: a demon could perish if it went wrong, cease to be entirely.

But all of a sudden, with a shock, Yehuda Leib stopped his pushing and turned to look back over his shoulder. It was as if he had been sleeping, sleeping for an eon, and something was beginning to wake him: an aroma, sweet and clean, like linen dried in the breeze, like the soft toasted smoke of the hearth.

Lord Mammon cleared his throat nervously. “On, boy,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “Walk on.”

But Yehuda Leib had remembered.

“On,” said Mammon again, his voice full and loud.

That frown.

How could he have forgotten?

“On,” cried Mammon. “Walk on, or so help me—”

The assembled demons had fallen silent, and when Yehuda Leib spoke, her name floated out to every ear: