She took a step back, and the smoke retreated and again took the shape of something that could have been called hands. Before her kneeled the gunman. I thought he was praying for his life, but then he turned toward me, and I saw white fog where his skin should be and fire in the place of eyes.

Together, they came for me.

I pressed myself against Hellida’s frozen chest and drew back the hammer of the pistol. The woman’s fingers billowed out to brush my cheek. They felt like burning ice. I pressed the pistol to her quivering, indistinct face. I was about to kill her, or die, when the liquor bottles exploded, belching a ball of white flame up the face of the building. The shadows—and the awful creatures they held—were hurled back by the burning light. But then the flames settled down and the shadows swept forward once more, and the two fiends sprang right back to their feet.

I had a few seconds to look for a way out. I consulted Hellida’s ashy face, and her blank eyes reflected the burning sockets of the creatures, advancing again. They were inches away.

I turned the gun around.

I ate a bullet.

I woke in Hellida’s arms and felt her tears on my face. The night was dark, the fire was orange, and we were both alive. I could only laugh—isn’t that what we’re supposed to do when we’re alive? She didn’t seem to think it was funny.

“The shadows,” she said. “I thought they’d taken you too.”

“What did you see?”

“The night came alive. The shadows walked. They leapt forward and swallowed that man whole, and then they took you too. And then an explosion, and the fire went higher, and the night was beaten back, and you were here on the sidewalk, but the man was gone. I suppose he got away?”

Hellida had spent most of my life warning me against the dark. I had only laughed. There was no way to tell her what had happened—both because I could not stand the sight of watching her learn she had been right all along, and because I didn’t need her worrying when, inevitably, I stepped back into the shadows.

“He must have,” I said. “I blacked out. I had . . . I had an unsettling dream.”

The smoke was thinner, the flames not as bright. The street was empty, and the shadows danced. I still held the pistol in my hand.

One bullet left.

“I’ll need to consult my father’s notes,” I said once we reached Washington Square.

“Why?”

“I’m reopening the case of Alice Pearl.”

“Oh, flicka. No.”

Alice Pearl. That name. That awful name.

Even now, I know the case by rote.