“My dad,” Jack said. “What does he want to tell me?”

Bev lifted her head and looked across the table at Jack, the smoke swirling between them. “What you seek is not lost but only seems to be.”

Jack stared. He blinked quickly, her words more than he could grasp. The smoke rose in a curl and died in the candlelight overhead.

“I don’t know what that means,” he said.

She watched him over the smoking bowl. Then she moved the incense aside and lifted the dark mirror. It fit in the palm of her hand, round in shape and framed in black pewter. The glass slightly convex, like an eye. She shifted the mirror in her palm gently, peering into the translucent glass. “Remove clouded thoughts from your minds.”

Matty bit into his cookie.

“What about my dad?” Jack said.

Bev glanced at her phone. She set the mirror before Jack and leaned over it to grasp his hands across the table, her gaze radiant in the candlelight, tender. “Sweet Jack. How will you know who to trust?”

“What?”

“Men are beasts, Jack. And ghosts.”

He pulled back his hands.

“They watch and wait,” she said.

“Stop talking like that.”

Matty shivered and scooted closer to Jack, bumping their chairs together. Jack looked at the mirror. He could see it—the eye—dimming and brightening in the candlelight. He felt weird all of a sudden, and he thought he glimpsed something there in the murky glass: a forest of towering pines blanketed in snow; the eyes of some wild animal shining, bright and unblinking, from deep in the woods—

He looked up, shaking. “My dad. I just want to know what he wanted—”

His voice ran high and broke off.

Bev stared into the mirror. She drew in a sudden breath, as if she’d been slapped. She lifted her gaze to Jack.

“He’s here,” she said.

Jack stood from the table, jolting it. The mirror quaked on the tablecloth, and a teacup fell over.

Bev’s voice, piercing: “He won’t hurt you, Jack. He just wants to talk—”

Jack grabbed Matty and turned and pushed him out through the beaded curtain, clutching his coat. There, at the counter, stood Red.

Jack was looking right into his eyes.

The face of bone. The disfigured head.

Jack shoved Matty back through the beads, sending Matty stumbling.

“Get up,” Jack hissed. “Dammit, Matty. Go!”

The knife. He had it in his pocket.

“Wait,” Red called. “Wait!”

Jack ducked between the beads. Bev stood beside the heavy curtain. There was a door. He grabbed Matty’s hand.

“Run,” he said. “Run.”

They crashed out into the snow. By the time they got halfway down the alley, Red was already through the door behind them. Jack tightened his grasp on Matty’s wrist, nearly pulling him off his feet. “Hurry,” he said.