It was dark in the tailor's shop, just the way she hated it. The dark was dusty as a tomb, still and quiet against her racing thoughts, leaving no reprieve from what was just around the corner there, to what had she forgotten this time, to who was about to betray her, to who she was going to betray. Lorelei lit her wand and held it close to her chest, to the pentral cowering in the locket around her neck, to the pentral flinging poisonous thoughts within, their chorus of fearful, hateful chatter keeping her company. What was just around the corner there - a mouse, said one, a ghoul, said the other - who was about to betray her - everyone - no one, not me, just leave me, let me fly up into the moonlight, please.

Shut up. Lorelei meant the opposite, her thought a caress.

The moon wasn't even full yet, still an oblong face in the sky, the hollows and pits of so many eyes and mouths cut smooth. According to Nate Briggs, a werewolf had told Bagnold about their trade of unicorn blood. According to Nate Briggs, Bagnold was a liar. Everyone lied, but Lorelei still searched in the nights leading up to the full moon. If she found a werewolf, someone who looked like a werewolf, someone limping, someone ragged who glanced at her wrong, she'd deliver them to Tawse for his next weapon. A little gift for the little hole that Nate had made in the side of the new Black Chimaera.[1]

She found hiding spots under counters and behind mannequins and dusty racks of clothing. Many hiding spots, but no one hiding. Visitors had made underhanded deals and left tributes and tokens on the counter for the absent proprietor, but nothing unusual.

Bagnold himself could have spied, she supposed, though she couldn't picture the brash werewolf hunter crouching among bits and bobs of fabric just for the chance to meet her. Someone who already knew her, who had seen through her disguised face and false name that evening in November[2], had talked.

Who had known her then, but ghosts?

Lorelei looked out the window, her reflection caught in the light of her wand, the pupils of her eyes so large they blotted the pale gray irises. 

The shop stayed dark those first few nights.

On her third visit, it turned bright.

Lorelei stood at the start of a long hallway, lured by the light in the back room. A red glow brightened the wooden edges of the door and pressed against the doorjambs with a flickering hum.

The blacks in Lorelei's eyes shrank.

Nox. She walked down the corridor. The floor shifted - one two three - the sea underneath - four five six - and she stepped with the creaks and groans of the shop. Spiderwebs dangled from the ceiling, grazing her hood. The forest-green wallpaper unfurled like ivy and reached for her pale hands, plucking at the wool of her cloak, the rain and chill from outside, gathering a stray strand of her red hair into the dusty folds of the wallpaper, into the bricks and bones of the walls.

It hooked a papery finger into her pocket to pluck an empty vial of unicorn blood. Ours, ours. The floor jolted. Lorelei narrowed her eyes. She'd blast into the walls later, ripping into its secrets. After she reached the light.

Hurry, her pentral urged, clamoring in her head for space. Every time she shoved the pentral away, it surged back with the floor and the ceiling and the walls, slipping around the barbs in her mind.

Lorelei pushed the pentral down, letting it pound in her chest. The other pentral, the dying pentral in the locket, flickered.

Lorelei slowed, her hand closing around the locket. The locket was warm. It shivered at the dark she gave it.

The floor pushed at her feet. One two three four five six? She wasn't meant to slow.

Between the beats, the pentral flickered for the first time since she'd trapped it in the locket.

Between the beats, whispers seeped out of the walls, out of the frames that housed them.

Should we have, who else will, a voice sounded. The girl with the straw hair. Man with the silver rings.

Or him, the written word

under his fingernails.

Or her, finding the light

inside the doll we made.

Should we have? Who will help?

Lorelei strode faster down the hall, and the voices in the walls faded. Her pentrals gibbered. Go, go, go, find and save them.

Lorelei sneered. She'd find and trap them. Her wand ready, she flung open the door.

Empty. A pale light, no longer warm or red, lit the walls and the ceiling and the window like the faintest of Lumos charms. The light streamed into a hole the height and width of herself in the wall.

Not you. Us! The pentrals insisted. Let us go.

Lore followed the light to the hole, blasting at the bricks that tried to click and settle back together.

Her fingers scrambled at the brick edges, leaving enough room to point her wand into the diminishing passage. The curse raced down, crackling red.

Something rough curled up into her palm. Thin and papery. She moved her hand off the bricks.

Her curse struck. The light flinched in the tunnel.

Triumph lit Lore's eyes.

Then a crackling and burning snared Lorelei's ankles and tugged forward, knocking her knees against the closing brick wall. Lorelei fell hard on the floor with a grunt, kicking at the invisible rope caught on her ankles, bashing her feet on the bricks. Snarling, she twisted around to shoot a Confringo behind her.

Her wand hummed in her hand, but did nothing. To no one there.

She stared at her wand, brought back to the days when she'd struggled with magic. Who had hit her with her own curse?

The locket pulled feebly on her neck, trying to get inside the passage, straining to reach the light. The pentral within her fell quiet, as startled by the attack as Lorelei was.

The brick wall clicked closed. A tremble emanated from her hand, starting with the papery dust on her palm, the nerves stinging like someone had stolen her wand (but no, it was in her other hand), like someone had knocked her down, and instead of getting up to face the threat, to return anger with anger, her hand shuddered, and then her arm, and then her chest and into her head where she opened her mouth and her pentral screamed, streaming out into the air those few wispy inches that her breath went, pushed out by a new, agonized thought. Why was this happening, why had someone knocked her down and made the song in her soul stutter?

She breathed in and her pentral returned, back into her nose, into her mouth, into her mind, creeping thin as paper, making itself invisible against the new thought.

The strange thought stood on shaky legs, sinking into the dirt where Lorelei kept good buried. It reached out crying, wishing to be held, wanting a word of praise, a happy story.

It sank deeper into the dirt. She hadn't put it there. Hadn't let it grow. Her pentral became a clear, black sky arching away from the thought, pinning itself on Lorelei's barbs.

Her face trembled and twitched. The strange thought had come from the bit of skin on the bricks that she'd touched.

Her ankles gave a nod, the invisible rope turning her around and pulling her along the floor of the back room, knocking her against the table and out through the doorway, each floorboard cutting through her thick and heavy cloak as it pulled her down the long hallway, past the reaching wallpaper and into the shop proper.

The floorboards beneath her bent in a cradle just before they vanished.

She fell into the darkness, her pentral clawing at the top of her head, the locket silent and dull once more. She landed with a clatter on a brittle bed of hollow things.

The rope around her ankles vanished, but her mind remained trapped. She settled, closing her eyes when she never would, resting her wand flat against her collarbone like she never would, her hands curled against her neck, fingers gently cricked. A leafy herb stuck on the bottom of her shoe began to break free, reaching its vines into the cold and dusty air.

The strange thought was gone, but it had dug up other thoughts in its place. The slippery-sick feeling in her stomach when she'd stood over her father's corpse, staring into his blank eyes, her hands shaking. The careful, quick shut of the door as she'd shouted outside her former professor's flat, hearing him lock the door, the shadow of his feet on the floor, waiting for her to go. Her brother, following her past the yards of snarling dogs to the one house on their street that kept flowers in the window, waiting for her to beckon him forward, waiting for her to point at the bright spots of color before he looked. The small smile that struggled on his face. Her answering, bold grin. Had she been seven? Eight? Maybe she'd felt emotions like other people, then.

Not her. I thought she was -
someone else? I did too.

She woke. The sky was a mannequin-moon above her, the stars were white spiders, and the skin-dust drifted off her hand and found its way up into the cracks of the brick walls. She didn't know how she knew.

She lay on a pit of bones.

They'd woken her, reaching faintly with feeling. Still alive in the dark. Brave, unlike her pentrals.

They were dead and so they could not hurt her, holding only the barest traces of souls. Their aches and pains. The joy of running, hands climbing. So much was kept in bones. Aviad Cohen understood. Lorelei understood enough to use them to hold others in her grasp, and to bury them deep inside the earth when they lost their use.

Someone had buried them here.

They dared not ask her for help, but she could feel them reaching between the beats of her heart, the rhythm slowing again to the usual plodding pace. 20-12, 20-12. They couldn't stop it now.

Lorelei rose, shaking herself off like she always did. Her mind was numb with too much feeling, but she would mend. Fear belonged to pentrals and ghosts, to the light-filled creature. Kurby Bagnold still knew her name, but she'd found something far more important.

This pit of bones. She'd remember it before she slept again.

Lorelei took a skull, large in her hand, holding it by the eyeholes, its yellowed bone chalky like the skin dust that had drifted from her palm. She floated up, out of the shop. She'd return when she had one less pentral. She'd return with her brother or Av-i-ad. The light didn't want her, but she had her cloak, her borrowed body, her shielded mind, her pentral, her false face, everything she needed to find the light and trap it.

The skull was the moon against her and she clutched it, her face aglow.

1.	Names in Smoke
2.	Sane, sane, we're all insane