Page 76 of The Alpha’s Midnight Witch

"Gage."

"On Halloween the veil between here and everything else gets thin. It happens every year. Most years it's nothing. A cold room. A door that swings." He looks up at me. "This year you'll be standing in the middle of it."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning at midnight your power comes all the way up. Not this." He nods at the window, the yard, eight days of my life going sideways. "This is you leaking. Midnight on Halloween is the whole thing at once."

The refrigerator hums. Somewhere down the block a leaf blower starts, and it is the most obscene sound I have ever heard.

"Okay," I say. "And the Veiled Hand wants to be there when that happens."

"They want to use it. Your magic works on lines. Wards, curses, bindings, seams. Things that are shut." He sets the cup down. "They want you to open one."

"Open what?"

"Evelyn won't say."

"Then what am I? There's a word, isn't there. She almost said it on your porch and you heard it and nobody will tell me."

"There's a word."

"Say it."

"She won't say it inside her own house," he says. "So I'm not going to hand you a word I got by eavesdropping which might not even be the right one. You'll get it right, or you won't get it from me."

I hate that answer.

I hate it more that it's the second time in twenty-four hours he's refused to give me something, and both times it's because he thinks the truth should arrive with my dignity attached.

"Six months," I say.

He goes still.

"Evelyn asked you to watch me six months ago."

"Yes."

"And before that?"

He doesn't answer fast enough, and the not-answering is the answer.

"Gage."

"I knew the day you moved in."

The coffee turns to nothing in my mouth.

"You knew there was something coming for me for six months," I say slowly, "and you fixed my railing."

"Yes."

"You sanded my porch boards at four in the morning."

"Yes."

"You learned my pizza order."

"Pepperoni," he says. "Extra sauce. You pick the mushrooms off the ones Lila makes you order and pretend you didn't."