I watched Amber as she interacted with my beautiful daughter. She had a particular sheen about her. Her hair shimmered in the morning sun filtering in through the curtains. Her skin sparkled. Then I realized she still had some glitter on her face from the wedding. But she was so pretty. A wingless fairy, tall and strong with delicate features and an all-knowing sense of the world. Then again, she was a teen. They did know everything. The thing about Amber, however, was that she approached her worldly knowledge with respect.

Spiritualist, I thought as I looked at her. It seemed appropriate. Important, even. Her deep connection to all things around her, all things in nature, gave her a sense of the bigger picture.

She giggled when Quentin let the bottle drop too low. “Up,” she said, pointing skyward. He obeyed immediately, his blue eyes sparkling as bright as the smile he flashed her.

“What?” Amber asked Beep as though the little rascal had spoken to her. She giggled again. “I think so, too,” she told her. “His is bright and clear as a summer day.”

Wondering what she was talking about, Quentin shrugged at her.

She signed to him. “She said your aura is nice.”

He raised his brows and nodded, not believing her for a minute. I, on the other hand, was beginning to wonder. Maybe Amber really was a fairy.

She looked down at Beep again and nodded. “Okay. Okay, I promise. It would only upset her anyway.”

“Upset?” Quentin said with his voice, deep and soft as it was. “Who?”

Amber pressed her lips together seeming to regret something that was about to happen. “Charley,” she said.

Quentin knew I was standing there. He could see my light. He gave me a sideways glance, then went back to his duties. He also knew Mo was standing by them, waving to Beep, touching her face. Mo glanced up at me, her hands clasped at her chest in adoration.

I gave her a wink, then left them alone, my curiosity burning. Amber had a powerful connection with every living thing around her, but to have a conversation with a newborn? That was novel.

I felt a coolness waft over me and turned to see that Sister Maureen, or just Mo, as she insisted on being called, had followed me out.

“Thank you,” she said, using a gesture of tipping a hat. She pointed to the bedroom. “She is beautiful.”

“I agree,” I whispered. “My contact at the Vatican sent a report to the higher-ups there. They will be looking into your and your sister’s deaths as well as the priest’s, naturally.”

She thanked me again. “You told them? My sister tried to save me?”

“I told them everything, Mo.” I walked to her, a deep sorrow for what she went through tightening my chest. “You can cross through me.”

She lowered her head. “I— I don’t think he wants me.”

“Mo, of course he does. If he didn’t, trust me, you’d be elsewhere.”

“You don’t understand. I sinned beyond redemption.”

“Who hasn’t? You should have been at my house Halloween night my senior year of college. You ain’t got nothing on a French maid with a Jason Voorhees mask. That’s what forgiveness is all about, and I have a feeling God will understand. We all get lost, sweetheart. He knows. I promise.”

She gave in at last and took a hesitant step forward, then another, and another until her face brightened. I could tell she saw someone, most likely a family member. She looked at me one last time, her expression full of gratitude, then stepped through.

She’d seen her father gunned down in Chicago. The memory had the weight and force of a freight train behind it. It knocked the air from my lungs as I watched a gunman roar up the street in a classic Ford. He stuck his head out the window, his arms full of the automatic weapon he carried, a tommy gun, and showered bullets down on the pedestrians.

Sadly, he was after one man, a mob boss from a rival family. But Mo’s father, a baker carrying a fifty-pound sack of flour, had been gunned down in the process. He didn’t even know what hit him. He had the sack on a shoulder, holding it steady with one hand, and Mo’s hand in the other. They were looking at the Christmas-themed pastries he’d made in the window. Santa. Christmas trees. Stars. All brightly colored and begging to be eaten. By her and her sister, of course, who was home with a fever.

One of her father’s best customers was a man named Crichton, a crime boss, though she didn’t know it at the time. The shooter wanted him, but the rival family had also wanted to make a statement, to kill anyone they could on the boss’s turf.

Mo jumped when the gun went off, and she watched as the man, seeing her shocked expression, aimed the gun right at her. But the sack had fallen off her father’s shoulder. He’d been shot in the head, and the sack took the two shots that were meant for her head.

The car sped off, leaving the agonizing screams of the survivors in its wake. Mo stood there in a cloud of flour with a death grip on her father’s hand. But the angle of his grip was wrong. She turned and saw that he was lying facedown in a pool of his own blood.

The sounds died away. The cloud settled, looking like snow all around her. And her father lay motionless. Then everything went away for a very long time. She ended up spending several months in a psychiatric hospital. Her mother, thank goodness, refused to let them perform insulin therapy on her. She saw it no less barbaric than electroshock. When the doctors told her to just sign her daughter away to them, claiming she would never come out of her stupor, she took her daughter out that very day, brought her home, and made her chicken soup.

Mo felt to the day she died it was the chicken soup that had healed her, and though she never spoke again, she did find her way back to reality, slowly at first, and over time her mother and sister helped her recover.

She and her sister grew even closer. They made up signs, their own secret language, so Mo could talk to her, and while her mother insisted she learn real sign language, she never forgot the language she and her sister made up.

Her good memories hit me, too. Her cousin’s birthday party where she ended up bringing a puppy home because her cousin was angry that it wasn’t a pony. So her aunt gave it to her to teach her son a lesson. The boy had a pony a month later, thus her cousin learned nothing from the experience, but that was okay, because Mo and Bea had a puppy named BB, short for Big Boy, that they served tea to and taught to sneeze on demand. And I now had irrefutable proof that dogs did indeed go to heaven, because that was who Mo saw first when she stepped through me, followed by her sister and then her parents.

*   *   *

It took me a moment to recover after she passed. I was so happy for her, to be in the place she belonged, with her family again. I was also sad that it took over seventy years for her to be reunited with them, but from what I understood, time didn’t matter much on the other side.

Cookie texted me asking me where I was at.

Right here. Where are you?

Right here. Why can’t I see you? she asked, playing along.

I descended the stairs, still walking a little slower than I’d like, and strolled through the house toward our office.

Garrett was busy in the dining room, scouring a small portion of the text that he felt might be relevant to our situation, namely being held hostage by a group of angry hellhounds. I didn’t dare disturb him, but Osh did. He was in there, too, and he tossed a Cheez-It at him. Garrett didn’t acknowledge the Daeva or his antics.

Osh turned toward me as I walked past, his eyes narrowed. Had he figured out my plan? How could he have? It was a freaking awesome plan. No way would anyone figure it out. Not in a million years.

“So,” Cookie said when I walked in, “I have a plan.”

“Me, too.” I sat in my chair and snatched the file papers out of her hand.