The chain remained in Netta's hand for seemingly a single moment before Ash plucked it.

"Hey, so that's where you've been keeping our old friend all of this time."

"Give that back."

When Ash didn't listen to her, Netta turned around on him, brandishing the box. "I don't want to look at it - put it back. Now."

Ash rolled Its eyes dramatically, clicking its tongue in distaste.

Nevertheless, in it went, which Netta almost slammed shut.

When she turned around to sit on top of her bedspread to catch her breath, Ash remarked, "Where'd you get the box?"

Without turning around to look at the Monster, Netta answered, saying, "Dad's, just like the chain. If you knew him, you'd realize immediately who gave it to me. He was always - well, something special."

"I thought that this was the man that you referred to as the best human who ever lived?"

Netta, who had started for the entrance to the room, paused, a smile on her face.

"You can be a lot of things at once. I haven't seen it done - successfully - very much, but dad was sort of like... One of those traveling showmen who would drive his wagon out of town before the townsfolk figured out that his Fiji mermaid was a trout stuck to a stuffed Capuchin. If he had been an asshole, I'm sure that Hera would have killed him the first time he undermined her, but he could make anyone laugh. Well, except Mother."

She turned to survey her room one last time before she shook her head and walked out.

They hardly said anything as Netta went through Beryl's, Netta's younger and biological sister, room. As she had suspected, it did not look as though the woman had been back in a long while.

Looking through her room proved fruitless, save for the find of Beryl's doll collection. Netta ignored them in their cushions along the far wall beneath and next to the window, gazing, ageless, at her.

Until one cried out.

Not expecting the outburst, Netta leaped back.

It was Ash that investigated the doll first, pulling the one that was crying separate from the others. It lifting the doll up by the rightmost braid in its hair.

Staring at it for a moment, Ash turned to Netta and asked, simply, "What?"

Netta, pressing her hand to her chest in an effort to calm her racing heart. "Beryl and those fucking things."

Ash paused then looked back at her meaningfully for a moment. A slow smile started to spread on its lips. "Oohhh. That's right, you hate dolls."

"No. not dolls. Just Beryl's monstrosities." She rose her hand out. "Ash, stop while you're ahead."

"Yeah - yeah; some people are afraid of clowns, other people are scared of needles. You; stick you in a room with a porcelain doll in a cute little dress, you act as though you were stuck in a room with a tiger."

"This is so not funny, drop that thing - you know for a fact that there are very good, established reasons why I don't like Beryl's -"

The doll had not stopped crying, but was, instead, shrieking the more that Ash held it by its hair. Its reaction was a clear reason to expect that the thing was another one of Beryl's bizarre experiments.

The room itself - like the inhabitant - was deceivingly charming, innocent, even, with its candy-striped wallpaper and girlishly fancy lace curtains and pink bedspread.

In spite of the seeming sweet personality of the room, Netta was anxious at the thought of being around one of her sister's experiments.

Ash continued, tossing the doll into his other hand casually, as though the Monster were simply handling a well-worn baseball.

The doll's wails reverberated in the room strangely as it was tossed.

"No, how about we have a good conversation right now, with all of these lovely little ladies here to listen in. I would like to know where you get off keeping anything from me, let alone not contacting me for almost a decade. Except that one night when I could feel you calling out to me," It tossed the doll back into Its other hand and looked her deeply in her eyes. "because dear old mommy Hitler died and you need a shoulder to cry on. Only, before I could find you, you pushed the thought of me away, like your pain is this weird treasure that you need to hoard. If you would let me in for a moment, I think that you might find that I have a lot to share on the subject of pain. You know what I think? If there's one thing that you're afraid of, more than this stupid thing, it's openness, honesty."

The Monster threw the doll, hard, into Its other hand. The blow shocked the doll into silence.

The doll cried out, with a shriek that had had Netta grabbing for her ears.

When the thing lowered its crying to a tolerable volume, Ash said, in a surprisingly sober voice, "I never asked to be shut out from you. We used to have a friendship. Now, I know that I lied to you, and in retrospect, you had every right to not trust me, but it's been a human's lifetime. Aren't we mortality-challenged types supposed to be able to see the bigger picture and know when to put problems to bed?" He was smiling an almost endearing, warm smile at her. His eyes, for a moment, seemed to warm, to beckon.

Netta stared for a moment at the tableau presented to her. Here It was, in the form of a man that was literally impossibly handsome. A sort of physical perfection was being presented, even as it tortured an enchanted doll.

Slowly, she shook her head in disgust, turning to walk out of the room.

She tried to shove down the feelings of anger towards the Monster, a relative blast furnace of rage.

How dare he feign innocence with her.

She was about to walk into the next room when she paused, recalling whose room was next.

She was walking away from the room when she was stopped by Ash.

"Hey, you forgot a room, Little Miss Grudge Match."

Netta shook her head, pushing the door open that lead to one of her adopted sister's rooms.

"I'll get to that one later," she said, knowing full well that she would rather search all of the way through the unending storage than enter that room.

After searching all of her Sister's rooms, as well as the room of her deceased mother, Netta came to the conclusion that there was nothing to find that could help.

Left with no other option, Netta pushed the door open to her older sister's room and cringed, half expecting something horrible to be waiting for her as she walked in.

She didn't realize that she was having difficulty breathing until she had to remember to exhale the breath that she had kept fluttering in the cage of her chest.

"As bad as you thought that it would be?" Ash asked, appearing next to Sia's bed.

As a matter of fact, the sight of the room - changed to have the largest stylistic update of any of the rooms she had seen thus far in the house - inspired the greatest sense of dread that she had experienced since entering the house.

The furniture was chic and antique - if someone who did not know any better came into the room, they would assume that Sia had gone to great trouble and no small amount of money to procure the furniture. Everything was perfectly chosen and placed. Like the Witch who spent a long time in the room herself, it all seemed almost too perfect. How could the room still smell this way - like she was in the middle of an English rose garden?

Looking around the room, Netta walked first over to Sia's desk and began to look through the drawers.

She didn't realize how close Ash was until It leaned over, and sweeping her up in a single movement.

The feel of Ash, pressing Itself against her, awakened her into a sense of immediacy.

She felt the Monster press its face to her nape, then breathe in.

It murmured, "This room - she never liked either of us. What if we consummated our relationship in here as a nice fuck you to the old, miserable bitch?"

Netta pulled her arms loose of his gentle grip and wrestled a few steps away from Ash . "I may be a virgin, but I get the feeling that if I gave myself to you that you wouldn't know what to do with me anyway."

Netta started to go through the drawers in Sia's desk in earnest, shaking off the impression of the weight, the heat of the Monster's touch.

Suddenly, she heard Ash, standing right next to her but, blessedly, not touching her, say, "I assure you, you may be one-of-a-kind, but given enough time and shared eagerness, I can learn very well how to make both of us very, very happy." The Monster paused when Netta didn't acknowledge It as It bent closer to her.

And then she found something.

Netta held the tiny, embroidered cloth that was wrapped around and sewn to a piece of square wood.

She stroked her finger along the grain of the rough brown cloth.

"How did this get in here? I had this - I kept this in my hiding spot..."

She recalled then the simple charm that she had once made, then had hid. It was infused with a simple spell, one to help find lost items.

She glanced up then and looked over at Ash, unable to keep the panic away from her face.

"Why would she - why would she have been looking through my room and taking things?"

"Is that your charm?" Ash leaned over, its fingers grazing against the simple piece of embroidery.

The tender graze shook something that seemed to be buried so deeply in Netta's subconscious that she could not place, remember.

"Y-yeah..."

Netta picked the charm up and tried to shake both that deeply buried emotion that she could not place - as well as the image of her older sister going through her spartan belongings.

What could she have been looking for - and why would she have taken the basic charm that Netta had made?

Netta cleared her throat and focused on re-igniting the basic magic that was kept in the small, thin wrapped block of wood.

She thought about the Chronicle, imagined what she could remember of its heft, its weight, its texture, its smell.

The magic responded feebly, as though it had been drained of a good deal and was responding to her out of sheer loyalty to its creator.

She felt the magic, a ghost of even what little magic she had been able to successfully imbue in the little charm, responding to her.

Netta muttered, "Why would she have wanted to use something with my magic in it?"

"What are you talking about?"

Netta shifted uneasily, allowing her own energy to stoke what small flame existed in the charm.

"I thought that she had just taken my charm for some reason, but it seemed that she tapped the energy out in this completely by using it. Why wouldn't she just use something of her own creation?"

"Because yours so charmingly reminds her of arts n' crafts time in Kindergarten?"

When the charm finally pinged back that the Chronicle was not very close, but had to be in the house, Netta walked briskly out of the room and followed the trail that the charm attached itself to.

She moved quickly, worried that at any moment that she would lose the charm's magic. If she lost the trail, it would leave her with having to take the time to continue digging through the house.

As she ran down the stairs, she could feel Ash's hovering presence, not physical, as It trailed after her.

When the trail lead to the living room, she wheeled into the living area proper, unable to suppress the sarcastic, "Really? Here, all along?" as she ran past the coffee table. She found herself drawn past the magicked furnace to the wall that had an inset book case in it.

She didn't even need the help of the charm to tell the large book that stood apart from the rest. It was a thick, old thing that stood out from the Jodi Picoults and the Stephen Kings in her sister and deceased mother's book collection, sat next to an old photo album.

She sighed and pressed her hands to her face.

Her words muffled in her hands, she said, "It was here all along."

"It appears to be that way. Now what?"

Netta took in a deep breath and pulled the book loose from its neighbors. She pushed a good majority of the pages aside until she found the entry that she was looking for.

She took a long moment to stare at the enchanted pages, staring at the pages in utter disbelief. Netta may have continued to do so for a good deal longer in the hopes that she was simply reading it wrongly, if not for Ash coming up to peer down at the book.

"What is it?"

Netta took in a deep breath and tried to focus herself. She wanted to stop shuddering.

"This has to be wrong. It's saying that aside from me, Calliope and Saorise, the rest are - they're dead. They - they have no more entries."