Under the cover of my duvet, I dreamt of fire.

And I awoke to the distinct sounds of metal clanging in the kitchen—not something I'd have noticed months ago, but now I was so used to the silent solitude that any little sound echoed up to my room. I threw off the blanket and sprang from bed, but then groggily stumbled. I grabbed a pale pink cable-knit sweater from a pile on the floor and stretched it over my head as I went downstairs with visions of sandwiches and soup and cereal dancing in my head.

But when I entered the kitchen, there wasn't any evidence of grocery shopping. No empty bags on the floor, no boiling water or signs of food to come. My father finished drying the oatmeal pot and hung it back on the rack above his head. Empty beer bottles had been organized into a bag for recycling. We still didn't have collection service, but he dropped them off at the recycling center every couple weeks because it was next to the junkyard where he scavenged scrap metal.

"Good morning," he said, kissing my cheek.

I winced when his unshaven cheek scraped my skin. "It's four p.m."

"Well, I just woke up, and from the looks of it, you just woke up too."

I opened the nearest cabinet, closed it, and opened the next. There wasn't a grind of coffee or a single bud of chamomile, much less food. I knew we'd both taken a turn for the worse over the last couple months, but this level of absentee parenting was extreme even for his dark times.

"You know what most people do in the morning?" I asked. "Drink coffee, orange juice. Eat breakfast. Eat anything."

He frowned.

I nearly apologized for being snippy, but then my stomach rumbled. I grabbed a bottle of water from the pantry and glugged back a third of it, hoping it would stop the ache, but it only made me feel nauseous.

"Dad, we don't have any food."

"I left my wallet on the counter for you, sweetheart, just like I do every morning when I get home."

My finger pressed into my forehead, and I bit back a snarky response.

"You know . . ." he said, "you could still finish out the semester at Ursuline—"

"Dad, I'm not going back to that place!" I exploded. "We agreed!" We'd discussed this endlessly, but I'd thought it was over. "You said if I completed the correspondence classes— I finished everything. You can't make me go back!" Suddenly, I was there. Being tied up to the statue, my magic being used against me to kill Nicco and Brigitte.

"Sweetheart?"

Then I'm lying on the stone floor, seeing my mother loom over Codi, feeling the panic as I slice open my arm to get her away from him.

"Adele!" My father's eyes widened with worry.

I let go from clutching the counter behind me and glanced at my wrist. No scar, thanks to Nicco's blood. No hint that anything had even happened. Just memories and nightmares and regret. Just something that happened on the school grounds that I couldn't tell my father about.

"Breathe, baby."

I tried, but it felt impossible. I faked a big inhale by standing up taller.

"I'm not making you go," he said with reassurance. "I was just asking if you'd given going back to school any more thought. It might be nice to finish out the year with your friends."

"They said taking a grievance period doesn't affect your records."

"I'm not worried about your records, Adele. I'm worried about you."

"Me? You barely left your room for the first month. Just the bar and then straight to bed. Bar. Booze. Bed. Bar. Boo—"

"I know!" His gaze shuffled around the room. "I've been meaning to talk to you about that." A look hid behind his eyes that I hadn't seen in a while, but that had become prominent the closer I'd gotten to my teenage years. The one that said he knew he'd never be as good a parent as my mother would have been, that he didn't know how, and that he was sorry for it. Until now, I'd never said anything to make him feel that way, and now I hated myself even more.

His gaze finally landed back on me. "I should have been more available to you. I should have—"

"It's not your fault, Dad."

"I-I was in shock. Some days I'm still in shock. It's not an excuse. I'm sorry."

This is not your fault, Dad. It's my fault. I'm the one who trapped them in the attic in the first place and then led their sworn enemy straight there. I'm the one who told Annabelle about the convent. That traitorous little—

"I'm so, so sorry, baby. It's hard to explain—hard to admit—it was never real to me before. I always believed she was going to come home one day. Knowing she never will . . ."

Every sentence crushed me a little deeper into the ground. Each word was dirt spraying on my face, mud shoveling on top of my chest. My legs. My arms. My shoulders. Into my mouth and throat, choking me. She didn't leave us; she died!

I wanted to tell him how I'd tried to save her. I tried, Dad! A wheeze expelled from my throat, and my chest pinched as I tried to catch my breath. I couldn't tell him. He was a mundane. I was a witch. A witch without magic. My lungs locked.

Tighter. Tighter.

My father reached for the drawer just as quickly as he used to when I was a child. He pulled out my inhaler.

"I . . . don't . . . need it." I gripped the counter. Calm down, Adele. My thoughts flashed to the last time I'd had a major panic attack, in the attic after the Michels' funeral with Isaac—and suddenly I couldn't breathe at all.

"Adele!"

I snatched the inhaler from him, brought it to my lips, and punched down on the plastic button with both hands. My lungs puffed, and I held in the blast of albuterol.

"Count to ten before letting it out."

My eyes slanted upward at him. I know how to use the freakin' inhaler.

By the seventh second, I could feel the relief kicking in, and by the ninth, my lungs felt like they were going to pop, desperate to exhale.

"We need to get back into our running routine," he said casually as the air puffed from my lips. My father knew that for some reason I always found this particularly humiliating.

"If you were worried about me"—I sucked in another quick puff for good measure, holding it in as I spoke—"you'd go grocery shopping." I dropped the plastic inhaler back into the drawer.

He pushed his wallet along the counter to me. "Not that you need cash. The Palermos will put anything you need on our store account."

As I exhaled the steroids, it suddenly all made sense. All this time I thought he was so far gone wallowing in grief that he'd forgotten essentials like feeding me, but really he was . . . "You're-you're trying to starve me out! What the hell, Dad?"

"Don't curse, Adele."

I scowled.

"Sweetheart, I know it feels impossible right now. Believe me, I know. But we're going to get through this. And . . . you have to leave the house. I'm sorry to do this to you. It doesn't have to be school, but you have to leave the house."

"It's not like it's been that long!"

"It's been over two months. I was even thinking that you might want to visit Brooke. A little Los Angeles sunshine, ocean breeze?"

"Dad! I am not going to California. Christ, I'll go get groceries!" Panic flooded my veins. "I'm not leaving you!"

"Okay. Today, then. Promise me."

"I promise," I said through gritted teeth, unable to even look at him. I didn't know if I was more annoyed with myself for not realizing what he'd been doing or at him for actually doing it.

"One more thing, sweetheart. Your mentorship. I'm not just going to sign off on the paperwork. If you want your credit with NOSA, you have to get back into the metal shop."

"You haven't even been working in the studio."

"I know. It's the perfect excuse to get both of our butts back in gear." He kissed my head, pulled something out of his pocket, and slipped it into my hand before he walked out the door.

The round, foil-covered object was rough in my palm, and for a flash it reminded me of when Nicco had slipped me the metal note—right before he spun me around and tossed me out the attic window. To save me from his family. It's weird how I'd blocked it out after that night, but now I could remember it so clearly. I guess a near-death experience could do that to a person.

I opened my fingers.

A peppermint patty. It was warm from being in my father's pocket. Barely getting a look at it, I unwrapped the chocolate with more enthusiasm than Charlie and gobbled it down.

For a brief second, a sugar-induced endorphin rush flooded my heart.

It didn't last long.

I paced down the hallway to the front door.

Just thinking about leaving made anxiety spider in my chest, and the lingering chocolate taste on my tongue felt traitorous. But the longer I waited, the worse it would get. I'd start picturing all the horrible things that could happen if I went outside. Having to confront everything I'd been avoiding: the enemies I wanted to slay, the jealousy I'd been harboring against my best friends who still had their magic, the secrets I'd kept from the coven. And then of course there was Nicco. I didn't know how to re-integrate Nicco into my life. Wooziness washed over me. I thought about the pile of paper airplanes from Isaac still in their crash-landing places under the sill. I'd avoided that part of my life completely.

I knew if I didn't leave right that very second, I was going to run up the stairs, climb back into bed, and not wake up again until tomorrow.

I grabbed the front door handle, realizing only then that nothing but furry purple socks covered my feet. I stepped into the pair of shiny black rain boots lined up next to my father's industrial looking ones. It was April—I mean, it could rain today.

As I reached for my purse and the canvas shopping bags in the closet, I got a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror. My hair was a ratty, oily, matted mess. The pale pink sweater engulfed me, falling off my left shoulder where my collarbone jutted out in a way it never had before. I pulled up the sweater to cover it. The circles under my eyes were so dark, my face looked hollow, almost like Callis's when I first met him, when he was . . . starving. My teeth clenched.

I pulled an elastic band from my wrist, wrapped my waves into a sloppy topknot, retrieved my sunglasses from my purse, and grabbed the doorknob. The sounds of the lock unclicking twisted my insides, but then . . . I was standing on the stoop, shielding my face from the sun.

I was outside of the house.

This is a bad idea.

Breathe.

* * *

My head remained down, focusing on my steps. The bright light was harsh even under the dark glasses. Was this how Nicco felt every time he stepped into the daylight? I concentrated on each little thing my feet passed as the distance between me and our Creole cottage became greater: cracks in the slate, a Pat O'Brien's plastic hurricane cup filled halfway with a questionably yellow liquid, a pile of garbage on the curb so huge its shadow engulfed me as I walked past. Someone must have recently returned home and begun the purge.

I turned the corner without looking up. I didn't need to; I'd walked to the corner delicatessen hundreds of times. Like Mémé et Pépé Michel, the Palermos had known me my whole life. How well had they known my mother? How many people did my father tell about her death, and what details did he give? I wasn't even sure how many details Nicco had given him. Just enough to keep him from asking questions, I suppose. Car accident. Brigitte had been on holiday in the South of France. The driver survived, but neither she nor her assistant made it. Their bodies were badly burned and, due to the poor post-Storm connectivity, she'd already been buried by the time we found out, so we had missed her funeral in France.

Lies.

All lies.

Except for the fact that she'd died.

Only, she'd died just a few blocks from our house, in my arms, with her fangs plunged into my neck. She'd pulled on my blood until her last dying breath. I hadn't a clue where her body was now, but it sure as hell wasn't in the Dupré family plot in Paris.

My autopilot feet stopped and I looked up. Only the letters P and A remained of the neon namesake sign high above the shop. After all the anguish, it had only taken six minutes.

I took a deep breath, pushed the sunglasses to the top of my head, and opened the door.

The smell was overwhelming as I walked into the store, like someone had painted the muggy, non-temperature-controlled air with Tabasco. The local NPR station chattered from a small speaker beside the register where Lucy, the Palermos' daughter, was sorting through paperwork. She was older than my dad, with short buzzed hair and a wide stance like she was always ready for a bar brawl. I'd rarely ever seen her here. She nodded hello. I did the same.

It had been weeks since I'd spoken to anyone other than my father. I'd even stopped charging my phone so I wouldn't have to see all of my unopened texts from Dee.

The mood in the shop seemed oddly somber. Maybe it was just the current state of the city—or just my current state. Mr. Felix, who hadn't noticed me yet, was sitting in the corner next to a propane tank and a giant crawfish boiling pot, the source of the potent smell. He was wearing the same suspenders and tweed pageboy hat he always wore regardless of the temperature. He leaned forward against the paddle, looking like he'd fallen asleep. My stomach gurgled. It was crawfish season, that was, if their habitats hadn't been destroyed in the Storm, but it didn't smell like a boil.

"Dad!" Lucy yelled over the radio-rant. "Adele's here!"

He shook awake and tried to pretend he hadn't dozed off. "Addie! Ya hungry?"

Hungry hardly described how the smell was making me feel. I wanted to shove my face into the twenty-five-gallon pot and suck it dry. I nodded rapidly, and he lifted the lid and moved the paddle, slowly stirring the biggest pot of gumbo I'd ever seen.

"It's not the best, but it's not the worst either," he said, scooping rice into an old margarine tub and ladling over a big helping.

"Merci." I slurped it straight from the tub, not stopping when it scorched my tongue. It didn't taste quite right—nothing did post-Storm—but it tasted liked manna at the same time.

"When I was growing up, it was called the Depression." His voice sounded so much feebler than I remembered it. "You learned to get by with what you had."

I looked back to Lucy and her mountain of receipts. Mid-slurp, I asked, "Where's Mrs. Rosaria?"

They both looked to me, but neither immediately said anything.

When Lucy didn't respond, Mr. Felix said softly, "She's upstairs resting, Adele. Don't you worry her any mind."

I glanced back and forth between them. Something else was going on. Something bad, and they thought I was too fragile to handle it. I wanted to press them for answers, but Lucy went back to the receipts and Mr. Felix was stirring the pot again, gazing into the swirling roux. The sadness in his eyes made my pulse flicker. "Send her my love, s'il vous plaît."

I scolded myself. For weeks, while I was holed up in my room, the world had felt frozen, as if time had stopped. I'd been so wrapped up in my own self-pity I hadn't given anyone else a proper thought.

And yet a part of me couldn't help but think, At least she's led a full life. Mrs. Rosaria was in her eighties; my mom had barely made it to forty.

I wasn't sure which of my thoughts made me feel more horrified. If I stopped thinking about my mother, I felt guilty; if I thought about her too much, I felt guilty. It was a lose-lose.

Carrying my gumbo, I walked down the aisle, surprised to find how many of the shelves were full compared to the last time I'd been here. Only now, instead of being full of food, they were full of cleaning supplies. There was an entire aisle of garbage bags and bleach, and another comprised entirely of duct tape, sponges, and steel-wool pads. The rest were lined with non-perishables. There was no milk, but an endless supply of Kool-Aid.

I opened the canvas bag on my arm and, between sips of gumbo straight from my bowl, began filling it with canned goods and bags of rice, pasta, and beans.

Most of the space on the walls where the refrigeration system had been was now filled with mops and brooms, but a single freezer was loaded with plastic bags of vegetables, pre-chopped and just waiting to be thawed out, cooked up, and in my belly. The frozen vegetables were now treasures, leagues above their canned counterparts. I filled my second bag with frozen fruit, and then even scored six fresh carrots and an onion from the produce shelves. I couldn't remember any fresh produce last time I was here. The fact that I'd been living solely off oatmeal for the last three days now made me feel like a child. I picked up a bag of potatoes, and my arms began trembling, which I hated. I guess that's what happened when you stayed in bed for most of winter.

Under the weight of the groceries, I could feel how much time had passed. What else did I miss?

"Take this to your daddy," Mr. Felix said from the front of the shop.

I hurried back, cans clanking, and he stuffed two frozen chickens into the bag on my left arm. I tried not to sink.

"Put one in the freezer when ya get home."

I put the totes on the counter so he could ring me up, but instead he added two margarine containers full of gumbo and a loaf of French bread, and waved the bags away. "Bread's probably stale by now. We're only getting one delivery a week. Come back Monday for a loaf hot off the Langensteins' truck. Anyhow, put it in the oven with a little olive oil and it'll be fine."

I nodded thanks. I felt foolish that it had taken me so long to step out of the house. There were so many others who weren't so fortunate, and I'd let myself go hungry when there was food just a couple blocks away.

Just as I stepped to the door, Mr. Felix called out, "Addie, we're so sorry about your mother."

I froze.

"We heard about the car crash."

I turned around, nodding awkwardly.

"If there's anything you and your pa need—"

"Merci beaucoup." The words rushed out of my mouth as I ran out of the shop.

Seventeen cracks in the ground later, the spike of adrenaline leveled. I tried to keep up the pace, but two frozen chickens, a sack of potatoes, and two totes full of canned and frozen food made it impossible. I felt like a slug.

By the time I finished the first block and a half, my shoulders ached, and the bags were digging so deeply into my skin that they felt close to drawing blood. I readjusted them, nearly spilling the cans, trying not to think about how much lighter they'd be with a magical assist, but then I felt the sun on my face, and I registered that the winter chill was almost completely gone from the spring air. When did the season change?

After that, I couldn't help but pay special attention to everything. How much bluer the sky seemed, how much sweeter the chirps of the birds fluttering from roof to roof sounded, how many more parked cars were on the streets than the last time I'd been out of the house. Freshly potted annuals—purple pansies, pink geraniums, and multi-colored petunias—waved from baskets under the LaBordes' windows. Bright blue tarps hung on the roofs of at least half the buildings on the block, potted ferns graced the third-floor balcony of a neighboring townhouse, and even though I was still half a block away, I could smell incense billowing out of the Pharaoh's Cave, the Egyptian shop on the corner.

I was almost glad my father had forced me to leave the house. It was one of those perfect spring days. Winter was over, and the world had been moving on without me while I'd been lying in my bed staring at the ceiling for all those weeks.

Who else is back in town? What else has reopened?

Maybe I could visit Café Orléans to catch up on all the neighborhood happenings—if it was even still open. I decided that after I put away groceries, I'd go check it out. And if it's closed, I'll open it back up. A few café au laits with Ren would catch me up on all things recovery-related and gossip-related in one fell swoop.

First, you have to take a shower, Adele. I turned the corner at the side of our house and jerked to a stop.

My heart erupted violently, filling my limbs, hands, and feet with lava.

A guy was on our stoop, finishing a conversation with my father. He turned to leave, and I tried to leap back around the corner, but the bag of potatoes snagged the iron work that held open our shutters and ripped, spilling the spuds all over the sidewalk.

He saw me. He saw me. He saw me.

"Adele!" Isaac seemed as shocked to see me as I was to see him, which was ridiculous since he was at my house.

I mentally cursed everything and everyone as I scrambled for the potatoes, shoving them into the already full bags. I unzipped my purse, putting the smaller ones inside two at a time. Then his hands were in my sightline, picking them up too.

"I don't need help," I said, refusing to look up at him and grabbing another potato. There were so fucking many of them.

He placed one inside the canvas bag on my shoulder, his hand brushing my arm.

"Stop it!" I leapt away, but toppled. The skin on my palms scraped on the sidewalk as I landed hard.

"Adele!" He tried to help me up.

"Don't touch me!" The words came out louder and sharper than I'd intended.

He froze, shock chiseled on his face.

The lava flowing through my veins hardened like rock. We both just stared at each other, wide-eyed, him looming over me, looking utterly flustered, and me about to come unglued.

I steadied myself on my knees and resumed gathering the potatoes, this time slower, with more control, trying to regain some of my dignity. He just stood there, watching me, as if petrified of setting me off again. Petrified was not Isaac. Isaac wasn't scared of anything. Not of hurricanes or vampires or succubus witches. I couldn't look up—couldn't bear to see the hurt in his caramel-colored eyes, the flecks of gold that glistened when he tried to blink back pain. I wished there were a hundred more potatoes to pick up. A thousand. Infinity more potatoes so I never had to look up.

When I placed the last potato in my purse, I stood and lifted the bags to my shoulder, trying my best to exhibit not needing help.

"Adele—" His voice was choked. "I am so sorry."

My eyes watered, but all I could do was stand there as the lava hardened in my throat.

"I just need to know you're okay."

My gaze flicked to the gate handle behind him.

"Please, just say something."

I had to get inside, but he felt like a mountain I couldn't climb around.

"Anything," he pleaded.

I glanced up at him through the filmy tears threatening to spill. He looked even fitter than I remembered, and his hair, pulled back, no longer fell in his face.

"Please."

The longer I waited in silence, the glossier his eyes became. I couldn't handle seeing him tear up. When I opened my mouth, words tumbled out, but not the words I meant to say. "You killed my mother."

I didn't know who was more stunned. The bags fell off my shoulders as I rushed past him, letting the contents spill onto the sidewalk. I twisted the gate handle and leapt up the stoop. I needed to be on the other side.

The heavy wooden door slammed shut behind me and I prepared for the floodgate of tears, but they didn't come. I wrapped my arms tight around my stomach, twitching violently, and fell to my knees, my hand slapping the marble foyer floor as I puked, the fiery spices of the gumbo singeing my throat.

It hurt. Everything hurt.

Panting, I tried to sit up on my knees, but my stomach threw my frail body right back down, and I gagged again.

"Adele?" my father yelled from somewhere deeper in the house.

"Don't come in here!" I screamed, my face hot with tears I didn't remember shedding and the floor around me covered in vomit. Tremors ripped through me, paralyzing my body in the hunched-over position.

Footsteps pounded closer.

I groaned.

"Adele . . . ?"

"No, Dad!"

I heaved as he came into view and desperately clutched my stomach, trying to keep it in. He leapt for the umbrella bucket, dumped the contents, and slid down to the floor just in time. I retched into the bucket over and over again.

"It's okay," he said, one hand rubbing the small of my back. "It's going to be okay, I promise."

I dry-heaved as he stayed kneeling in my vomit, saying soothing things, until there was nothing left inside my stomach and the convulsions calmed into a series of feverish waves.

"Baby, what happened?" he asked.

Over the last eleven weeks, I'd ignored Isaac's calls and messages, and I'd let his paper airplanes pile on the floor, until I eventually shut the window. Then I had to close the curtain so I'd stop getting nervous every time a bird flew by. I sat back on my knees, shaking, grocery-less, completely humiliated, until my breathing slowed.

When my father asked again, and I still didn't speak, he stood and opened the door, as if he was going to find the answer outside, find some kind of monster lurking.

There was no one there, just the groceries, perfectly lined up on the stoop, including a pile of potatoes carefully stacked into a pyramid. The fresh air was cool on my fevered face.

"Did this have anything to do with that boy who just came by?"

I thought about the vial of Désirée's sleepytime potion in my nightstand—I'd been saving the last remaining drops for a really bad day. I looked at him through my wet lashes. "There's no boy. I told you I didn't want to leave the house."