## Carol

The basement at midnight smelled of chalk dust, candle wax, and the low electric hum of the leyline waking up. Carol Godwin sat cross-legged on the cold concrete with a bowl of water between her knees, and watched two souls breathe.

East, in the dorm at Vermont Mountain College: Amanda Kemp's bedroom. The tall girl lay on her back, one arm flung out, snoring softly. Curled against her side, small and pale and utterly wrung out, lay Martin Star. His dyed-blue hair was a mess on the pillow, his lips parted. Even in sleep, the body had the wanton curve of a girl who had spent the whole day being taken apart. Carol watched his ribs rise and fall and felt the old man's soul inside him, quiet for once. No longer clawing at the walls.

West, at Shady Oaks: Martin's dying carcass, now Amy's. The girl lay alone in the narrow bed, on her back, one liver-spotted hand pressed to her gut where the cancer gnawed. She had been restless for hours. Carol watched her toss, turn, pinch her eyes shut, open them again. At eleven she had cried herself into exhaustion, and now she lay in the shallow ditch of sleep, twitching at every noise.

Carol blew across the surface of the water, and both images flattened into stillness.

"There we go," she murmured. "Under."

She had prepared everything the night before. Fresh chalk on the concrete. Eleven candles trimmed to the proper height. A lock of Amy's dyed-blue hair and a lock of Martin's gray pelt coiled together on a dish of silver, like mating worms. The two photographs from the dossier, face down, side by side on the altar, waiting to be turned.

But first, the pause. She sat in the dark, listening to the double heartbeat of her work through the floor, and enjoyed the moment before the cut.

Anyone could steal a memory. A corner-cutting hedge witch could yank a life out by the roots in a single ugly pull, and what did you get? A hollow. A person who walked around with empty rooms and no idea what had been in them. Carol had been doing this long enough to know the secret: the anguish wasn't in the removal. It was in the sequence. Remove the right thing at the right time, when …