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that I didn’t need to pay attention. When that was done, I could focus on the mirror itself for a second or two to see if anything looked . . . off.
    Easy.
    I reached toward the mirror and ripped down the towel as I fumbled for the first aid kit, one of several stashed around, under the sink, spotting the box of syringes while I did so. That was a different situation. I might dread the mirror, but I was pinning a lot of hopes on those syringes and the new bottles in the refrigerator that went with them.
    But time for that later.
    With gauze and peroxide I wiped the dried and fresh blood from the slice that ran from the far end of my righteyebrow in an almost directly horizontal line to my hairline, keeping my eyes on it and only it. It was a red, seeping mess, but once I had it cleaned, it turned out not to be that deep and only a few inches long. It might not even scar. Wouldn’t that be a shock, considering the scarred mess my hands, chest, and ribs were? I applied several butterfly bandages and it looked good. A little blood would ooze past the antibiotic cream a half Auphe with a hyped-up immune system like me didn’t actually need, but otherwise it could’ve been worse.
    The worse, of a different sort, was what I was preparing for now.
    I dropped my eyes to study the sink as I pulled the ponytail holder out of my hair. It was a nice sink—no cracks in the glazing, the first one we’d had in the city where the water came out clear instead of rusty orange. I’d much rather look at it than the mirror. “Coward,” I exhaled before stiffening my shoulders and raising my gaze. My hair, now free of the holder, fell thick and black as my mother’s own had been. Dark and depthless as it always was . . . except for one solitary gleam. I felt my stomach burn as I raised slow fingers to tease out that glitter I’d seen in the broken piece of hell’s own reflection at the bar.
    One silver-white hair.
    It was tucked down in the lower layer and only chance, the flickering light of the bar’s bathroom, a flying sliver of mirror, and my own suspicious pessimism had let me see it. It could be natural. I’d already thought that. Black hair often goes prematurely gray or white. Sophia’s hadn’t. I was twenty-five now. She’d been thirty-eight when the Auphe burned her alive in our decrepit trailer, but she’d died with hair as black as her burned corpse. She could’ve been lucky, if dying a pretty much well-deserved death with your natural hair color couldbe called lucky. Her mother or father could’ve gone gray younger. I wouldn’t know. I’d never met them, but . . . I had to have hope. Faith was a lying whore who’d kicked me to the curb me long ago, but Promise and Goodfellow had proved charity existed. Why not a little hope to prove the trio wasn’t a mirage?
    The hair was between my thumb and forefinger—only the one. I didn’t see any more of them. One premature silver-white strand, it was normal. So fucking
normal
that I should be pissed at getting that worked up. Niko would snort at my idiocy. Goodfellow would buy me the cheapest box of hair dye he could find at the drugstore. They would . . . I dragged my fingers down the bright thread and felt the snag of serrated hooks too small to be seen by the naked eye. It stung, a hundred tiny bites.
    Hope had given me my answer. Hope was a bitch, same as her sisters, because the Auphe had white hair. They had silver-white hair that burned and bloodied your skin when you snagged a hand in the fall of it as you jerked back their head to cut their throat. It bit and had a texture slick at first touch and then jagged, altogether strange compared to human hair.
    I yanked at it, pulling it free from my scalp. It didn’t come easy like human hair either. It came stubbornly with a root stained with a clot of blood and a pain that didn’t only annoy; it pissed me the hell off. It showed in my eyes. Not from their narrowing in anger, but that the gray of them