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mine and she leaned closer, like she was whispering a terrible secret. “You look so much like my sister.”
    I nodded, because her voice was sad, and it was true. When I’d stood at the mirror in Shiny’s room, it had nearly been my mama’s face looking back at me.
    “But you’re not her,” Myloria said, leaning so close that the messy wisps of her hair almost brushed my cheek. “What are you?”
    “I’m her daughter,” I said, so afraid that she would shy back from me again, call me a liar like she had in the kitchen.
    Her eyes were so sad I could barely stand it and she held my hand like she was clinging to a past I could never quite know. Sisters and mothers were different people. I thought that I had never seen someone look so undone.
    “You be careful where you go and who you talk to,” she said finally. “And stay well away from the boys hanging around Carter’s Garage. Town is town, and they’ll leave you be for the most part, but those ones are not good boys. And don’t go around mentioning yourself to anyone if you can help it.”
    Shiny was standing by the door, picking off her nail polish. “And just how are we going to explain where she came from, if we can’t mention her?”
    Myloria hugged her elbows. She didn’t look much braver than before, but she put her shoulders back, like she was pulling herself together. “This whole business is a bad one, but I’m not so sure that whatever trickery is at work here doesn’t work a little in our favor. If the craft is as strong as I think it is, and Eric Fisher and his Maddox boys don’t go shooting their mouths off about digging her out of what’s left of the DeVore house, I don’t imagine we’ll have to explain at all.”
    It took a second to realize what she was saying—that I’d been put under a spell so strong that no one in the world would remember me. And for all the questions I might be able to avoid, it wasn’t reassuring. The other part was even less so, as it seemed to depend a lot on Fisher being right and the Maddox boys being too scared to say a word against me.
    Even Myloria looked doubtful, like maybe she was considering that, but none of us went so far as to remark on it.
    “You look nice,” she said finally, as though it were an afterthought, or like someone remembering their line for a play a beat too late.
    I knew I was supposed to tell her thank you, but the words felt wrong. She was still watching me like she expected me to go wild and tear up everything, and anyway, I didn’t even really know what it meant for me to look nice anymore. When I was little, nice was a pink dress and a pair of shiny shoes. Now I was just some strange, grown-up girl, with matted hair and someone else’s clothes.
    “You be good in town,” she said, and then glanced at Shiny. “Because I know this one won’t.”
    Her voice was almost too thin to hear. I wanted more than anything to make her back into the aunt that I remembered, make her not be scared anymore. Not just of me, but of everything.

TRICKS
    CHAPTER FIVE
    T he front of the Blackwood house was nearly as bad as the inside. The porch sagged where the boards had begun to rot, and everything felt squishy. There was a jar of sun tea at the top of the steps, the Lipton bags floating like giant soggy beetles.
    Shiny clomped past it and down into the yard, kicking at some of the milkweeds that were taking over the flowerbed. I started to follow, then turned back to look at the house.
    Most of the top floor was gone, and where it wasn’t, the boards were burned nearly to charcoal. The only spot that hadn’t been touched was the kitchen corner of the ground floor. There, the windows still had their glass and the paint was a watery yellow instead of just charred.
    “It’s ruined
,
” I said, and my voice was dry and ragged. “Oh, Shiny . . . it’s awful.”
    She twitched her shoulder and looked away. “Fire will do that. This place went toe-to-toe with the reckoning and