Casandra Videncia knew the spirit's true name was hiding in her mirrors, and tonight a stranger stood between her and finding it. For forty years the same shape had drifted behind her glass, a woman made of stars and mist. Casandra wanted only one thing now: to learn what to call it, and to send it away forever. But she could not work while a man watched her door. He had come at dusk. Tall, gaunt, dressed in black. Golden gears hung on his belt beside a strange clockwork weapon. He said little. He said the spirit's stirring had led him here. Casandra had heard spirits since she was a girl, when she still thought everyone could. She knew a hunter when one crossed her floor. This man hunted something, and he believed her mirrors held it. She folded her hands over her tarot deck and studied him. "You feel it too," she said. "The pull." "I feel a boy," he said. "He hid what he stole. Something that glows." An apprentice, then. A thief. Not her spirit at all. Relief and danger arrived together. He would not leave until he was certain, and she could not draw a name from the glass with his eyes on her. So she lied. She turned three cards face up on the table. She let her voice drop, the way clients loved. "Your boy passed through the aviary conservatory," she said. "The glowing thing waits under the birdcages. Go now, before it moves." The Whispering Shroud did not move. His good eye held her. "You read cards for coins," he said. "Now you read them for me." "I read what the spirits show." He looked past her, at the mirror on the wall. The star-woman hung inside it, faint and watching. His hand touched a gear at his hip. "They show glass," he said. "Not birds." Casandra's throat went dry. He knew. Yet he stepped back toward the door. "The conservatory," he repeated, softer now, final. "If you sent me wrong, I return." Then he was gone into the fog, boots quiet on the stair. She bolted the door with shaking hands. He had taken the lie, but he had seen the truth beneath it. He would search, find nothing, and come back angry. She had bought an hour. Maybe less. Casandra crossed to the mirror. The star-woman waited, arms at her sides, her face calm. Forty years of silence stood between them. Now a killer knew where to look, and the spirit inside the glass had never once spoken its name. She lit the candles, all of them, the way she had once done to answer an older ghost. She spread her cards along the frame's dark gold gears. "We finish this tonight," she told the glass. "Both of us. Before he comes back." The mist behind the surface stirred. For the first time, the star-woman's lips began to part.