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I fish out my wallet from my desk drawer and slide the little rectangle from the third slot down. Then I pass it to her so she can see exactly what it says:

Never walk alone at night.

Never reveal what you are to anyone.

Always wear silver on your throat and wrists.

Carry silver nitrate in your pockets.

Eat a lot of garlic, every day.

Though, honestly, they seem pretty silly now. The kind of thing a sixteen-year-old would imagine might protect her, before every single memory that might help me fully flooded in. The girl I was based most things on shows and movies.

I know better. And I tell her so, after she says: “This seems pretty airtight. How did he get around it?”

“It always works until it just suddenly doesn’t, is the problem.”

“So he’s like an evil computer program that learns your patterns in order to defeat you. You smother your face in garlic, he goes for your foot. You prepare for dusk attacks, he wears twelve bike helmets all over his body and attacks you at dawn. That kind of thing,” she says as she hands the card back.

I take it, wincing just a little.

Because that’s the other problem.

“Well, I was kind of complacent this time, too.”

“Complacent wouldn’t be the word I would use in this harrowing situation.”

I shake my head. “But I would. I know not to go out at night without ten tons of silver all over me and my clothes dipped in garlic and something to fly on strapped to my back. And yet I did it anyway. I don’t know why I did it anyway.”

“Maybe you’re getting tired of all these exhausting things you have to do.”

I close my eyes for that. Brief enough that I think she hasn’t seen, but still.

I really don’t know why all of this is hitting me so hard.

“It’s not that exhausting. It takes a blink to throw ten cloves into the washer.”

“So what made you skip it, then? What made you not do it this time?”

“I don’t know. Maybe … maybe I just … I mean, it could be that…”

“If you tell me it’s because you want to be killed I’m going to be very upset.”

I snap my gaze up to her, shocked that she would say it. But worse is how upset she already looks, just at the idea. Her eyes seem a little glossy behind the gleam of her glasses. And her hands are not reaching for me.

They’re together, kind of twisting in her lap.

I swear the urge to reassure her gets me by the throat.

“It’s not that, Nance. I mean, sure, I get very tired sometimes of it all, but I’ve never been suicidal over it. No, no, this time it was just … I mean…” I sigh, trying to think of a way to explain that doesn’t include a vivid description of me throwing myself off a cliff. And it does come. I have to drag it up from the same rusty depths as the ability to advise, and the idea of my own suicide. But it’s there. “I think … I think I started to really believe he wasn’t going to show. He usually turns up around twenty-one, when my powers manifest. But this time, I got all the way to twenty-nine. I’m almost old. Not for normal people, of course, I know thirty isn’t old for normal people. But it is for me. I’m simultaneously hundreds of years old, and never out of my twenties.”

There, I think, and sag back in my seat.

My fucking hands are sweating.

I can taste salt in the back of my throat.

And it doesn’t even seem to work. She’s even more upset now.