PART ONE
Friends

If you visit Selenna House, the first thing you see are the broken gates. Weeds grow all around. You go up the broad graveled drive that used to be raked every day, but now is full of holes and more weeds.

Then you come to the fountain, which still spouts four streams of water, for the magic spell on it will probably last another hundred years. You think, whose idea of art is this, flying babies and cats and other sentimental footle? Well, let me tell you, that fountain hides secrets.

But you don’t know that, so you look at the house. Its forty tall windows—twenty-four upstairs, sixteen downstairs—are now mostly broken, like a big grin with missing teeth. Fire blackens the walls, and if you go inside, you see where the great silver and crystal chandelier once hung—now just a dangling chain—and the grand stairways on either side of the hall that curve upward to a landing littered with animal nests and ashes and broken bits of furniture. A row of rooms opens off it.

That door down at the left end? My rooms.

It’s cleaner downstairs, because the last tenants swept the floor before they were swept by slam justice.

Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard about that, but not what actually happened.

I am here to tell you the real truth, because I—Lilah Selenna—was there.