“You are right on time,” Nathanial said as he shot a pointed glance at the clock on her chest. “As you always are.”
Instead of easing back into his chair, though, Nathanial shifted forward and began to tap his foot against the carpet in a hasty tempo.
“What troubles were you speaking of just now?” she asked, the words causing another icy shiver to melt down her spine.
As Nathanial’s eyes drifted toward Hester, Anne caught that same expression she’d seen on the other side of the hand mirror, a subtle tightening of the mouth that made her feel like she was about to receive a pressing piece of news instead of the other way around.
“Strange incidents are happening across the city,” Nathanial began, his voice growing so serious that the house pulled the curtains on the windows a bit tighter, hoping it might prevent whatever secrets he was about to share from creeping out. “The reports are coming in so quickly now that we fear they won’t be easily contained.”
“What kind of incidents?” Anne asked.
“Happenings of a magical nature,” Nathanial explained. “Trains turning onto a pair of tracks that should carry the car north but somehow pull it south. Icicles in the shape ofBlackeyed Susans blooming along thresholds during a blizzard. Footsteps appearing in the snow a moment before someone sets their boot on the sidewalk.”
Anne listened as Nathanial continued to describe the peculiar incidents unfolding across the city, but her attention soon wandered toward the flames flickering in the hearth, where she began to see thin strands of light dancing in the fire. The longer she stared, the more she noticed that the delicate threads were beginning to tangle where they should have fluttered gracefully upward, a sure sign that the web of destiny had been disrupted.
“A Task has been left undone,” Anne murmured in understanding.
“That is what we believe,” Nathanial said with a nod.
“Whoever the Task belonged to must have been incredibly powerful for it to have such an effect,” Anne replied.
Only a witch with a rare aptitude for magic could have caused this number of unusual incidents to occur all at once.
“But no one like that has been brought to our attention,” Anne continued, her brow furrowing in confusion. “And I’ve been keeping an eye out for witches who might be struggling with their Tasks. How could I have not foreseen something like this?”
Again, Nathanial and Hester caught each other’s gazes, clearly deciding which of them would speak next.
“You’ve been looking toward the future,” Isaac said. “And turning away from the past.”
Anne jumped at the sound of his flat, icy voice, which perfectly matched the absent intensity of his eyes. He’d been so silent the whole meeting that Anne had almost forgotten he was there at all.
“The past?” Anne asked, her words echoing through the stillness of the room.
Unsettled by the pitying expressions that had suddenly appeared on Hester and Nathanial’s faces, Anne stared down at the leaves in her cup. And that’s when she found the answer to her question waiting for her along the rim—an hourglass formed from the remnants of her cloves.
“Mr. Crowley,” Anne gasped as her gaze shifted from the leaves to the ring wrapped around her finger.
“Yes,” Hester sighed. “It seems that Mr. Crowley was keeping a good many secrets to himself.”
“But you said he was a witch of middling abilities,” Anne said in disbelief, remembering the exact phrase that Nathanial had spat when he’d explained that Mr. Crowley was determined to leave his Task unfinished. “That the consequences would be easily dealt with.”
“That is what we thought,” Hester said. “But we were mistaken.”
She said the last word as if it left a bitter flavor in her mouth.
“But how can we be sure that all this has to do with Mr. Crowley and not another witch?” Anne asked, desperate for another possibility that had been overlooked.
“I went to visit his grave this morning,” Nathanial said, his voice somber. “And it was so covered in blackthorn that I could no longer see the stone.”
Anne stilled. Blackthorn only grew atop the graves of witches who’d held so much magic that it had started to seep into the soil.
“He must have hidden it away,” Anne said as she resigned herself to the truth. “To ensure he wouldn’t be forced to complete his Task.”
“Yes,” Nathanial replied. “We believe he got into the practice of hiding his magic at a young age. By the time he came to our attention, Mr. Crowley was so skilled at cloaking his abilities that we failed to notice them.”
Anne blinked, and an image of a young Mr. Crowley tugging his coat closer as he ran toward another boy across the street flew to the front of her thoughts. Of course, it all made sense now. Part of the reason Mr. Crowley had been able to strike up a friendship with Philip must have been that his family didn’t think he had much magic worth cultivating. If they knew the strength of his potential, he would have been under a much closer watch, and slipping out to see the human boy who lived on the other side of the road would have been impossible.
And then once Mr. Crowley had learned that Philip would become a ghost, he’d tucked his magic even deeper within himself to ensure that they would be together again.
