“Hold this,” I told her, and then ran down the nearest aisle of costumes until I found the Victorian era ones. I pulled a long black cloak that looked like it may have been worn by the Ghost of Christmas Future, and ran back with it.
“Zale, totter your way over here for a second,” I said, throwing the cloak over my shoulder, and climbing back up the ladder.
Zale still looked mystified, but he did what I asked. I draped the massive cloak over his shoulders, and then held my hand out for the mask. Eva handed it to me, and I placed it carefully on Zale’s head. Then I pulled the hood up over his head.
“Hand me some of that greenery!” I said.
Eva’s face broke into a grin as she caught on to what was happening. She started handing me long flowering vines and trailing garlands of ivy. I wound them around Zale’s arms and draped them from his shoulders.
“How about this!” Eva shouted, running for a display of headpieces. She lifted one down that looked like deer antlers dipped in gold, and I placed it, with a final flourish, on Zale’s head.
“Holy shit!” I said.
“Lemme see!” Zale demanded.
Between us, Eva and I held up the cloak and the trailing vines so Zale could rotate himself and look into the full-length mirror on the opposite wall. He looked like some kind of strange apparition.
“It needs some work, but you can see it, right?” I asked eagerly. “We paint the mask, use seasonally appropriate greenery, find a big gnarled staff? Maybe give him some big branchy arms that people can operate with sticks?”
For a moment, Zale didn’t move or speak. I felt my heart sink. Did he hate it?
“I mean, it’s just an idea, we can just use the stuff we?—”
“THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEST PAGEANT EVER!” Zale shrieked. Eva yelped and jumped away from him, which made him lose his balance. He toppled to the floor, still laughing with excitement in a heap of fabric and fake leaves.
Eva looked at me and grinned. “I think he likes it,” she said.
As Eva and I helped the still giddy Zale extract himself from the makeshift costume, Eva’s phone went off. She pulled it out of her pocket to check the notifications.
“Oh, it’s Nova, reminding me about tonight,” she said.
“Nova?” My head snapped up. I’d been so caught up in thoughts of the pageant that I’d completely forgotten about Nova.
“Yeah. She asked if Zale and I could help her with something.”
“Is that what she said?” I asked.
“Yup,” Eva said. “She was kind of sketchy on the details, to be honest, but we told her we’d come. I mean, she’s basically been in hiding for a week.”
“Dammit, Nova.” I groaned, and Zale and Eva both looked at me.
“There’s a reason she’s being sketchy about the details,” I said.
“Wait, are you going, too? Do you know what she wants help with?”
I hesitated only a moment. I didn’t want to betray Nova’s confidence, but at the same time, I couldn’t let Zale and Eva go into Nova’s plan blind. I’d only agreed to it out of guilt, and probably because I didn’t know enough about magic yet to realize how dangerous it was going to be. But Zale and Eva were lifelong witches. They deserved to know what they were getting themselves into.
I sighed. “You’d both better sit down,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
10
“Please tell me this is a joke,” Eva said. “Like, some YouTube influencer is about to pop out from behind one of these boxes and tell us we’re being pranked, right?”
“Unfortunately, no,” I said. “She’s doing it tonight, whether we go with her or not.”
“But not to tell us what she’s planning? Just texting us to hang out? Is she out of her mind?” Zale asked weakly.
“She knows we’d never show up if we knew what she was doing,” Eva said.
