“Did you have any luck?”
“Oh, yeah, we did. I came up with an idea to create larger than life versions of the Oak King and the Holly King—sort of like puppets on stilts. I think it will be really cool, if we can pull it off.”
“Well, that sounds great, honey,” my mom said, stifling a yawn. “It’s about time someone jazzed up that pageant, and I can’t think of a better person for the job than you.”
“Personally, I wish Charlie was here,” I said, referring to one of my best friends from home, who was a brilliant costume designer. “But I’ll do the best I can.”
“I’m sure it will be wonderful. I can’t wait for Sedgwick Cove to see what you can do, Wren.” She kissed the top of my head.
I smiled half-heartedly. The problem was that Sedgwick Covehadseen what I could do—or heard rumors about it, at least—and now they were all wary of me.
The hours until midnight dragged by. I tried to fill the time by reading the books Rhi had given me, but I couldn’t focus. I found myself reading the same paragraph over and over again, without absorbing a single word. Every time I looked up at the clock, I was sure it would be time to go; and instead, I would see there was still an interminable wait left. I threw the book aside in frustration, and picked up the pageant script instead, but I might as well have just stared at the tiny spider weaving a web in the corner of my ceiling for all the progress I made. It wasn’t that I wanted to go—I simply wanted to get it over with. Rhi, being such an early riser, was also in bed well before ten o’clock, and my mother was so exhausted, she’d been snoring in the room beside me since eight-thirty. So at least I didn’t have to worry about climbing out of my window to make my escape. Nova might be competent at scaling trellises, but I’d never had the chance to hone that particular skill, and I didn’t much feel like breaking my neck in the attempt.
I put a few things in my backpack—a flashlight, my phone, and all the notes I’d made for the pageant. If we were caught, the pageant was a passable excuse why we might all be meeting up together. I saw the mirror tucked down at the bottom, and shuddered involuntarily. If there was any way I could convince Nova to take that thing back to the Manor with her, I would try it. I changed into all black clothes—I had plenty of them from working backstage— and slipped as quietly as I could down Lightkeep’s creaky old staircase, and out the front door. I’d stashed my bike around the side of the fence rather than locking it back up in the shed, so that I’d have easy access to it. I wheeledit carefully through the gate, hopped on, and took off down the road toward town. I tucked the flashlight under my arm to light my way until I reached the part of the road that had streetlights, and made a mental note to invest in one of those little lights I could strap to my handlebars. I had a funny feeling this was not going to be my last clandestine bike ride in the middle of the night.
I felt a stab of guilt as I glided into the deserted downtown. Every decision my mother had made, ill-conceived or not, had been to protect me; and here I was, sneaking out in the middle of the night. Of course, I reasoned, I wasn’t doing it to get into trouble. I was doing it to get someone elseoutof trouble. And the only reason Nova was even attempting this ridiculous scheme was because the Conclave wasn’t doing its job. If the adults were handling things the way they were supposed to, instead of playing politics, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Nova asked us to meet her outside of Shadowkeep which, tucked as it was down a narrow street with two other shops but no houses, meant there was little chance that we’d be seen by anyone. As I rounded the corner, I saw that Eva and Zale were already standing there, huddled together against the surprisingly cold wind rolling up from the harbor. I pulled my bike up, leaned it against a picket fence, and pulled my hands into my hoodie sleeves as I joined them.
“Any sign of Nova?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Eva said, pulling out her phone.
“What are we going to do if we can’t talk her out of it?” Zale asked. “Like, what if she just decides to go through with it anyway?”
“Look, I’m not here to be a snitch,” Eva said. “I might not want to participate, but Nova can do what she wants. If she wants to get herself caught interfering in Conclave business, that’s on her. I’m not risking Xiomara’s wrath because theClaires can’t get their collective shit together, but I’m not going to rat her out either.”
We stood there together in the cold, waiting. Zale’s teeth were chattering. Eva was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, trying to keep the blood flowing. The temperature had dropped considerably that night, due to a storm that was rolling past the coastline out to sea. The minutes ticked by, and the anxious knot in my stomach twisted tighter. Where was she? What was taking her so long to get here? I could tell the others were thinking the same. Eva was glancing at her phone every ten seconds, waiting for a text, and Zale was pacing the block, peering down in the direction of the Manor.
“Something’s wrong,” I finally whispered, when a glance at my phone told me it was one o’clock in the morning, a full half-hour after Nova had asked us to meet. “What should we do?”
Zale was still looking up the street in the direction Nova should be coming. “Should we go to her house?” he asked.
“And do what, throw rocks at her window? I’m just going to text her,” Eva said, and began typing. At that moment, all our phones buzzed: a group text message.
There’s been a complication. Talk to you tomorrow.
Eva expelled a sigh of relief. “I guess that’s it, then. She’s not coming.”
“What do you think happened?” Zale asked.
“Probably got caught trying to sneak out. The last time Nova snuck out after curfew, Ostara grounded her for a month,” Eva said. “Hopefully she only found out that she was sneaking out, and notwhyshe was sneaking out, or we won’t see her again for the rest of her natural life.”
“Speaking of getting caught, let’s all try not to,” Zale said. “Can you both come by tomorrow to help with pageant stuff?”
“Let’s do it at my house,” Eva suggested. “Xiomara will have leftovers from a catering gig, and we can use my mom’s artsupplies. She’s got a sort of workspace up in the attic where we can lay everything out.”
“What time?” I asked.
“I’ll have to be at the cafe for the lunch rush. So… how about three?”
We all agreed. Zale and Eva headed off in opposite directions toward their houses. I stood at the fence getting ready to mount my bike, when a sudden flare of light caught my eye. I looked up, and saw that the light on the top floor of Shadowkeep had just turned on.
“What the hell?” I murmured. I hastily rolled my bike a few feet so that I could conceal both it and me behind a massive hydrangea bush, and continued to watch the upper windows. There was a figure moving around up there, silhouetted against the cream-colored shades that had been pulled down over the windows. My heart began to pound. Had someone broken into the store? Were we being robbed? And what did someone even do if they found out the secret part of their store was being robbed? It’s not like I could just call the police, could I? I could see it now: me standing in the side garden with two bemused officers, trying to explain about the invisible staircase, and then getting carted off to an in-patient mental facility. Unless the police here understood enough about the secrets of this town that they’d actually believe me? I didn’t know for sure. No, I’d have to handle this by myself.
I toyed with the idea of sneaking up the stairs to catch whoever it was red-handed, but dismissed it almost at once. Whoever was up there was clearly a witch, because they knew about the second floor; and if they were willing to use magic to break into Shadowkeep, I was sure they wouldn’t hesitate to use it against me if I confronted them. And so, I did what every teenager does when they want to document something: I whipped out my phone and started recording. I decided to waitand catch footage of whoever this person was sneaking back out of Shadowkeep, and then I could bring the evidence to Rhi and let her decide what to do with it. Of course, that would mean I’d have to explain why I was outside of Shadowkeep at one o’clock in the morning when I was supposed to be at home in bed, but I would cross that bridge when I got to it. Shadowkeep meant everything to Rhi and Persi, and I couldn’t just pretend I hadn’t witnessed this.
I shrouded myself further back into the bushes, and trained my camera on the upstairs window. The figure moved swiftly, but I was fairly confident it was a woman from the silhouette. As I recorded, the wind from the harbor numbing my fingers, the light in the upper level suddenly went out. I heard a creaking sound, followed by the shutting of a door, and then the footsteps down the hidden staircase. I waited for the person to come around the corner of the house and into my view, so that I could catch them on camera. My hands shook, and my lungs burned with the breath I was afraid to release. At last, I heard the creak of the gate, and the figure emerged from the shadowy garden into the golden pool of a street light.
