I turned back to them, biting my lip. “Bea, is that you?” I asked, and it was a struggle to get enough breath to raise my voice.
“Of course it’s me, Wren!”
Two voices. Two figures speaking to me, and only to me.
Dread exploded in the pit of my stomach.
“What’s happened to you, Bea?” I whispered. “Luca, what’s going on?”
And then suddenly, both figures laughed, a long, harsh laugh that sounded strange in their voices, and looked even stranger as their expressions did not change. They laughed and laughed, like I’d just told the funniest joke.
“My goodness, that was easier than I expected,” they both said to me, as their laughter died away. “Honestly, it was almost too easy. I’m rather disappointed.”
Nova’s fingers on my arm tightened, as we watched a third figure emerge from the shadowy corner of the cavern. The figure stepped into view with slow, measured strides, that nonetheless had a feline fluidity. Watching the figure come closer was more like being stalked, than approached. As the figure moved forward into the light, it revealed itself, piece by piece, like a puzzle clicking together in my head. First, the long, slender legs, then the sparkling, bangle-clad arms, then the shining halo of hair surrounding the flawless face of Veronica Meyers.
“Ms. Meyers?” I mouthed. There wasn’t enough breath in my lungs to say the words out loud, and yet she seemed to understand me perfectly. At the mere suggestion of her name, she twitched with annoyance, as though a fly had landed on her.
“I do believe I told you to call me Veronica,” she said, hitching her smile back in place at once.
“I don’t understand,” I said. My brain felt slow, like every thought was wading through molasses. I looked from Bea to Veronica to Luca, desperate for the pieces to fall into place.
“Oh, that much is very evident. I never imagined I’d be up against such an utter ignorance of magical knowledge. I mean, I knew you were unpracticed, butwow.”
“Up against?” I asked. “Why would you be up against me? What are you even doing here? Did Luca call you?”
“Dear Luca,” she looked at her son beside her, his expression impassive, almost blank. “He did provide me with an in, however inadvertently. I really must remember to thank him when I see him.”
I looked back and forth between Luca and Veronica, feeling like someone had put my brain in a blender, and hit the button. “What do you mean when you see him? He’s… he’s right there.”
Veronica looked at the figure beside her, and then back at me with a pitying look. “My dear, you are even further behind than I thought.” She then bent over to whisper something in Luca’s ear. As she did so, she rested a single hand on his arm. A moment later, Luca was simply gone—crumbled away to nothing, like sand in the wind.
I cried out, taking a step forward, and raising my hands as though I thought I might be able to gather all the tiny particles, and reassemble him. The impulse died as quickly as it flared, and I froze where I stood, horror bubbling inside me.
Luca hadn’t been real. But then…
My eyes drifted over to Bea.
“There we are. Catching on at last,” Veronica said, and she crossed the space between her and Bea in a single long stride. She reached one long, slender finger out, and cocked it under Bea’s chin, pulling Bea’s face toward her, and then puckering her lips and planting a gentle kiss on the tip of Bea’s nose.
With a shiver and awhoosh, Bea vanished as well.
Veronica then turned to me, cocking her head to one side. “Surely, you recognize a glamour when you see one? Your family’s shop is crawling with them, after all.”
I turned to Nova, and she nodded, answering the question in my eyes. How could I have been so stupid?
I’d thought Bea and I had been the only two witches who hadn’t been affected by the spell at the festival. But now I understood: Bea wasn’t Bea at all. The real Bea was probably somewhere in that crowd back on Main Street, still hypnotized by the pageant. This Bea—the one I had followed here—had been nothing but an illusion, a piece of bait dancing on the surface of the water. And like the most gullible of fish, I leaped for it. And yet…
“I still don’t understand. How do you know about… about glamours and… You’re not even a…” I felt almost dizzy withconfusion. I must have swayed because Nova put out a hand to steady me. When I locked eyes with her, she looked just as bewildered as I felt.
“Not even a witch?” Veronica finished my sentence for me, her lips exaggerating the final word. “I’m afraid that was just an assumption on your part, and a foolish one at that.”
“You’re a witch,” I repeated, and the words sounded wrong.
“That’s right. Do try to keep up.”
“I… how?” I asked, utterly unable to form a more coherent question.
“The very same way as you are a witch, Wren. I was born one. Surely you heard the story of the playhouse? That Victor Meyers fell in love with a girl from Sedgwick Cove, and then bought the playhouse. Did you never think, perhaps, that the woman he married might have been a witch?”
