“Well, hello, Wren,” Miss Bishop trilled from behind her desk. She was a squat little woman, with silvery hair braided into ropes that hung about her ears and nested on her head, like a shiny serpent.
“Hi, Miss Bishop,” Wren greeted her with a smile. “I have a paper to drop off for Ms. Boswell. Could you put it in her mailbox for me, please?”
“Of course, pet,” Miss Bishop said, reaching out a hand that jangled merrily with bracelets and bangles. “Just sign the log there, if you please.”
I jotted my name down along with the time, gave a last wave to Miss Bishop, and jingled my way right back through the curtain and out the door. Ms. Boswell was one of the history teachers—a tall, willowy woman who gestured violently with her hands while she taught. Her lectures were half performance art, half factual information. I was excited for her to read my paper, which I had researched using family records in the Sedgwick Cove Historical Center. I couldn’t remember ever being excited about homework before; but then, why would it be surprising that magic made everything—even homework—more interesting?
As I headed back to my bike, I noticed a woman with long black hair streaked with purple. She was standing on the steps of one of the school buildings, looking thoroughly aggravated as she examined a map. Was she lost? Her expression was so fierce, I decided to just slip away before she could ask me for directions. I would have enough of tourist demands over at Shadowkeep, where I was headed next.
Little did I realize there was no point in avoiding the woman. Before the day was over, our lives would collide.
2
By the time I pedaled over to Shadowkeep, there was already a small crowd of people outside with their faces pressed to the window displays. Of all the shops on the main drag of Sedgwick Cove, Shadowkeep was perhaps the most obvious tourist trap. Everything about it, from its sagging front porch, to its impossibly lush plants, to its ancient-looking sign screamed the Hollywood version of witchcraft. Eager to avoid a scrum of people trying to get through the door after me, I cycled around the side of the house, and opened the gate in the fence that led into the garden. I leaned my bike against the inside of the fence, unbuckled the basket from behind the seat, and turned to face the shop.
There was a trick to finding the secret entrance. Only a witch could see around the glamour that hid the staircase in plain sight. It wasn’t exactly invisibility—it was simply a trick of the mind that caused the passersby not to notice the stairs built up the side of the house that led to a door on the second floor. I amused myself as I walked up by waving at passersby and watching them completely ignore me. I wondered if that was how ghosts must feel, drifting invisibly along beside people, but the thought pricked at me like an unexpected thorn. I didn’t want to thinkabout ghosts right now, not when my own studies of my spirit abilities were going so poorly.
Well,Ithought they were going poorly. Xiomara seemed to expect no better, a fact which I knew should have made me feel better, but instead festered inside me like an ulcer. Like with Eva and other friends who were coming into more advanced studies of their powers, we were all starting to feel the pressure of expanding and honing our magic. Was this what normal teenagers felt like with stuff like SATs and college applications? I’d have to ask Poe or Charlie the next time I talked to them.
At the top of the stairs, I inserted my key in the lock and twisted the rattly old crystal doorknob to let myself in. The door was so old, I could probably have opened it with one good shove of my shoulder. I’d have to talk to Rhi and Persi about replacing it—it might be invisible to most people but, as we now knew, enemies had infiltrated the Cove without detection over the summer.
“Hi Persi,” I said as I entered the upstairs shop space, and found she had beaten me there. Persi merely grunted in reply—she had a screwdriver clamped between her teeth as she stood perched on a stepladder, and adjusted the height of a new shelf above one of the windows. “Do you want me to get things ready to open downstairs?”
She grunted again, this time with a nod which I took to mean “yes.” I moved past her to the opposite door, and descended the stairs into the tourist area of the shop. I unlocked the old-fashioned cash register and double-checked the starting cash. Then I walked around and clicked on the many stained-glass lamps, fairy lights, fake candles and lanterns we used to light the place instead of overhead strip lighting—nothing spoiled a spooky atmosphere like fluorescent lightbulbs. I could hear the voices outside rise into an excited babble as they realized the store was waking up and getting ready to open. I tried to ignore the faces pressed to the glass as I fixed some displays, restocked a few items that were running low and, at last, turned the sign from “BOO, we’re closed” to “Enter If You Dare.” With a sigh, I plastered on a smile, pulled back the deadbolt, and opened the door.
“Welcome to Shadowkeep,” I said, in what I hoped was a goodimitation of Persi’s musical tones. “Please let me know if I can be of any assistance, magic-makers.”
The rest of the morning was a blur of cheap wigs, plastic vampire teeth, and melting face paint. Nearly every visitor to the shop was decked out in their Halloween finest, despite the fact that the lingering summer heat was refusing to cede its ground to the crisp breezes of autumn. I could never remember it being this warm in the run up to Halloween. By the time Persi descended into the lower shop an hour later, Rhi’s cookies had already sold out. This soured her mood, and she snapped at several customers before she got over it.
Around lunchtime, Zale and Eva braved the crowds, pushing past two girls taking selfies dressed as Elphaba and Galinda by the candle display, to arrive, breathless and grinning, at the checkout counter.
“Well? How did it?—?”
“Say hello to Sedgwick Cove’s newest waterworker!” Eva crowed.
“I knew it!” I cried, leaning across the counter to pull her into a one-armed hug. “Persi, I’m gonna step out for a second, okay?” `
“Sure, I’m not drowning in customers over here,” came the dry reply, over the heads of the customers.
“Thanks!” I called blithely, ignoring the sarcasm, and slipped out onto the porch with Eva and Zale.
“So? Tell me all about it!” I said, as we settled ourselves on a cluster of Asteria’s creaking old rocking chairs.
“She flooded the Humanities building,” Zale said, deadpan.
“Very funny. Wait, did you?” I gasped, rounding on Eva.
“Of course I didn’t,” Eva snapped, shoving Zale so hard that he fell out of his chair and into a planter full of climbing roses. Ignoring his curses, she went on. “I really thought my nerves were going to get the best of me, at first. I sat down at the practice altar, and my mind went absolutely blank. I honestly don’t think I even remembered my own name. I thought I was going to pass out.”
“So what snapped you out of it?” I asked. I was having a vivid flashback to the time freshman year when Poe had dragged me into an audition for the musical. My brain had similarly short-circuited, thoughrather than recovering and nailing my audition, I’d given up and became a stage manager instead.
“Well, I opened up my notebook and found this,” Eva said. She pulled a folded-up piece of paper from her shorts pocket, and unfolded it. It was a sketch of Eva herself, but she was dressed as a superhero with a water droplet on her chest, and more little drops dancing at the ends of her long braids. Streams of water shot from her eyeballs onto a burning building, while a crowd of firefighters cheered her on.
I grinned. “Bea?”
Eva nodded. “She must have swiped my notebook last night after my mom demanded I go to bed early. That kid drives me up the wall, but sometimes, she’s all right. Anyway, it made me laugh, and it was like my brain just clicked back on again. It was smooth sailing after that!”
“And she just told you that you passed right on the spot?” I asked, as Zale slumped back into his seat, grumbling.
