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She turned my palm upward. I saw now that there was writing across my fingers and the back of my hand, wrapped around to cross my palm. As if some skilled calligrapher had applied a fountain pen to my skin and written there for several minutes. Her name sat there in the center. “Rose Penrose.”

Xavier, seeming to have forgotten his strange turn and—at least for now—about rushing me off to the emergency room, came forward to study the writing on my hands. I guessed it had come from Rose herself, “leaking” onto me when she caught hold of me and kept me in her grip.

“I’m supposed to get a witch’s book out of the wall,” I said, as if we needed any more strangeness. “To help her.” I held my palm toward them. “Rose.”

Grandma Josephine’s frown was very similar to her grandson’s. “Witches, is it?” She shrugged. “Could be worse.” And looked down at her shoes. “Much worse.”

“He’s got a concussion,” Xavier said reasonably. “We need to get him to a doctor.”

“Hmmm.” Grandma Josephine stroked her chin. “Go get us a hammer first, Xavi.”

“A hammer?”

“You can play deaf when you’re my age. A hammer. For hitting things.”

Xavier gave his grandmother a narrow stare and then retreated, muttering to himself.

The old woman turned her back on her grandson and went toward the cleared shelf. She stared at the portion of wall where I’d felt the tingle in my fingertips. “You’re not like other people, Frederick Archer.”

“I want to be.” A cold chill ran the length of my spine. Back when I was little, Madam ZaZa had turned out to be Mademoiselle Lefevre, and that had explained her knowing my birthday. But somehow even knowing how she did the trick didn’t rob it entirely of magic. Xavier’s grandmother usually called me “the youth” because she seemed incapable of remembering “Red.” There might be an explanation for how she now knew my full name, but there was magic in it even so. I even knew what she was going to say next, and I almost asked her not to.

“You’re a crack in the world, boy.”

“I didn’t ask to be…”

She shrugged again, the shrug of someone with a great weight on their shoulders. An Atlas shrug, my mother used to call it. “A lot of people get more than they ask for, or less, and even those who get exactly what they think they want are rarely happy.”

“Are…are you a witch?” I asked.

“Not much of one,” Grandma Josephine said as Xavier returned with a claw hammer in hand, stainless steel and a rubberized grip in black and yellow, like a wasp. “But I have my moments.”

“So, what are we doing?” Xavier clutched his hammer protectively in two fists.

“You’ve got a witch, boy,” Grandma Josephine said. “A witch in the walls. I told you when you rented the place.”

“You’re always saying things like that…” Xavier held the hammer close to his chest, looking around as if the witch might show her face any moment.

“They’re always true too.” Grandma Josephine nodded. “This one wasn’t causing any problems though. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say. But something changed. Some things are like lightning rods for all the strangeness in the world. I don’t know if it was this one”—she nodded toward the bare wall—“that one”—she indicated me with a flash of her dark eyes—“or the others”—she glanced toward the floor—“but one of them drew the girl in, and trouble followed at her heels.”

“You know I don’t believe any of that stuff.” Xavier sounded nervous. “But if, for the sake of argument, I did, then surely bashing holes in my walls is just going to make things worse. I mean…” He looked around and let out a deep sigh. “I could rent a different shop.”

“For twice the price.” Olivia walked in, and suddenly the cubicle was very crowded. “You know you got this one cheap for a reason. And I know you’d rather die in the fruit cellar Evil Dead–style than move all these books again.”

“Wait, there’s a fruit cellar?” Xavier’s defining cool had left the building.

“No.” Olivia grinned.

Xavier glared at her. “What’re you doing here anyway? Does that job of yours pay you to keep out of the office?”

“I thought you needed me.” Olivia exchanged a swift and knowing smile with her grandmother.

“Things are afoot.” Grandma Josephine wrested the hammer from Xavier’s hands. “Good or bad, we gotta lance this boil. Leaving it now’s like letting an infection fester.” She handed me the hammer.

“Wait.” I tried to give it back. “Can’t Xavier do it? It’s his shop, after all.”

“Rented,” Xavier said. “And the safety deposit was sizable, so make it a small hole, please.”

“You make it a small hole!” I offered him his hammer.