G. P. Putnam’s Sons

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2024

Copyright © 2024 by Andrea Tang

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 9780593524251 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780593700457 (international edition)

ISBN 9780593524275 (ebook)

Design by Alex Campbell, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

Cover Art © 2024 by Katt Phatt

Cover Art by Theresa Evangelista

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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For Melody Lee, my failtwin since our misspent Bryn Mawr days, and her Littlepip, our favorite daily pest. Thank you both for sitting through multiple 10 p.m. coworking sessions on Zoom, as I labored over the many, many edit passes for this book while we all bemoaned the treacherous glamor of an artistic life.

Well, except for Littlepip, who mostly just yowled at us reproachfully, and has perhaps harbored the right idea all along.

ONE

The best prophecies always begin with love stories and end with tragedies. Or so it’s been said by fortune tellers and sorcerers. Do you think it’s true? I wonder. I used to think it was just a clever little cliché that Sorcerer Solomon leveraged to market his fortunes to an anxious audience, and I can’t fault him: Who doesn’t hope to play the hero of their own love story? Who doesn’t dread eventual tragedy? But lately, I’m beginning to believe that Sorcerer Solomon really lives by those words.

Lived. Sorry.

Please be patient. Toying with fate makes it hard to keep track of those hairline fractures between past, present, and future. When you spend all your time sneaking peeks at what’s yet to come, getting persnickety about the precise order of time seems pretty rich. But I must, for my own sake, try to keep this story as clear and conventionally chronological as I can. A story, properly told, can save a life. This one, if I tell it right, might even save mine.

My parents say that I spend an alarming amount of time thinking about death for someone only seventeen. Honestly, it’s a difficult subject to avoid in my line of work. It wasn’t so long ago that doing the sort of things I do after school would have gotten me burned at some stake or another. People claim that the twenty-first century has eroded the atmosphere, mysticism, and, frankly, sheer aesthetic that once elevated the practice of sorcery beyond the comprehension of mere plebes. I tell these people that if they want to hop into a time machine and get themselves murdered by history’s most notorious anti-fun police off in Puritan-ville, Salem, Massachusetts, they’re more than welcome. I’m not wild about murder, myself. Which is pretty ironic, when you consider the direction my life has taken recently.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself again. What did I tell you? Past, present, and future, all jumbled up in my head. So let’s begin at the real beginning: my pursuit of sorcery. Not just any class of sorcery, but fortune-telling. Even among sorcerers, bona fide fortune tellers are a rare breed. You have your illusionists—considered petty entertainers—and your kinetics—respectable, though a bit mainstream. But fortune tellers have always been kings among sorcerers. Why not? Hollywood might have use for another illusionist to temporarily beautify a face, and the military loves its kinetic soldiers, but if there’s one thing everyone everywhere wants, it’s the power to screw around with the future. And no one made the future their bitch half as well as Sorcerer Solomon could.

That was really why I began working for him, you see. I told my parents it was only because I didn’t get into the academic summer intensive they wanted me to take at some Ivy League school or another. Besides, I reasoned in my best Perfect Asian Daughter voice, I wanted a vacation job that I could continue working into the school year. That way, I could contribute to my college fund and develop better personal finance skills. The truth is, when the summer intensive program rejections came in, I’d never been so pleased with my own apparent mediocrity in my entire life. Because I had the one acceptance that really mattered to me: Sorcerer Solomon’s.

I won’t lie: an apprenticeship to the most notorious fortune teller on the East Coast of the United States is an extremely weird after-school gig. There are many things, good and bad, that can be said of sorcery as both discipline and profession, but the one that most folks agree on is that your average sorcerer leads a thoroughly beyond-average life. That was why I wanted to be a sorcerer in the first place.

The thing is, no sorcerer can spin real prophecies without learning to tell a true fortune from the bullshit. Sorcerer Solomon taught me this lesson by lying to me on a weekly basis. And I really do mean weekly. I had it written down in my planner and everything.

More specifically, he lied to me about the future. It was half game, half training exercise—teaching me to see the truths among his lies. It’s common enough among fortune-telling aspirants. Unlike the other branches of sorcery, fortune-telling has no sigils, no incantations to work our magic. We have only our minds. When we play the liars’ game, and guess at which future is true, all we can do is listen to a liar’s voice, empty our minds, and trust our training to show us the truth.

The Sunday where this story begins seemed the same as all the others. Eight o’clock at night, in his private parlor, just left of the sorcerer’s workshop on the fourth floor of the manor. It was a cozy little space, all dramatic velvet drapes and plush cushions tucked around a great roaring fireplace. Sorcerer Solomon fit in perfectly with all that furniture, perched in his favorite armchair, blue eyes twinkling in the glow of the flames. I never actually saw him cast the kinetics to summon fire, but every time I arrived at the parlor, the fire was there, roaring bright where only darkness had lurked a moment before.

“Well, Tabatha,” he said as I sat down, his voice crisp, his fingers steepled. “Shall I lie to you?”

And he did, a litany of predictions about kitchen appliances and teen romances, exam results and bus schedules. And I got them right, every time.

Finally, he came to the end of the list, and I knew what would come next. His favorite lie went like this: “Tabatha,” he said, once he finished with his other lies, “Tabatha, here’s a prophecy for you: I will die at the hands of my best beloved. So shall it be.”

He changed the time stamp on it every time, to keep things interesting. Sometimes, his best beloved would kill him fifty years from now. Sometimes, his best beloved, apparently too impatient to wait half a century, would simply off him tomorrow. It really depended on the old man’s mood, but he told the same lie every time: his own murder, at the hands of the person he loved most in all the world.

“Right,” I said that Sunday night, unfazed and grinning. “And when will the murder be happening this time?”

He grinned back. “Seven months from now. So shall it be.”

I opened my mouth, brimming with confidence, ready to call his bluff as ever. The intention died in my throat. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced how it feels, as a sorcerer, to spin a true prophecy. It’s as though time itself slows down for your sake. Everything swimming around inside your head sharpens. And then it begins to unfold, right there across your mind’s eye: the shape the future is going to take. The story of something, great or small, still waiting to come true.

When another sorcerer spins a prophecy, you can tell it’s real because you see that fortune the same way they do, like a secret whispered in your ear, the truth of it weighing down your bones with every word the sorcerer speaks.

I straightened my spine. “Lie,” I pronounced. Even then, the word tasted like dust inside my mouth.

Sorcerer Solomon shook his head. The smile finally dimmed a little. “I’m afraid the only lie between us right now is the one you’re telling yourself. Oh, come now, Tabatha, don’t give me that look. We both know you’ve grown far too good at this game to miss a fortune so obvious.”

“And you’ve been searching for a new way to fool me for months,” I retorted primly, refusing to panic. “We both know I’m a better apprentice than that.”

He chuckled. “Truthfully, I think you’re a far better apprentice than either of us deserves. Certainly, you take to these lessons better than any of my own children ever have.”

If he’d meant to distract me from our game in that moment, he succeeded. I blinked. Sorcerer Solomon almost never talked about his children, even though he had three of them. “I thought your kids were all sorcerers.”

“Pah!” Solomon waved a dismissive hand. The remains of the smile snapped right off his face. “My sons and daughter may be sorcerers. They may even be good sorcerers. But a fortune teller, a prophet? Not one of them has the chops. Frankly, not one of them has the balls. Callum came closest, perhaps, but even he’s not you.”

Callum Solomon, the youngest of the Solomon kids. He and I knew each other, sort of. We were both high school seniors, and had shared a physics lab period once, back in freshman year. Not that he’d remember. Callum was one of those boys constantly flanked by an orbit of other students, like the poster for a cheesy high school drama, all of them casually well coiffed with those rare gifts of self-assurance and effortless charisma. Which is not to say that I’m some kind of outcast leper, but there had always been a friendly but unspoken distance between kids like him and kids like me. We nodded and smiled at each other, but up until our senior year, I don’t think we’d had a conversation that extended beyond “Hey, is the problem set Mr. Cohen assigned due Tuesday or Thursday?” I’d known in theory that Callum studied sorcery under his father, but it’s not like grimoires and prophecy are the sort of thing you bring up during normal school hours.

Sorcerer Solomon leaned forward so suddenly that I flinched backward in my seat. His hands snaked out to catch mine. “Seven months isn’t nearly so long as it sounds to someone your age, Tabatha. So I’m going to need you to make a promise.”

My hands squirmed beneath his grip, but those fingers were like iron. Maybe they literally were. Fortune-telling wasn’t Sorcerer Solomon’s only magical talent, just his most famous and lucrative. I wouldn’t have put it past him to transform his skin to iron, all to frighten his apprentice for a good laugh. “This isn’t funny.”

Sorcerer Solomon’s mouth twitched. “I should hope not. I like to think you enjoy being my apprentice, and don’t particularly relish my death.”

“Of course not! And you’re not going to die! Certainly not in only seven months!”

“Oh, my dear, but I shall.” He didn’t let go of my hands. His eyes, bright blue beneath the bushy gray of his eyebrows, didn’t blink even once. “It’s going to be a messy affair when it happens. Murder is an unfortunate business, and difficult to do elegantly. But no matter what ugliness ensues, you must promise me this: find my son Callum and stay by his side. Come hell or high water, you stick to that boy like glue, you hear? It is the surest chance we have of keeping everyone safe.”

“Safe?” Now I was the one leaning forward, clutching at his hands. “From what? What’s going to happen?”

He just gave me one of those opaque sorcerer smiles of his. You’d think a man would smile less, predicting his own death. “A great many things, I’m afraid. Do you promise?”

I frowned. “But what does Callum have to do with—”

“It will become obvious in due course. Everything will. But first, I need you to promise. Say the words.”

“I—”

“After my best beloved kills me, you will find Callum. He’s your first call. Not the police, not your parents. Callum. Do you understand?”

No, I didn’t. “Yes,” I lied. I swallowed the words and tried to make them true. “Sure.”

“Then say it. Promise it.”

“I promise,” I stammered. The words climbed slowly to my tongue, clumsy with my own confusion, but I made myself say them anyway. “I promise that after . . . after your best beloved kills you, I—I’ll find Callum. I’ll find Callum, and I’ll stay by his side. No matter what. I promise.”

It’s a tricky thing, a sorcerer’s promise. The occult does something strange to you, and to all the words you say, when you play with magic for too long. A sorcerer’s words are the source of their craft. So when we give a promise, when we speak it into existence like that, we keep it. Our words may grant us our power, but they also, at the end of the day, bind us.

And that day, I suppose, I bound myself to Callum Solomon. In fairness to me and my hastily crafted bond to a boy I’d barely ever spoken to, I still didn’t think his father would actually die. It had to be a trick. A joke. A particularly tasteless lesson on the dangers and vagaries of imprecise fortune-telling. After all, Sorcerer Solomon—true to the grand tradition of most rich, eccentric genius white men—was, despite his charms, also kind of kooky and more than a little paranoid. And conversely, because he was—despite being kind of a kooky, paranoid guy—also charming, rich, white, and brilliant, the world still worshipped him. That didn’t mean he couldn’t be wrong. Sure, I’d never actually seen Julian Solomon making a mistake with my own two eyes in almost four years of working for the guy, but there’s a first time for everything, right? Intellectually, I knew that even Sorcerer Solomon had to be fallible.

So although I couldn’t fully commit to really believing it deep down, a part of me at least held on to hope that he’d finally screwed up. I really, really wanted to think that the great prophet-sorcerer Julian Solomon had lost his touch at last. It could happen. It had to happen. It happened to all of us eventually, right? Maybe once, just this once, Sorcerer Solomon would be wrong about the future. Maybe just this once, we’d see that the greatest living sorcerer on the East Coast was capable of that damnable sin: making a mistake.

And in the end, I got my wish. Just not in any of the ways I expected.

Before you ask, no, I did not know who Julian Solomon’s best beloved was. There were a lot of solid contenders: the guy had been married twice, with three kids total, which left a lot of possibilities open. I keep kicking myself for not paying more attention to the other Solomons, back when it would have been easier, before the family started paying too much attention to me. Maybe I could have fixed this back then. I’m not saying I could have undone the prophecy entirely—I don’t have that kind of hubris in me. Fate, once written into truth by a real fortune teller, can’t be rewritten—no more than a historian might rewrite the past. But maybe if I’d known who Sorcerer Solomon loved—who he really loved, more than anyone else in the world—I could have found some loophole, some small way out of the whole awful mess that followed.

Instead, I found Angelique Reed.

Remember the two wives I mentioned? Angelique Reed was wife the first, and had the chip on her shoulder—not to mention the entitlement complex—to prove it. After her highly publicized divorce from her celebrity sorcerer husband, she’d avoided Solomon Manor like the plague—I’d only ever seen her portraits in the family gallery: all flame-red hair and imposing green glare. According to the tabloids, once upon a time, she and Sorcerer Solomon had been quite the magical power couple. Sorcerer Solomon may have been the renowned prophet, the fortune teller, but Angelique Reed was a witch in her own right, from a long line of them, her magic blue-blooded with old Northeastern money. The couple’s separation had been a messy business, punctuated by public, screaming fights, all meticulously documented by the wagging tongues and pens alike of a gossip-loving press.

It had surprised me, when I first began my apprenticeship, to find Angelique’s portraits still hanging on the manor walls. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t have. My mom always says that the opposite of love isn’t hate—it’s indifference. And Sorcerer Solomon, although many things, was never indifferent to Angelique, even long after he’d married Callum’s mother.

The day I finally met Mrs. Solomon the First in the flesh, I thought at first that I’d stumbled across an oil painting brought to life. I’d worked late the previous night—Sorcerer Solomon had insisted I practice some kinetic conjuring spell that I still didn’t have quite right, even when the clock struck midnight. The conjuring had nothing at all to do with prophetic magic, and I had been extremely irritated—both at its lack of relevance to my interests and the fact that I was, evidently, extremely bad at kinetic magic.

It was, to say the least, a dissatisfying way to conclude the evening. I might have let it go more easily, but the vibe at Solomon Manor had been weird for the past month. Sorcerer Solomon’s kids had been curter than usual with me, fleeing any room I entered. They’d watched me—and their father—from a cold distance, their mouths thin and gazes fearful of eye contact. At the time, I’d just assumed that they, too, were judging my terrible kinetic sorcery skills.

So when I arrived five minutes early the next morning, seeking reluctant redemption, the last thing I expected to see was Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop boarded up shut, and Sorcerer Solomon’s estranged wife blocking my way, arms crossed.

I blinked up at her several times. Angelique may have been a sorceress by profession, but she probably could have been a runway model in another life—she had the bones for it, and a staggering six feet of height. Still, when she looked down her pale, perfect nose at me, an expensive French cigarette dangling from one elegant hand, I couldn’t imagine her as anything other than the witch she was. A Sorceress Supreme, right out of a Marvel comic book. As I stared at her, she took a long drag on the cigarette. “And who might you be?”

“Um,” I said. “Sorcerer Solomon’s apprentice. Tabatha Zeng. I . . . I’m supposed to have a lesson today.”

“Zeng, huh?” Angelique sounded out my surname like it left an undesirable aftertaste in her mouth that she couldn’t quite place. “Chinese, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s right.”

“I’d have pegged you for Korean, not Chinese. You’re the spitting image of a Korean girl I knew back at boarding school.”

I shrugged, the way I always did when white people made comments like that. “Sorry. Just one of those faces, I guess.”

“Hmm,” said Angelique. She didn’t look entirely convinced. “I suppose Chinese girls or Korean girls or whatever it is you are do tend to make quick studies. And what, pray tell, is the lesson Julian was meant to teach you on this fine Saturday morning?”

I pulled a face, as much at the incredibly awkward racism as the thought of my much-loathed lesson. “Kinetic magic.”

Angelique snorted. “Kinetic magic, huh? A little ironic.”

I frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“He’s dead,” said Angelique. She said it casually, jerking her head at the boarded-up doors behind her. “Most likely at the hands of”—she paused, as if for dramatic effect, then waggled her fingers—“kinetic magic.”

The air in my lungs froze. I hadn’t counted the time passing. Not consciously, anyway. A million little details slammed into the forefront of my brain: the tension spiderwebbing through the house in the weeks before, the abrupt manner of its inhabitants.

I felt like I’d been hit. “What?”

Angelique rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t look so big-eyed and quiver-lipped. Surely you knew about the prophecy, if you’re his apprentice. He predicted this himself, the big asshole drama queen.”

I know, I wanted to scream in her face. I was the one who heard that prophecy first, and now I wish to all the heavens above that I hadn’t.

And the fact that his family had known explained why they’d all been so damn weird around him—and by extension, me—recently.

For months, I’d known he’d die this way: certainty coupled with desperate denial in the hollow pit of my belly. I’d heard Julian Solomon’s fate from the tongue of the master fortune teller himself, and I’d committed the cardinal sin of prophets everywhere by hoping for any other outcome. After all, it wasn’t for a prophet to want, or fear, or hope. The very opposite, in fact. Telling the future required clearing your mind of wants, of desires. Our job isn’t to change the future—merely to see it.

Well, I’d wanted, all right. I’d wanted Julian Solomon to have made a mistake. I should have known better. After all, as his apprentice, I knew it best: Julian Solomon never made mistakes, at least when it came to magic.

Air resumed its flow in my lungs far too quickly. “Where is he?” My chest heaved. “What happened?”

“He was found this morning, by my scrying spell. What’s left of him, anyway. That’s why I’m here. It’s a petty and morbid business, but I always scry for deaths in the family. It’s a matter of propriety, not to mention security. You can’t just let a sorcerer of Julian’s caliber lie dead for a day without answering certain questions of succession.” Angelique’s eyes narrowed as she gave the boards over the workshop door a little knock. “Vultures gather far more quickly than you think. One can’t be too careful.”

“So, you came first.”

Angelique studied me for a moment. A curtain of red hair had fallen over her shoulder. Outside of her portraits, it carried streaks of silver the painter had neglected, which only served to highlight her uncanny beauty. “I wasn’t the one who killed him, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said. “I knew about the prophecy too.” The smile she offered me was grim. “And although I was many things to Julian, I was never his best beloved.”

“I want to see him,” I blurted out.

Angelique looked at me like I’d gone mad. I probably had, honestly. What I thought seeing a dead body would do to improve the situation, I couldn’t have told you. But I needed to know. I needed to see for myself that Sorcerer Solomon wasn’t playing another trick.

“Fine,” said Angelique after a moment, with a little shrug. “Your therapy bill.” She crooked her fingers over the workshop door. “As I have bound, so shall I unbind.”

The boards fell loose. The clatter was still echoing in my ears when I shoved past Angelique into the room.

I wish I hadn’t. In truth, I don’t want to tell you what I saw when I opened that workshop door. I’ve always found it gauche, you know, the way some people recount sad stories with as much gore and horror as their shock-value-starved minds can muster. But I promised you the truth, so I’ll lay out the facts as clinically as I can: when I opened the door, what I saw wasn’t Sorcerer Solomon anymore. It was a collection of body parts, pulled apart as neatly as a disassembled doll’s. The only way I recognized the owner was by the head, staring dead and blue eyed at me.

I muffled a scream on my elbow.

“Like I said,” Angelique offered from behind me, her voice rich with pity. With a casual wave of her hand and murmured word of kinetic power, she shut the door. “It’s your therapy bill, not mine.”

Several thoughts sprang through my head at once. The police needed to be notified. And I had to find a way to tell my parents. Had the police been notified? Oh god, what the hell would I tell my parents? Would they ever let me practice sorcery again? Maybe I shouldn’t tell them. No, god, what kind of awful person was I, already planning hysterical lies to tell my parents, when someone had just done that to Sorcerer Solomon? Shame sharpened my misery.

The idea of him being gone at all felt wrong. He’d been here, alive, just last night—I’d been here with him. I’d nearly blown up his study with a pyrokinesis spell gone wrong, and he’d had to step in to prevent the entire manor from burning down.

“Well, you’re not inherently bad at kinetic magic,” Sorcerer Solomon had mused.

“I’m sorry.” I’d looked morosely up at him from between my slightly singed bangs. “Does bad not mean what I thought it did? Does it not entail losing control of a rudimentary pyrokinesis spell?”

The corners of Sorcerer Solomon’s mouth twitched. “I asked you to hold a fireball in the palm of your hand, not light a candle. Hardly rudimentary material. And it was nothing I couldn’t extinguish.”

I watched the arc of his fingers warily. “What if you hadn’t been here?”

“But I was, Tabatha.”

“But what if you hadn’t been?”

“Tabatha.” The long-suffering, almost exaggeratedly singsong drawl of my name, accompanied by the twinkle in those blue eyes, told me so much more than a complete sentence would have. The way a name fell off Sorcerer Solomon’s tongue could communicate almost anything: amusement, chagrin, approval, or in certain, utterly deflating moments, true disappointment.

He wasn’t disappointed. But he was definitely annoyed, which trod on territory that inched dangerously close to disappointment.

“Don’t you ever worry?” I asked him carefully. “About what would happen if I lost control of a spell and you weren’t here to fix it?” It’s every apprentice’s nightmare: losing control of a spell. Hell, it’s probably every sorcerer’s nightmare, fully fledged or not, training wheels on or off. Sorcery, after all, is the product of want—of willpower. If you’re not the one taking charge of the spell, its magic will find a way to reestablish a purpose without your input.

I must have heard half a dozen stories of spells gone wrong during sorcery electives in grade school, and even later, during my apprenticeship under Sorcerer Solomon. Sorcery teachers always seem to spin those cautionary tales half in horror, half in macabre glee: the illusionist who casts a mirage that takes on a life of its own and destroys the creator’s sense of reality, the kinetic specialist who accidentally calls down a hurricane on their own home.

Sorcerer Solomon’s eyebrows climbed as his mouth puckered slightly. It was as though even the very notion of my incompetence had turned his tongue sour. “And have you ever lost control of a spell, Tabatha? One that I couldn’t extinguish?”

I swallowed hard. That was the thing about Sorcerer Solomon. He had an uncanny capacity to make you feel guilty for things you hadn’t actually done. Or at least, to make you second-guess whether you were even sure you hadn’t done them.

“No,” I said in a small voice.

He shrugged, like that was that. “Then as long as you are under my supervision, you needn’t worry about it. I will be here to maintain control.”

Well, Sorcerer Solomon wasn’t here anymore. He would never be here again.

“Do you need a minute?” It was maybe the kindest thing that had yet emerged from Angelique’s mouth. “If you’re going to throw up, I’d rather not have my Louboutins in your vicinity, you understand.”

“I’m not going to throw up,” I told her, surprisingly steady voiced. I closed my eyes. Amidst the hysteria, a single obligation had emerged from the recesses of memory. “I’m going to call Callum.”

“That bitch Rowena’s boy?” Disdain warred with disbelief in Angelique’s voice. “What on earth do you want with Julian’s backup kid?”

I was already walking away as quickly as I could. “I have to keep my promise.” Maybe if I ran fast enough, I’d stop seeing it. The doll parts. The blood. The eyes, worst of all, the eyes.

I’d never called Callum Solomon before. Sorcerer Solomon had put all his children’s numbers in my phone, along with a bunch of other emergency contacts, but I don’t think Callum even knew I had his contact information.

I called him anyway. A sorcerer’s promise is a sorcerer’s promise.

He picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

I didn’t say anything. It occurred to me all at once, horribly and hilariously, that I’d completely failed to consider what I’d say to the boy whose father I’d just found dismembered in their house. An unknown eldritch force of dark magic just crazy murdered your dad probably wouldn’t do.

“It’s Tabatha,” I said instead, feeling stupider and more helpless by the second. I finally stopped, breathing hard. In my panic, I’d walked out of the workshop and straight into the family portrait gallery. As I looked up, Angelique Reed’s green eyes glared down at me from the first painting. Great. “Um, Tabatha Zeng, from chem class. I, uh, work for—” Oh no, Tabatha, don’t cry. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. “I, um, worked for.” Shit. Tears began to dribble down my cheeks. “I mean. I apprenticed with—”

“My dad.” Callum sounded friendly and amused, which, horrifically, only made me cry harder. “Yeah, I’ve seen you around the house, Zeng. What’s up?”

Instead of actually saying anything, I emitted an enormous, incoherent sob.

“Zeng?” The amusement was gone. “What happened? Where’s Dad?”

“I’m sorry,” I choked. “I—I’m so sorry.”

A long silence ensued. Then, very quietly, “He’s dead, isn’t he?” He paused again when I didn’t answer. “Are you all right?”

I just kept crying and clinging to the phone, like it was my dad who’d died, instead of his. “He told me to find you,” I blubbered. “If Sorcerer Solomon died, I was supposed to find you, and I promised, and I just—I’m sorry to call like this, I didn’t know how else to get ahold of you, and Angelique Reed is here, she says she came as soon as she knew—”

“Angelique?” His tone sharpened abruptly, breath hitching. “My stepmother is back in the house?”

“She’s the one who found him,” I said, sniffling. “She casts scrying spells, apparently. To alert herself to deaths in your family. Which isn’t weird or creepy at all.”

“Zeng.” His voice still carried that sharp, wounded quality. “You need to get out of the house.”

“Why?” My heart drummed against my rib cage as I glanced toward the accusing green eyes of Angelique’s portrait. “What’s she going to do?”

“Nothing good,” said Callum in grim tones. “Listen, I’m at a fencing scrimmage right now, but it’ll take me about fifteen minutes to get home once I tell Coach McClellan there’s been a death in the family. I’ll get there as soon as I can. You should be gone by the time I’m there.”

“I can wait for you,” I protested, oddly hurt. “If she’s going to start shit—”

“Then you shouldn’t be there for it. Trust me.” Wry, bitter amusement crept into his voice. “It’s a family matter.”

“And after?” I wiped at my nose with my sleeve, absurdly glad that we weren’t on a vid chat, where he’d no doubt see how gross I looked.

“Well, if Dad’s prophecy is true,” said Callum, “then no doubt, after the dust has settled, we’ll find each other again. Just not at the house. Not while she’s there. Where are you right now?”

I sniffed again. “Your family gallery.”

“Good. That room has a bunch of doors, and it’s easy to get out of the house from any of them. Let’s see—there’s an exit into the gardens behind the house. Take the old servants’ staircase down to the kitchen, and out the back door. My stepmother won’t follow you that way, and she won’t think to scry in that direction. Hopefully, she’ll forget about you.”

That was when I heard it: the telltale clack of expensive heels in the hallway. “Zeng?” Angelique’s voice thundered through the corridor. “Is that you? Are you talking to that little bastard Callum? Put him on the phone—I want to give him a piece of my mind.”

“She’s here,” I whispered.

“Zeng!” called Angelique, increasingly impatient. “I can hear you!”

“Run,” said Callum. “Now.” He hung up.

I stuck the phone back into my pocket. And I ran.

TWO

My mother once told me never to run from the scene of a crime. She’s a lawyer, so I guess she’d know, right? I expected a scolding, or a lecture, or some kind of reprimand when she found out about my encounter with Angelique Reed and Sorcerer Solomon’s remains. Why had I run? Why had I called some teenage boy I barely knew, and not my lawyer mother, or the police?

Instead, she pulled me into a bone-crushing hug and said, “I’m glad you got out of that house as soon as you could. I never liked you spending so much time around sorcery, if I’m honest, and now you understand why.”

I squirmed out of Mom’s embrace. Even now, with Sorcerer Solomon’s death freshly dogging my heels, the compulsion to defend my chosen passion rose inside me like a tidal wave. “That’s not fair,” I said. “You can’t blame all sorcery ever for . . . for what happened to Sorcerer Solomon.”

“Can’t I?” Mom paced our kitchen floor like it was a courtroom as she ticked off her reasons on her fingers. “One. Sorcerer Solomon was, indeed, a sorcerer—”

“Wow, keenly observed, Ma.”

“Hush, dear—don’t interrupt me when I’m arguing. It’s not filial. Two, he was murdered by sorcery—”

“We don’t know that for sure!”

“Very well, allegedly murdered by sorcery. And three, I still blame Sorcerer Solomon for convincing you to quit the Mock Trial Club to apprentice for him instead. God rest his soul nonetheless.”

“That third one isn’t even a real anti-sorcery argument!” I protested. “It’s just the downfall of your parental ambitions for me.”

From behind his newspaper, Dad gave a mournful little sigh. “I wonder why it is that in this house, we always center your mother’s parental ambitions for you and never mine. I wanted you to join the high school robotics team. No one ever got murdered by shadowy occult forces on the high school robotics team.”

“That we know of,” I muttered. “Also, I can’t join the robotics team, Dad. I hate coding in Python. The last time I tried, I almost flunked my computer science final.”

“The robotics team was going to be my second choice for her after Mock Trial Club,” Mom conceded generously, sidestepping the whole Python disaster entirely. “But that isn’t the point, Eddie. The point is that the profession of sorcery, although lucrative and debatably prestigious, has a dark and bloody history that stains its present, and that our daughter has now learned this lesson the hard way. I don’t want you going back to that house, Tabatha.”

My head jerked up. “What?” I didn’t disagree, exactly. Not even Callum seemed to think my return to Solomon Manor would be wise while Angelique Reed remained in residence. But the finality of it all jarred me. “My apprenticeship—”

“Has, with all due respect, been concluded by the untimely death of your boss. We’ll find something else for you to do. Best to steer clear of that Solomon boy in your class too.”

“Callum?” Now my jaw hung open with real outrage. “I made a promise to his father!”

“And, technically, fulfilled it when you called him,” said Mom with litigious primness. “Sorcerer Solomon, when he made his prophecy, didn’t specify how long you had to bind yourself to the boy’s side, did he? Let’s be generous and assume that the five minutes on the phone sufficed.”

“Mother!”

“Tabatha!” Mom echoed dramatically. She sobered, expression softening. “Look. My heart goes out to the boy. It really does. I can’t imagine what an awful shock it must be to lose his father so suddenly and so . . . gruesomely. But you have your own reputation to think of. It’s a small town, sweetheart, and people love to talk. That family has always attracted more than its fair share of attention, and not always the good kind. Believe me, you don’t want to get any more entangled with their private affairs than you already are. Please don’t call the Solomon boy again, Tabatha.”

I lifted my chin. “And what if he calls me?”

“Well,” said my mother, with decisive finality, “let’s hope that he doesn’t.”

The official story was that Julian Solomon’s death had been an accident.

Of course, any gossipmonger with two ears and more than one brain cell knew better than to take that at face value. After a week of headlines and hysteria, I did in fact receive a call from a Solomon boy. But not the one I’d been expecting.

I guess I haven’t told you yet about Felix. And no wonder. Talking about Felix even before Sorcerer Solomon’s death used to tie my tongue in knots. The eldest of Sorcerer Solomon’s children, Felix was a bit of a local heartbreaker and seemingly, cheerfully oblivious to that. He had all of Angelique Reed’s striking, redheaded good looks but none of his mother’s embittered venom. He was, well, nice. Nice always seems like such an insipid thing to say about a person, but on a guy with Felix’s particular set of privileges and accomplishments—good-looking rich white boy, firstborn son of a famous magical dynasty, two-sport varsity athlete and Princeton grad—“nice” was probably the most surprising thing about him. He never seemed to feel entitled to anything, he listened to people more than he spoke, and whenever I saw him, he always had a smile to share and a favor to offer, whether it was a ride home from Solomon Manor or an extra set of hands on workshop cleanup duty.

I didn’t have a crush on him—at least, not like you’d think. For one thing, handsome and accomplished as he was, I also knew he was far too old for me. For another, as much as I relished his small kindnesses in that big, cold house, I also nursed a complicated jealousy for his station in life: the easy, jovial charisma, the money, the conventional good looks, and oh, the doors that being Sorcerer Solomon’s son opened. The entire concept of a family full of occultists, where an interest in sorcery wasn’t just encouraged but practically assumed a birthright. How much easier would it have been to chase my ambitions if I too had been so all-consumingly born into magic?

I felt guilty for my jealousy. Like I said, Felix was nice. So when he called me, I didn’t have reason to suspect anything amiss, beyond the obvious. Maybe he needed my help cleaning up the workshop one last time. Maybe he wanted to offer an exit interview for my apprenticeship. Maybe he just wanted to know that I hadn’t been completely scarred for life by his father’s death.

“Felix,” I said as I picked up the phone. “How are you holding up?”

He didn’t answer immediately.

“Felix?”

“Tabatha!” He sounded distracted. “I’m so sorry—my sister came in just as I called. It’s total chaos here at home, as you might guess.”

I frowned. “Is she doing okay?” Circe Solomon, Felix’s younger twin and Julian’s only daughter, was the Solomon sibling I knew least. More reclusive than either of her brothers, whenever she was at home, she seemed to spend the majority of her time lurking up in her childhood bedroom with the door locked. I’d seen her portrait: a hollow-faced girl, her mother’s green eyes eerily luminous against Circe’s gaunt features, but so far as real life went, I’d only caught fleeting glimpses of her curtain of corn-silk hair, usually as she went stomping up to her room like the sullen teenager she’d probably once been.

“I’m not sure, actually,” said Felix.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure either of us are okay.” Usually so full of good cheer and optimistic energy, Felix sounded uncharacteristically tired. “We . . . well, there’s been a lot of confusion since Dad’s death, and I—we were wondering if you might be willing to return to the house.”

“Why?” The question came out more aggressively than I’d intended. I winced. “Sorry. I just meant, I assumed your family would want time to process your own affairs. I don’t want to intrude on a private moment.”

“You won’t, believe me.” His voice, still tired, warmed all the same. “Dad practically considered you one of our own. Which actually brings me to our current dilemma.”

“Dilemma?”

Felix paused. “You know my mother came home this week, right?”

“I met her, actually. It . . . could have gone better.” The understatement of the week, probably. I gripped the phone a little tighter, remembering the odd, dark urgency in Callum’s voice when he’d spoken of his stepmother. When he’d told me to get out of the house. Run. Now. I licked dry lips, trying to keep myself calm. “How’s your brother? Your mom didn’t sound, uh, happy with him when I saw her.”

Felix emitted the sigh that only the long-suffering eldest child of high-maintenance parents can produce. “Oh, she’s not happy with anyone, and she probably won’t be for some time. At least, until the question of my father’s legacy is settled. Sorcerers always leave behind an inheritance—personal spells, grimoires, and in Dad’s case, probably the most highly valued collection of prophecies and fortune-telling formulas in the country. My mother assumed—as the most experienced occultist in the family—that they’d be bequeathed to her upon his death.”

My eyebrows climbed. “Let me guess. They went to someone else.”

Felix sucked in a breath. “Not exactly.”

“No?”

“They didn’t go to anybody at all.”

“How is that even possible?” Sorcerers always ink wills, to prevent division among covens and families in the event of an untimely demise. I couldn’t believe Sorcerer Solomon wouldn’t have made one of his own.

Felix’s voice turned testy. “Here’s a fun little plot twist: Dad used to have a formally inked will, all right, but he destroyed it in the hours before his death. A delightful discovery, on top of the death itself.”

“He what?” I squawked.

“Burned the only copy of his will to ashes. Using a conjured fire in his workshop, to be exact. We scried the whole damn house, just to make sure. No one else could have conjured that fire except him, and no one else could lift the protections on that will long enough to destroy it that way.”

“But why?” I rubbed a hand over my face, leaning the back of my head against my bedroom wall. Sorcerer Solomon was an unconventional guy, sure, but so are most occultists. Eccentricity doesn’t equate to self-destructiveness. “I can’t imagine he’d ever do that to himself, much less his own family. Not something so—”

“Crazy?” My heart twinged at the misery in Felix’s voice. “I don’t know. I’m starting to wonder how well any of us knew him. Mom wants to take over the inheritance anyway—says it’s the only sane thing left to do, to preserve his legacy as befitting the Solomon name, but . . .”

“But?” I pressed him.

“There is one recourse when a sorcerer dies before his time without a formal will,” said Felix. “It’s old school, but real traditionalists still abide by it.”

I sucked in a breath. “You’re talking about a séance.”

Séances are a staple of the craft’s oldest origins. This isn’t your garden-variety Ouija board game, played by bored girls at slumber parties to practice their Intro to Sorcery basics from middle school electives. Séances—true séances, performed by and for true sorcerers—link us to our dead, and through our dead, our history. The roots of our power. Inked wills have largely supplanted their practice, but in the event of an unexpected death, summoning the dead sorcerer’s ghost from his grave—in a formal ritual on the full moon—is the one way to preserve their legacy. Their singular, unique link to our collective roots in the occult.

“It was Rowena’s idea, of all people.”

I blinked. “Callum’s mom?”

“It surprised me too,” Felix confessed. “She’s the only member of the family who’s not a sorcerer of some stripe, so I didn’t think she’d get involved with this side of things, but I guess . . . well, he was still her husband. She wants to see his work appropriately preserved and built upon for future generations. Or so she says.” His voice turned wry. “Though I don’t think the chance to stick it to my mother hurt much, either.”

“And whose side do you support? Rowena’s or Angelique’s?” I swallowed. He’d chosen to call me. His father’s apprentice. It didn’t take a genius to guess whose reasoning had won out with Felix. “No judgment either way. I swear.”

“Thanks.” He sighed again. “It’s complicated. I love my mother. But when it comes to this, I can’t . . . it’s just . . .”

“You’re also your father’s son, at the end of the day,” I said softly. “A traditionalist. A sorcerer in the old, true sense.”

“My mother has agreed to wait for a full moon,” said Felix. “She’s enough of a traditionalist herself to grant that much. She may hate Rowena, but she’s confident that Dad’s ghost will still grant her the inheritance. The séance, if anything, will solidify her claim.”

“Then what’s the holdup?”

“At a séance, all members of the immediate family must be present, but so must anyone who directly partook in the dead sorcerer’s magic. Rowena pointed out that . . . well, that includes you.”

My heart dropped into my belly. “Felix, I’m just an apprentice. A half-trained student. I couldn’t.”

“Oh, I know you’re far more than half trained,” said Felix archly. “You forget that I clean up after your workshop sessions with Dad. Cleaned.” Then, slightly wetly, “Oh, hell.”

“It’s okay,” I said softly. “I keep forgetting he’s gone too.”

“Guess that’s why we need the séance,” said Felix. “Your presence at the ceremony would mostly be for show, if that takes the pressure off at all. You wouldn’t need to do anything to prepare. No one would expect anything of you. Just . . . it would mean so much to the family, to all of us, if you could be there for this.”

My breath hitched. That shouldn’t have meant so much to me. I knew better than to think my relationship with the Solomons—any of the Solomons—was anything other than transactional. That’s the way of sorcery, you understand. Commodification is how our kind has always survived through the centuries. It’s no coincidence that people stopped burning witches once we turned our craft into a legitimized profession. Come on, Zeng, don’t go getting all maudlin now. “Somehow,” I said wryly, “I don’t think ‘all of us’ includes your mother.”

He granted me a chuckle at that. “Maybe not. But the point stands. As do the ancient rules of sorcerous tradition.”

I closed my eyes. “Ugh.” Gently, I beat the back of my head against the wall. “My own family will hate this, you know.”

“Do you have to tell them?”

“Ha,” I scoffed into the phone. “See, it’s when you ask questions like this that I remember that your family is white. Chinese parents shalt not suffer a daughter to practice deceit under the roof they pay for. It’s not filial.”

He laughed. “Touché. How good are you at lying?”

“Excellent, to an audience of anyone other than my parents.”

“What about obfuscation? Concealing an unpleasant truth with a smaller, more palatable truth?”

I hummed, thinking of all my summer school rejections. “That one’s a little easier.”

“So you’ll come?”

I bit my lip. No. I should say no. Callum had told me to run. Callum had urged me to escape Solomon Manor when I’d had the chance. And wasn’t Callum—according to his own dead, dismembered father—key to keeping us all safe from some infuriatingly unknowable horror? Maybe I had to stick by Callum’s side, but I could do that just as well in a high school hallway or a well-lit park. Callum wouldn’t want me to return to the manor, of all places, especially not while Angelique Reed remained there. It was the sort of idiot thing girls in scary movies always did. By all means, walk right back into the haunted house you just escaped. Can’t imagine anything could possibly go wrong.

I wasn’t a horror movie heroine. I wasn’t stupid. I would say no.

But instead of saying no, I asked Felix: “How long before the next full moon?”

“Two days.”

I chewed a little harder on my lip, then opened my mouth before blood could stain my teeth. “My mother’s a lawyer, you know. She sniffs out lies for a living.”

“She may be a lawyer, but you’re a sorcerer,” countered Felix. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“An apprentice,” I corrected him, ignoring the tiny glow in my chest at being counted a true sorcerer, even if it wasn’t technically true. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“A sorcerer-to-be, then,” said Felix. I could hear the grin in his voice. Then, a little more quietly, “Thank you. Truly. I know it’s not easy on you. Any of this. But I really think . . . I believe it would have pleased my father. You being at his séance, I mean.”

I shrugged. Despite the nonchalance, my heart was thundering beneath my rib cage. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I knew I was being a foolhardy idiot, even then. Yet like a moth drawn to the flame, I couldn’t seem to resist the call of Solomon Manor, or the ghost of its master. Never again would I be able to make fun of a horror movie heroine. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

And two days later, I did. But not in the way any of us—least of all myself—expected.

Sometimes, I truly think the art of fortune-telling and the art of necromancy are two sides of the same sorcerous coin. One allows us to sneak a peek behind the future’s curtain, and the other—pretty literally—digs up the underbelly of the past. I bet there’s some kind of joke to be made about summoning a fortune teller back from his grave.

I could never think of a good one, though. I still can’t. And the night I returned to Solomon Manor—full moon hanging fat and bright in the ink-dark sky—I wasn’t thinking of jokes. I was thinking of stupid girls who walked right into the plots of scary movies.

The house was still dark. That should have been my first clue that something had gone wrong. I squinted at the shuttered windows, the blackened glass of the familiar French doors to the garden. Utter quiet permeated the property. Calling it silent as the grave might have been too on the nose, but at the very least, it sure didn’t look like anyone was home.

I double-checked my phone. Felix’s text, with all its neatly typed-out timing and location details, blinked up at me, a perfect match for the date and hour. I scowled at the shuttered windows. If this was the eldest Solomon’s idea of a prank, it was in pretty bad taste.

I was ready to turn on my heel and walk home when long fingers clamped claw-tight over my shoulder.

“Jesus Christ!” I whirled around, fists flailing, only to have both wrists caught by a wax-pale Felix Solomon.

“The séance is off,” he said tersely.

I snatched my wrists out of his grip. “Excuse me?”

“Shh,” he hissed. “We don’t want to make this into a bigger mess than she already has. If she sees you, she’ll want to question you.”

I frowned. “She?” In the generous glow of the full moon, I caught a glimpse of the getup Felix was wearing: a full ceremonial sorcerer’s robe, black as a void in the universe. The exact sort of thing you’d wear to a séance. Without thinking, I snatched a handful of it. “What do you mean, the séance is off? Why are you still dressed like this, then?”

“Again, lower your voice, please.” Felix’s eyes shut. Moonlight threw the dark circles under his eyes into sharp relief. He looked awful. “My mother, it seems, is a step ahead as ever.”

I froze. “What did Angelique do?”

“Pretty much the only thing that could get a séance postponed. She called the cops.”

My blood, if possible, ran colder still. “You don’t mean—”

“I do.” Felix rubbed a hand over his face and raked it over his head, mussing his product-slick russet curls. “I’m sorry, Tabatha. But figuring out the inheritance business is going to have to wait. We’ve got Elena Chang on our asses now.”

I groaned. Of course it had to be Elena Chang. The occult crimes unit at our local police station was, for all intents and purposes, a one-woman operation, but oh, what an operation it was. If the good Detective Elena Chang could have revived the Salem witch trials for the twenty-first century, I’m pretty sure she would have. Any whiff of magic on a local crime, and Chang was on it like a bloodhound. She’d been a thorn in the side of the town’s occult community for as long as she’d been a detective, but there hadn’t been much she could pin on a family headed by a man as powerful and wealthy as Julian Solomon.

But now Julian Solomon was dead. And all bets were off.

I could guess why. I looked Felix right in the eye. “She’s not buying the tragic magical accident story, is she?”

“Is anyone?” he asked tersely. His hands found their way back to my shoulders, his fingers tight enough on my body to bruise. It was a jarring sensation from the young man I’d long thought of as the warmest, most cuddly member of the Solomon clan. Then again, jarring was a good summation of this whole awful night. “Tabatha, this is serious business. She’s looking for a murderer. And you can bet her first inclination is going to be to pin it on a sorcerer.”

“So why in hell would your mother call her?” I hissed at him, my voice a furious whisper. “If she wants to take a stab at Callum’s mom, this is the wrong way to do it. Detective Chang hates magic. And Angelique is the sorceress of the family, not Rowena.”

Felix shook his head, shoulders still trapped between those great long hands of his. “This goes way beyond some petty rivalry between my father’s wives. My mother, at the end of the day, wants the inheritance of my father’s power. More than wants—believes she’s entitled to it.” He met my gaze. Felix’s eyes were darker than his mother’s, hazel more than emerald green, but they were hard as gemstone here beneath night’s cover. “And believe me, Tabatha, she’ll do whatever it takes to ensure that any other sorcerer who might be in her way is . . . no longer an obstacle.”

As if on cue, the front door of the manor slammed open. Felix and I both started. His hand dropped from my shoulders.

Angelique Reed emerged, bright smiled, at Detective Chang’s side. “Why, Felix,” she purred. “We wondered where you’d run off to.”

Subtly, Felix’s entire demeanor changed. His body, so taut with worry a moment before, relaxed. He raised a languid gaze toward his mother’s. “Just taking some air. No big deal.”

“Taking some air with Miss Zeng, there?” Angelique squinted pointedly through the dark, emerald eyes glittering in triumph when they locked on mine. “It is Miss Zeng, isn’t it?”

Beside me, Felix’s shoulders slumped. I tried to look a little less defeated. “Just Tabatha is fine,” I told his mother.

“Tabatha Zeng?” Detective Chang spoke up for the first time. She was a sturdy-looking woman I suspected was probably close to my mother’s age but could have passed for twenty-eight in a dimly lit bar, with her fashionably bobbed black hair and smooth, lightly freckled skin. “You’re the apprentice?”

“She is,” said Angelique, practically crowing. “She was with Julian in that workshop nearly every hour of every day.”

“Bit of an exaggeration, that,” Felix put on dryly, “given that she’s a minor, and, you know, goes to school.”

His mother glared at him. “You know what I mean. In any case, Detective, I’m sure Miss Zeng will be able to answer a great deal many more questions than most of us about Julian’s activities before his . . . untimely passing. Particularly regarding young Callum.”

My head jerked up at the mention of Callum’s name. So did Felix’s. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, probably a shade too harshly. “What does Callum have to do with any of this?”

Detective Chang put a hand on Angelique’s arm before she could reply. “I’ll take it from here, Ms. Reed, if you don’t mind. Tabatha, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?” I blurted out. “Callum Solomon—”

“Is a young man you were reportedly in contact with shortly after you and Ms. Reed discovered Julian Solomon’s remains,” said the detective in crisp tones. “There’s no need for worry, Tabatha. It’ll only be a few minutes, and then you can go on your way. Can you handle that?”

My brain spun through the implications of the setup. One: Angelique had shut down Rowena’s séance attempt by calling down a known magic hater on all our heads. Two: Angelique wanted said magic hater’s interest solidly pinned on Callum. Which, three, meant Angelique had a good guess for whom Julian’s ghost would be bequeathing his inheritance to—and it wouldn’t be Angelique or her children. Which, four, meant she needed to get the likeliest heir out of her way.

Hence, five. She thought I would be her vehicle.

Well, she thought wrong. I may not have known Callum well back then, but I wasn’t about to stand by and let his stepmother set him up. He didn’t deserve that. No one did. “Sure,” I said, forcing brightness into my voice. “Anything to cooperate with your investigation, Detective.”

“Tabatha—” Felix began in a low voice.

“Splendid,” said Detective Chang. “If you’ll come with me, then?”

In hindsight, I realize I did several things wrong in that moment.

First of all, I should have had a lawyer present. Even as I obediently trotted after the detective’s heels amidst Felix’s protests and Angelique’s smirking triumph, the thought swam through my head. In my imagination, a little shoulder angel shaped like my mother sat beneath one of my ears, yelling at me for my foolishness and brandishing her law degree. That voice only got louder as Detective Chang led me to her car and drove me to the local police station instead of questioning me at Solomon Manor. Maybe I was innocent, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t get myself into a world of trouble answering a sorcery-hating detective’s questions unsupervised.

But not nearly the amount of trouble Callum would encounter at Angelique Reed’s hands if I didn’t do my part to set the record straight as quickly as possible.

That assumption was the first mistake I made. The second was my next assumption—that I’d be in and out of Detective Chang’s interrogation like it was nothing. That all I would have to say was that Callum Solomon was, to my knowledge, just as innocent as I was, and we’d both go free.

I was, in hindsight, pretty stupid.

The occult crimes unit is, unsurprisingly, a weird one. They have their offices way off in the back of the police station, almost like they’re not a part of the police proper at all, which honestly, most of the police would probably prefer. You actually have to walk outside the building, take a path through a little garden, and go through the door to what looks, ironically, an awful lot like a witch’s cabin in the woods. It’s actually Detective Elena Chang’s private office. Maybe that was another reason I followed her there. She’s always felt like some sort of weird frenemy to all things sorcerous, a threat, sure, but one that could and should be contended with on our own terms, free from the shackles of bureaucratic law enforcement. The occult crimes unit feels so much like a world apart—from the police, from everything, really—that it’s easy to forget that Elena Chang, scourge of the occult world, is just another cop.

I had, at the time, no idea what she needed a private cabin in the garden behind the police station for. Concocting anti-sorcery conspiracy theories, maybe.

But she didn’t ask me about the evils of sorcery, as I’d expected. She didn’t, in fact, ask me about sorcery at all, at first. Though what she did ask me was probably worse, in some ways.

“Are you sleeping with Callum Solomon?”

I blinked once, twice, three times at the detective. Well, that wasn’t the kind of question I’d been expecting the police to open with. “Uh,” I said. “Are you allowed to ask minors that kind of thing? Also, why do you care?”

I’ll admit now what I wouldn’t have back then: some perverse little corner of my soul was kind of flattered. Not particularly because of Callum himself, but because of what he represented. I wasn’t the kind of girl who dated much—too focused on magic, on school, on becoming the next Julian Solomon. I liked that someone thought I had it in me to fool around with one of the hotter, more-talked-about guys in my grade.

Even if the someone was, you know, probably trying to pin a patricide on the guy in question.

“Romantic relationships compromise judgment,” said Detective Chang. “Especially among young people. If you’re involved with the Solomon boy, I’ll have to interpret your answers about him accordingly.”

“You mean you think I’ll lie for him.” I folded my arms. “But then, wouldn’t I lie about theoretically sleeping with him in the first place?”

The detective chuckled. “You tell me, Tabatha.”

I glared at her. Her expression—mildly amused as it was—didn’t even flicker. “No,” I said. “Believe me?”

Her head canted. “Yes, actually, I think,” she said slowly. “For all your obvious resentment of this situation, you strike me as an honest girl.”

“Lucky for me,” I muttered, leaning back in the chair.

“Lucky indeed. I don’t often trust sorcerers—nothing personal, you understand. But magic tweaks a person’s head, in my experience.” The detective’s mouth, so amused a moment ago, pursed with distaste. “It makes them do what they otherwise might not.”

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Maybe a dumb thing to do in the current circumstances, but it happened before I could stop my face from doing it. Great. Another “magic makes people crazy” zealot. “Yes, our darksome rituals are responsible for all the ills of the world. Definitely haven’t heard that in some eighteenth-century screed.”

“Oh, it’s not the rituals themselves,” said the detective, conversationally enough. “The way magic drives its practitioners is not, in my experience, so different from the way money drives those gambling traders on Wall Street that our prophet-sorcerer Julian Solomon so loved to count among his clientele.” Her eyes glinted at me. “Magic makes you hungry. Hungry turns into greedy. And greed, Tabatha, is a dangerous force when it drives the heart of a sorcerer. At least New York traders can’t bend the physical universe to their will.”

“Can’t they, though?” I shot back, eyebrows raised. “I think you’re giving sorcerers a little too much credit, Detective, and the rich white men of Wall Street too little.”

Chang glared at me, but I could swear a vague, reluctant sense of amusement lurked behind the frustration on her face. We may have been an anti-sorcery crusader and a sorcerer-in-training, stuck on opposite ends of an ideological spectrum, but hell, if two daughters of Asian immigrants can’t bond over the shared recognition of rich white dude entitlement, what hope is there for any of us?

“Did you know that Callum Solomon was present in his father’s workshop the night before Julian Solomon was found dead?”

I hadn’t. It must have shown on my face, because the detective leaned forward a little. “He went into the workshop, perhaps half an hour after you left.”

My heart dropped into my belly.

“Yes, Tabatha.” Her voice was soft. Sympathetic, almost. “It’s all right. I know that you were at that workshop the night he died too. Don’t look so alarmed. You had every reason to be—after all, I’m given to understand that you were his apprentice. But it does mean that you two were the only people known to be alone with him that night—the last two, in fact, before we found the body, according to Ms. Reed. What was left of it, anyway.”

Angelique Reed. The recognition of my own stupidity washed over me in a hot tidal wave of shame and panic. Hell below, of course Angelique Reed had tossed me under the bus along with Callum. Why not? She clearly hated him, and so far as she knew, I was probably his friend, in cahoots with the Solomon she was most eager to rid the family of.

And I had played right into her hands. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why did I keep making all the wrong choices? First, accepting Felix’s invitation to the séance in the first place. Second, allowing his mother to get me in her crosshairs. And third, talking as much shit as I already had to a police detective already inclined to dislike me on the basis of my career ambitions. It was like Sorcerer Solomon’s murderer had also murdered every last commonsense brain cell in my own damn head.

“You’re not in any trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Chang continued. Like she’d read my mind. Her hands spread, cajoling. “I’m just trying to get a sense of the situation, Tabatha. You have to admit it’s a little messed up. Help me out here.”

How very good-cop of her. I could only imagine what her bad-cop routine would look like. Well, I didn’t plan on sticking around to find out.

“I don’t have to admit anything, actually,” I said, a little strangled. I looked down at my hands and flexed white-knuckled fingers, a decision made. The one I would have made in the first place if this whole murder business hadn’t so thoroughly addled my wits. Still, I had time to fix it: “You’re going to have to find someone else to help you, Detective. I think it’s time for me to call my mother.”

Who was 100 percent going to kill me. But better my mom than my own damn mouth.

THREE

Calling down your overprotective lawyer mom on the occult crimes unit of the local police station is kind of like dropping an atom bomb. It’ll get the job done, but, well, the less said about the fallout, the better.

I’d expected Mom to start yelling as soon as she descended on Elena Chang’s office. Instead, she arrived pursed-lipped and prim, briefcase in hand, hair pinned back in a rigid chignon at the nape of her neck. She had gold-framed glasses on and was wearing one of her nicer suits, the dove-gray one with the pencil skirt so precisely tailored that it looked like it could have cut through opposing counsel like a razor blade. I’d never seen a parent, much less my own, emit such perfectly cultivated murder energy. Mom didn’t even bother sparing me a glance. Instead, she looked straight ahead at my interrogator, dark eyes glinting over the tops of her glasses. “Detective.” The syllables dropped out of her mouth in clipped tones. “This is a bit of a low blow, even for you, wouldn’t you say? Dragging my teenage daughter—a minor—in here because of some ridiculous grudge against me?”

Chang sighed. “Hi, Anne-Marie. Nice to know you’re as much of an arrogant bitch as ever.”

My gaze darted back and forth between my mom and the detective. I was pretty sure my mouth hung slightly, comically agape. “Wait a minute—you guys know each other?”

“Our parents did,” said Chang. The look she had fixed on my mother was less a glare and more a resigned simmer of resentment. “It turned us into something like childhood rivals.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Elena,” scoffed Mom. “You never had my grades.”

“Wow, how very seventeen years old of you. Anne-Marie, one of these days, you’re going to have to wake up to the fact that regardless of what our parents thought, grades as a metric—”

“I am seventeen,” I interrupted them both plaintively. “And I would like to go home, please.”

“Yes, I think that’s quite a good idea,” said my mother, snatching me by the wrist. “I think we’re done here, unless the good detective would like to see us in court from a different perspective. Let’s go, Tabatha.”

Chang didn’t seem to have anything to say to that until we were halfway out the door. “This isn’t about you or me. I really am trying to solve a murder. You could help, Tabatha.”

“Detective,” my mother began in a warning tone.

“You don’t owe Callum Solomon anything,” Chang interrupted.

My mother fell silent at that. Maybe because it was, of all things, the one matter on which she agreed with Elena Chang.

I turned around. The detective was looking at me dead-on, straight in the eye, with an expression almost like pity. “You don’t owe him anything,” Chang repeated. “Whoever killed Sorcerer Solomon is going to get what’s coming to them, one way or another. It’s not your job to protect a murderer.”

With an effort, I met that dark, determined gaze of hers. “I know it’s not.”

“Tabatha!” The admonishment cracked like a whip from my mother.

For once, I ignored it. “But it is your job to catch the right person,” I said.

It wasn’t the greatest of parting lines. But it fed that reckless, fiery thing inside me, the same thing that had leapt to defend Callum in the first place and driven me right into Detective Chang’s clutches.

My mother didn’t want me talking to Callum after the incident at the occult crimes unit. Obviously, she hadn’t in the first place, but the sentiment was understandably more stringent after the whole detective questioning thing. I was pretty sure that childhood nemesis or no, she agreed at that point with Detective Chang and didn’t want me consorting with what she perceived to be a more-than-just-maybe murderer.

So, naturally, I called him.

Don’t go judging me. I need you to understand that at this point, nothing I did was really about Callum himself. It was an idea, a fixation, almost an obsession: that last promise to Sorcerer Solomon. The idea of something owed, not to the son but to the father. To the man who’d taught me, guided me, opened up a world previously untouchable to my ambitious, occult-itchy little fingertips.

And maybe if I kept my promise to him, that world would remain mine. So I called his son.

“Tabatha Zeng,” he said when he picked up, like he’d been expecting me all along. “Fancy hearing from you. Why exactly are—”

“The police think you murdered your father,” I interrupted, and immediately wished I could perish on the spot.

An agonizingly awkward silence followed.

“Oh,” said Callum.

“They questioned me,” I continued, feeling smaller and slower and stupider with every passing nanosecond. “I shouldn’t have agreed to it, but Detective Chang said—”

“Elena questioned you?” Callum interrupted.

Now it was my turn to succumb to the awkward pause. “Yeah, she did. Is it weird for me to be thrown off by the fact that you’re apparently on a first-name basis with the local police precinct’s designated witch-hunter?”

“Ouch. Touché.” He chuckled, but the hint of a real wince lay beneath it. “I guess it’s only right that I answer honesty with honesty: she questioned me too. About you, in fact.”

My belly went cold, then hot, then cold again. “What? Why?”

“That’s the thing, Tabatha,” said Callum, even voiced. “The way she told it to me, she seems to think that you were the one who murdered my father.”

In the end, I really should have been less shocked that Detective Chang had been aiming to play me and Callum against each other the whole time. I mean, why not? We were both sorcerers, both present in Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop the night of his death. I couldn’t imagine it would have mattered much to a wannabe witch-hunter like Detective Chang one way or another which one of us she managed to pin the crime on—just as long as one of us turned out guilty. And naturally, the chances of pinning a murder on a teen sorcerer-in-training got a lot easier if one was willing to rat the other out.

Well, I knew I hadn’t done it. And—given that Sorcerer Solomon had made me promise to stick to Callum like glue—I was pretty sure Callum hadn’t done it either. Sorcerer Solomon could be a little kooky at times, in the way that all famous geniuses in their fields tend to be, but even he wasn’t kooky enough to bind his apprentice to a guy who’d commit patricide.

Unfortunately, esoteric sorcerer’s promises and your own good word on your innocence weren’t exactly the kind of evidence that would hold up in court.

Callum’s incredibly terrible solution to this problem was also, unfortunately, the only one that I could see making any sense: he and I would have to meet in person to sort the whole mess out. “Don’t sound so suspicious,” he said cheerfully to my affronted silence over the phone. “I’m not going to kidnap you and murder you or anything.”

“That’s exactly what someone planning on kidnapping and murdering me would say,” I informed him. I was kidding, the joke falling naturally off my tongue, but it left a weird aftertaste in my mouth. Detective Chang no doubt thought that at least one of us was, in fact, capable of kidnapping and murder.

I didn’t want to ponder the implications too deeply, though.

“Maybe,” said Callum. “Then again, maybe not. Only one way to find out.” More seriously, he added, “Also, probably the only way we can stay a step ahead of Elena.”

Privately, I wasn’t at all sure, back then, that Callum was especially interested in staying ahead of the good detective. I still didn’t like the way he referred to her by her given name, like they were old buddies or something. But if she’d been feeding Callum suspicions about me the same way she’d clearly been trying to feed me suspicions about him, I wanted an end to it. On a practical level, I didn’t need to make an enemy of Callum Solomon: rich, popular, well connected, socially and magically powerful, probably entirely capable of making me miserable should he have chosen to do so. On another level, for reasons I couldn’t entirely parse for myself at the time, I just really didn’t like the idea of Callum thinking poorly of me. The idea of it just sat unpleasantly in the pit of my belly. Which meant that I really, really didn’t like the idea of him thinking that I’d killed his dad.

Besides, there was still the matter of the promise I’d made to Sorcerer Solomon. Always, always, that damn promise. I had agreed to find Callum. And I had agreed to stay by his side. A sorcerer keeps their promises.

And I was, come hell or high water, a sorcerer-to-be.

So I followed Callum. Hopefully not to my own demise.

We met over lunch, on a weekend. He’d chosen the venue and its circumstances with a deliberation clearly designed to earn my trust: a popular café, daylight hours, a sunlit outdoor table in plain view of plenty of witnesses. If he planned to kidnap and murder me, he’d have a hell of a time, sorcerous talent or no, and he plainly meant to convey as much. I found this all rather considerate, especially given how he still, at the time, probably thought I might be a murderer.

He was already waiting for me at the table he’d reserved, smack-dab in the center of the trendy patio, his monogrammed fencing pullover clinging over his shoulders, its navy dark against the bright gold of Callum’s hair.

Callum both did and didn’t look like his brother. They had the same sort of pretty, clean-cut white boy handsomeness, no doubt bestowed upon both boys by their father’s genetics. But where Felix was all sharply hewn, camera-ready angles like his mother, Callum bore softer edges. Even at eighteen, glorious Ivy League–destined high school senior that he was, the faintest suggestion of youthful baby fat still clung to his cheeks, and a slight downward slope to the corners of those bright blue eyes suggested a kindness to his nature.

Or would have, anyway, if he hadn’t been leveling the douchiest, most shit-eating smirk at me as he pulled my seat out for me.

My heart sank a bit, though the smirk didn’t surprise me, exactly. Callum and I didn’t know each other well, but I’d seen how he was among his friends sometimes: the way he wore that smirk like a mask, as if an air of vaguely entitled self-satisfaction came part and parcel with the uniform of running in certain social circles. Even from a distance, it had always looked just a little forced on Callum’s features, the mask ill fitted to the suggestion of the personality beneath, yet he insisted on wearing it all the same. It was one thing, I thought, that had always set him apart from his brother. Callum had a tendency to mold himself to his surroundings, like an eager-to-please social chameleon, for better or worse. Felix had never seemed anything other than himself.

Anyway, I couldn’t help wrinkling my nose just a little as I sat. A promise was a promise, but that didn’t mean I had to love the attitude that came attached. “So, this business with the detective,” I said, in what I hoped was a crisp, don’t-mess-with-me tone. My imitation of my mother wasn’t perfect, by any means, but I liked to believe I did Anne-Marie Chou Zeng’s bitch lawyer persona better justice than most. “What exactly did she say about me?”

“Oh, Elena?” Callum waved a menu lazily at me. “All in good time. Have you had the crab cake appetizer here? It’s divine.”

“No, I haven’t,” I said, irritation mounting.

“We’ll have to change that, then. You’re not allergic, are you? Or otherwise violently opposed to crab cakes?”

“No,” I repeated, “but I’d really like to—”

“—cut straight to the point?” The shit-eating grin widened. “I imagine. Dad always said you had a drive in you.”

Had his voice just faltered? He grinned so wide, so convincingly, it was hard to tell. “I’m just trying to clear up any misunderstanding between us,” I told him.

“Sure, sure,” he said, the way a half-defeated parent might say “sure, sure” to a toddler who’d been throwing a tantrum for the past twenty minutes, barely conscious anymore of what they were promising to quiet their spawn. “As am I. But I don’t deal with misunderstandings on an empty stomach. That’s a rule I’ve learned to set for myself, dealing with two siblings.” He squinted at me, pointing a fork in my direction. “Let me guess: only child.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Ah, got it in one,” he crowed. “Only child.” He waved the fork about my face. “You’ve got it written all over you.”

I scowled. I couldn’t help myself. You see, I’m not lying when I tell you that I’d known Callum Solomon, tangentially, before his father bound us with a promise to a dead man. But I’ll tell you this too: I hadn’t remembered Callum Solomon being nearly this annoying.

The server assigned to our section—probably one of the local college kids or grad students stuck in a crummy part-time side hustle—barely batted an eye when she arrived at our table. “Let me guess,” she drawled. “You’re here for the crab cakes.” She hadn’t so much as looked up from her notepad.

Callum beamed at her, all his father’s good old-fashioned Solomon charm shining at full wattage. “You know it, Desiree.”

The waitress—Desiree, apparently—rolled her eyes at him, but her mouth twitched with reluctant amusement. “Don’t you flirt in front of your date like that, Callum Solomon,” she chided. “It’ll land you in nothing but trouble.” To my horror, she winked at me. “Have fun with this one, girl.”

I felt myself go pink. “Oh no, I’m not—”

“We will, thank you,” Callum cut in smoothly. With a truly absurd amount of cheek, he slid an arm over the back of my chair. There must have been at least three layers of fabric between his arm and my shoulders—that stupid preppy fencing sweater, the windbreaker I’d thrown over my T-shirt that morning—yet I swore every molecule of my skin could sense every molecule of his.

When the waitress had left, I kicked him hard under the table.

“Ow!” he yelped, cradling his shin, blue eyes wide with shock. “What the hell was that for?”

I ignored the question, leaning across the table toward him. “Listen,” I hissed. “I don’t know what you’re playing at. But I need you to know that I didn’t kill your father.”

“That’s nice of you,” he said plaintively, rubbing his shin.

I ground my teeth at him.

He relented. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t kill my father either.” He tapped his fingers against the table. “Which seems to leave us in . . . well, kind of a conundrum, wouldn’t you say, Tabatha? You don’t mind if I call you Tabatha, do you?”

“What else would you call me?” I shook my head as he opened his mouth. “Never mind. Don’t answer that, I don’t want to know. And I don’t think so. We just have to explain how it is to Detective Chang.”

Callum’s eyebrows climbed so high, they nearly vanished into his hairline. “Simple as that, huh?” He held up his hands before I could snap out a retort. “Look, for what it’s worth, I wish it were that simple too. But Elena isn’t just going to let this one go.”

I took a moment to observe Callum—really observe him. He still wore what I thought of as his mask: the resting almost-grin teetering halfway between douchey and charming, the wide blue eyes full of slightly affected innocence. But there was an edge to it all that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, a loose seam under the mask, which, if tugged, might just unravel him completely.

I tilted my head. “Did she and your dad ever meet?”

“Did she and my dad ever meet.” Callum rolled my words around in his mouth like he was trying to savor them. “Well, that’s one way of describing their relationship. When I was a kid, I used to think they were having an affair. Oh, don’t worry, spoilers: they weren’t,” he added, upon seeing the look on my face. “Kind of the opposite, in fact.”

“And what, pray tell, is the opposite of an affair?”

The side of Callum’s mouth tipped upward. “Zeng, do you have any idea what it’s like to be a member of the most notorious family of sorcerers on the East Coast, in a town that employs a specific detective for the sole purpose of ferreting out magical crimes?”

Well, when he put it that way.

Callum continued, “I don’t think I remember a point in my childhood when Elena wasn’t on our asses in some form or another. Hell, even when she was still some rookie wet behind the ears and freshly hired by the force to witch hunt—pretty literally, I might add—she was always coming by the house. Anytime something went awry in the occult world, guess who showed up on our doorstep, badge in hand?” He shrugged. “I don’t remember when it stopped being scary. But at some point, Elena was just part of the background of our life, like, I don’t know, some seasonal cold blowing through between fall and winter.” He hummed thoughtfully. “You know, at one point, my mom started inviting her in to tea. And then my dad got in on it, and that was that.” His hands flapped about with a dramatic flourish. “A brand-new Solomon family tradition: witches inviting the witch-hunter to tea.”

“Why?” I asked, boggling.

Another shrug. “At that point, why the hell not? She clearly wasn’t going anywhere. And if she wasn’t going anywhere, and we weren’t going anywhere, well, all parties involved might as well have our fair share of caffeine and freshly baked biscuits. My mother studied abroad in England, you know, so her tea game is excellent.”

The waitress returned and deposited two platters at our table. “Crab cakes. You and your lady friend enjoy.” With a wink, she sauntered off again before I could protest.

“Appreciate it, Desiree,” Callum called merrily after her retreating back. He sighed, a little dramatically, at my scowl. “Come on, Zeng. Desiree thinks every girl I bring here is a hookup.”

“Aren’t they?” I deadpanned, unmoved.

“No, in fact.” Callum’s mask slipped again, just a little, but I saw the flash of vulnerability—and what might have been a hint of hurt—flicker through his eyes. “But I feel like it’s easier to just play into assumptions sometimes. Makes everyone’s life easier, you know?” He grinned at me. And just like that, the mask was back. “Now stop looking so cross with me, Zeng, and try the crab cake.”

Reluctantly, I tried the crab cake. To my fury, it was in fact delicious.

Callum must have seen it in my face too, judging from the delight smeared all over his face like cream on a cat’s whiskers. “Good?”

I scowled around my mouthful of crab cake. “Good,” I confirmed reluctantly, and swallowed. “Now, about this suspected murder business.”

Callum heaved a sigh. “Oh, very well.” Flopping backward in his seat, he folded his arms. “Here’s the deal, Zeng. Thanks to all those hilariously awkward afternoon teas, I know Elena pretty well at this point in my life, which means I’ve got a pretty good idea of what she’s playing at.” He picked up the butter knife and pointed it at me. “Elena needs a culprit—preferably a sorcerous culprit—to pin my father’s murder on. So far, she’s got two options she can build a case off of: you, the backstabbing apprentice, or me, the resentful second son.” His mouth twisted just a little as he spun the knife between his fingers. “You’re no idiot, so you probably see where this is going already. You’ve done the math. You and I have all the right attributes: we’re both sorcerers, we were both close to my father, and we were both in his workshop during the right time frame. So far, the good detective doesn’t have anyone else who matches that description.” He dropped the knife back onto the table. “Which means that it behooves us to find someone who does.”

I hadn’t expected that turn. “What?”

He spread his hands. “Think about it, Zeng. Why did she question us separately and act like she needed you as a witness against me, me as a witness against you? Why did she try to convince us each that the other was so damn shady? It’s because she’s hoping one of us will turn the other in.”

“Obviously,” I snapped. “But I know I didn’t do it.”

“And I know I didn’t do it,” said Callum. “But that doesn’t change the fact that someone did. If it wasn’t you, then who?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a detective,” I began, and was cut off when Callum shook his head at me with startling vehemence.

“Neither am I,” he said, “but I’m not as stupid as people think I am either.”

“No one thinks you’re stupid,” I said, annoyed. “We’re just tired of you pretending like you’re a brainless jock from some eighties movie when everyone also knows that you’ve been on honor roll since freshman year.”

I had not been on honor roll since freshman year, thanks to that time I had almost flunked computer science as a second-semester sophomore, and harbored no small amount of bitterness over this cold hard fact.

Callum’s cheeks pinked. “Whatever. Look, this is all to say I’m pretty sure I know who really did it.”

I searched his face for signs that he was joking, and found none. I swallowed hard. “You couldn’t have just led with that?”

“I thought the fact that you were a lead suspect in the actual detective’s opinion was a bit more pressing,” said Callum archly.

Okay, fair. I glowered at him but didn’t retort.

“It’s pretty obvious what Elena’s gambit is,” he continued. “She’ll keep questioning us until one of us breaks, and whoever caves first basically does her job for her. She gets to pin my father’s murder on one of us, proving yet again that the occult is an evil influence upon the hearts of man and is probably also corrupting the youth to boot.”

I snorted. “So your answer is to pin his murder on someone else?”

“No,” said Callum patiently. “My answer is to pin his murder on his actual murderer so we can both go home, book therapy appointments, and carry on with our lives.”

“So you still want us to do Detective Chang’s job for her.” I said it dismissively, but I couldn’t help the way my heart rate sped up just a little at the thought. Dad—who, true to his roots as an engineer, read old-school murder mystery novels because he liked the puzzle-solving aspect of trying to beat the author’s main character to the solution—had introduced me to the likes of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers back in middle school.

I didn’t quite take to the logic-gaming side of the genre the same way Dad did—after all, my interest was sorcery, not STEM—but those books had cemented in me a bit of a romantic fascination with private eyes and detective heroes. A daughter of suburbia, I’d grown up watching crime shows on TV and reading whodunits, just like every other moderately sheltered middle-class kid I knew.

I’d never fancied myself the much-romanticized amateur sleuth popularized by the books Dad had gifted me for Christmases and birthdays—I was too busy fancying myself an admittedly equally romanticized master sorcerer—but it was hard not to be a little excited by the concept.

I doused that excitement as best I could. Now was not the time for daydream-sanitized thoughts of adventure. Julian Solomon was still dead. Callum was still under suspicion, and so, apparently, was I. We still needed to clear our names, first and foremost.

But god, Callum was right, wasn’t he? If we wanted to clear our names, we legitimately had to figure out who the real killer was—and I had genuinely no clue where to begin. Obviously, this was scary. But—and I should be a little ashamed of this, because it’s pretty unhinged—it was also weirdly kind of thrilling.

“You say you think you know who the real murderer is,” I said slowly.

He took another bite of his crab cake. “Yep.”

“How?” I leaned forward, hungry despite myself. “Did—did you cast a prophecy spell?”

It was strictly forbidden, of course. Sorcerers’ apprentices are usually kept on a pretty long leash, but the leash still exists—especially for prophets. We’re allowed to start practicing illusory and kinetic magic on our own once we’ve mastered the basics—but prophetic magic is different. Messing around with the future is a more dangerous business than most, and we’re not supposed to risk it without supervision from a full-fledged prophet-sorcerer.

Unfortunately for us, the only full-fledged prophet-sorcerer within several states had been horrifically murdered just last week.

“No, I didn’t cast an illicit prophecy spell without supervision. Even I’m not that much of a rebel,” said Callum, as if reading my mind. “You don’t have to use magic for everything, you know.”

“Then how—”

“It’s called,” he said with a flourish, “deductive reasoning.” He punctuated this brilliance with another mouthful of crab cake.

“Uh huh,” I said, deliberately unimpressed. “And?”

He swallowed. “I’m guessing you already know about Dad’s last prophecy. The one that foretold his death.”

I swallowed. It was as if the oxygen had been sucked from the air around us. “He said he’d be killed by his best beloved.”

“Right.” Callum’s expression was brittle. “Which narrows down our field of suspects considerably, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t take your meaning.”

“All right, then.” He glanced from side to side, then said, low and carefully neutral in the way only the truly angry can sound, “Let me put this another way: if my father was truly murdered by his best beloved, then we should start by investigating my brother.”

“You don’t mean—”

“I do mean,” said Callum. Those blue eyes had gone flinty. “Felix. Felix should be at the top of our suspect list.”

“No,” I said immediately. I couldn’t have heard that right. “Felix is—”

“Too charming? Too sweet? Too pure as the driven snow to be guilty of harming a fly, let alone his father?” Callum sat back in his seat, expression full of dark amusement. “I thought so too. But the words of the prophecy said best beloved. Who could that be but Felix?”

I hated that this was actually pretty hard to deny. Of the three Solomon children, Felix had always been the one whose name was spoken in the fondest tones by his father. Maybe Sorcerer Solomon didn’t do it on purpose. But it was tough to avoid. Felix was simply so much more warmly, well, present than his siblings. While Circe hid up in her bedroom, and Callum largely ignored the quiet, nerdy kids like me to hang out with loud, jovially popular varsity athletes at the high school, Felix paid attention to everyone. He always wanted to know how your day was, what was going on in your classes, if everything was okay with your family, if you needed help with anything, anything at all.

To that end, it wasn’t just Sorcerer Solomon who’d so instinctively favored Felix. It was everyone who encountered the Solomon family. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said that Felix went out of his way to ensure that he was beloved.

Which, I realized with a pang, was exactly the sort of thing a murderer might do to evade suspicion.

“Do you think Detective Chang has any other suspects?” I asked Callum halfheartedly.

“Doubtful,” he said around a mouthful of crab cake. He swallowed, and added, “Confirmation bias, you know? She’s got it in her head that it’s got to be one of us, so she’s probably ignoring evidence that could point to someone else.”

I deflated slightly. “So we really will have to do her job for her.”

“Absolutely,” said Callum cheerfully. “What do you expect, that she’d do it herself? Let’s be real: we can dress it up in all the modern red tape and respectability and legalities or niceties we want, but at the end of the day, a magical crimes unit detective is just another iteration of a Salem witch-hunter from the 1600s.” He shrugged. “Just with the power of technology and the internet paving their way.”

“A cheery perspective,” I observed dryly.

“Ah, it’s not all bad.” Callum made a dismissive sound, flapping a hand. “At least if we do the good detective’s job for her, we have some say over whether we wind up on trial for murder or not.” That bright blue gaze, so like Sorcerer Solomon’s, flicked toward me. “And for what it’s worth, I’d like to look my father’s murderer—his real murderer, mind you—in the eyes, just once.”

That actually did give me pause. Callum’s face hadn’t really changed. But the fingers that had been toying with the knife were drumming against the table now. I knew a fidget when I saw one. He was scared. Or angry, maybe. Probably both. Who wouldn’t be?

And for what it was worth, in this particular matter, I was on his side. Not because of Sorcerer Solomon’s warning, or prophecy, or that bizarre promise he’d extracted from me to stick to Callum like glue, no matter what. It wasn’t even because I particularly believed his theory about Felix—in fact, I was still reasonably sure that Callum was jumping the gun on that one.

I was on his side because I knew, deep in my bones, that if it was my own father left dead and dismembered in our home, I’d want to look his killer in the eyes too. And then some.

That much, Callum Solomon deserved.

Besides, I knew that I hadn’t killed his dad. And I wanted to prove it to everyone else too.

I tilted my head at him, put down my fork, and folded my arms. “Callum Solomon. Are you trying to ask me to be your girl Friday?”

He stopped drumming his fingers. The side of his mouth lifted again. With a grin, he took another bite of his crab cake. “Mmm.” He settled back in his seat, eyes closed in contentment as he swallowed. “If that’s how you want to think of it, sure. Or maybe I can be yours. Aren’t you the one with the lawyer mother? You’d probably be better at crime solving than me.”

My shoulders wilted at the mention of my mother. “That might be more of a problem than anything else, actually. My mom . . . kind of doesn’t really want me associating with you. So it’s going to be tough to meet up together regularly, much less, you know. Solve murders together.”

“Oh, I thought of that too,” said Callum without missing a beat. He took another bite of crab cake. “I haff a plan,” he said as he swallowed. He stared lovingly at his plate. “Goddamn. These really are good.”

I snapped my fingers under his nose. “They are. Do they have anything to do with your plan for how we’re going to run around playing badge-less buddy cops without getting caught by my mom?”

Callum set the fork down and grinned at me. “Tell me, Zeng. How does your mom feel about women’s self-defense classes?”

FOUR

The gym I’d been directed to was housed in a surprisingly modest-looking building. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected. It wasn’t as though Callum had been super keen on explaining himself, beyond the basics of his decidedly half-baked plan.

“It’s the ideal cover,” he’d said. “You have an overprotective mother. Overprotective mothers love enrolling their daughters in women’s self-defense classes.”

I looked him up and down very deliberately. “And what exactly are you going to be doing, pray tell, in a women’s self-defense class?”

“Playing the bad guy, obviously,” he informed me cheerfully. “Otherwise known as the teacher’s assistant.”

I gave him another skeptical once-over, really taking my time with this one. “You.”

To my satisfaction, Callum’s cheeks pinked very slightly. Score one, Zeng. “Hey now,” he protested. “I’ll have you know that I’ve thrown some punches in my time!”

“I’m sure you have,” I told him, in a tone that I hoped conveyed that I absolutely did not believe that he had. “I still don’t see what the point of this is. You may have gotten into your share of brawls in locker rooms or whatever it is that happens behind closed doors in fancy varsity fencing clubs, but I’ve never so much as thrown a punch. Also, I sprained my ankle on, like, day two of Coach O’Malley’s stupid wrestling unit in junior year PE, so you can imagine how well literally any kind of physical confrontation is going to go for me.”

“Ah, cheer up, squishy wizard.” Callum patted me gently on my—decidedly meager—biceps. “It’s only a three-month after-school course. That’s plenty of time to solve a murder.”

“Squishy wizard?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You know, like they talk about on gaming forums and stuff like TV Tropes? All those famous fictional wizards in games and movies who are super weak and easily defeated in hand-to-hand combat. Like you. Squishy.”

I scowled at him. “Well, I’m not a movie trope, and no woman ever learned actual useful self-defense in three months. Especially no woman with zero athleticism to speak of in the first place.”

“You might be right,” agreed Callum, gamely enough, “but overprotective mothers rarely see it that way.”

The thing was, Callum was right. My parents—my mother especially—ate Callum’s terrible, half-baked plan right up. “Well, I was wondering when you’d finally take an interest in your own physical well-being!” Mom preened. “I keep telling you, Tabatha, working up a sweat in the gym is far healthier for a young woman than spending all that time hunched over desks in occult workrooms doing Lord knows what all day. Besides, this whole murder business has everyone worried about safety after dark. I’ll feel better, knowing you can protect yourself.”

I bit my tongue on what I actually wanted to tell my mother, which was that learning how to jab some dude in the eye and kick him in the crotch was hardly going to protect me from a rampaging sorcerer who’d magically drawn and quartered the patriarch of the most powerful occult family on the East Coast. After all, the last thing I needed was my mother walking back her approval of my new fake hobby. My tentative murder-solving truce with Callum depended on that approval.

Tentative murder-solving truce aside, I wasn’t wild about this whole self-defense thing. I’d never been in a physical confrontation in my entire life, and I certainly didn’t intend to start now. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked through the sensible revolving doors of the redbrick gymnasium and stepped out onto the great big basketball-slash-volleyball-slash-whatever-else-they-played-here court. The whole place smelled like socks and basketball rubber. I wrinkled my nose.

True to his word, Callum had already arrived. It took me only a moment to pick him out among the nervous-looking gaggle of girls in their sweats, huddled in a corner of the Ambiguous Sportsball Court, watching the girls with his hands in the pockets of his varsity hoodie. I made a beeline for him, ignoring the curious—and possibly speculative—looks from the other girls on the court.

“What now?” I asked him, low voiced.

He blinked a few times, as if surprised by the question. “What do you mean? We take class, of course.”

“Class!” I didn’t like that answer at all.

“Calm down, squishy wizard, I’ll make sure I’m partnered off with you so we can start chatting murder suspects during drills. You won’t even have to interact with all the other no-doubt-terrifying ninety-pound teenage girls here, I promise.”

“I thought this was just supposed to be a cover,” I hissed. “I didn’t think you were actually going to make me take a women’s self-defense class!”

“Not much of a cover if it gets blown as soon as your mom spends five minutes on Google, is it?” observed Callum, sounding infuriatingly sensible. “Relax. We’ll still have plenty of time to play Nancy Drew. All we have to do is get through an hour, and then we can get to sleuthing around for clues. I’ve already found a clue—”

“An hour!” I interrupted, aghast.

He didn’t quite roll his eyes, but it was a near thing. “Yes, Zeng, an hour. It’s also not much of a self-defense class if you don’t rep out what’s taught, is it?”

I opened my mouth to continue the argument. I shouldn’t have bothered. Both because I knew, even back then, that I wouldn’t win, and because in that very moment, a person who could only have been the instructor entered the court.

You’ll notice that I hesitate here on how to describe our teacher that day. You know how some people just have a presence about them? An aura, I guess, that makes you realize pretty much from the get-go that they’re going to leave an Impression, capital I very much intended, for better or worse. This particular Impression-leaving person was a woman, athletically built, all smooth muscle tone and sculpted shoulders, dressed in chain-mail print leggings and an artfully oversized white hoodie that had the vibe of something that had probably cost way more money than leggings and a hoodie had any right to, no matter how fun the print or nicely made the material. Really, the only things that made the woman look like anything other than a professional fitness model were in the little details: the subtle streaks of gray in her honey-gold hair, and the laugh lines and crow’s feet sneaking their way into the smooth sun-kissed complexion of her face.

She clapped her hands together and looked around the room, the corners of her mouth tugged upward in a faintly familiar way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “Well, glad to see we’ve got such a great turnout.” Her voice matched her features: warm and inviting, effortlessly friendly. “I’ll be your teacher today. You can call me Ro. We’ll start with warm-ups. Callum, my lovely assistant over there, will lead the way.”

Obediently, Callum trotted up to the front of the class. “All right, ladies, let’s start with a light jog just to get the blood flowing.”

The light jog was not quite as bad as I’d anticipated. It was what followed afterward that nearly made me walk out on the class right then and there, murder mystery or no. I wasn’t sure what was worse: the burpees, the planks, the jump squats, or the fact that Callum refused to give us any kind of ETA on when all this sweaty nonsense would end.

“Okay, ladies,” he called at last—far too cheerfully, and not at all tired-looking enough for someone who’d demo’d the exercises right along with us—“good stuff, everyone. We’ve still got fifty minutes of class, and I’d rather get started on technique now that everyone’s nice and warm.”

Warm? That had been the warm-up?

Ro reappeared. “We’re going to start with some groundwork. We’ll open with the basics: buck, trap, and roll. Partner up, everyone, and let’s hit the mats.”

This buck, trap, and roll business, as it turned out, did not entail any eye gouging or crotch shots. It was, in fact, pretty much exactly what it sounded like. One partner, playing the attacker, pinned their victim down, straddling the waist. The partner playing the victim captured the attacker’s arm and leg on one side, then bucked their hips up to put the attacker on their back. Theoretically, it was a pretty simple exercise. I could hear the other girls giggling self-consciously as they practiced bucking their hips up and rolling their partners onto the mat.

Unfortunately for me, my buck, trap, and roll partner was Callum.

“So,” I panted, trying not to grunt under the weight of his superior muscle mass as he sat atop my hips, “you said you found a clue?”

“I might have.” He sounded distracted. “You’ve got to get those hips off the floor, Zeng.”

“I am getting my hips off the floor! This so-called clue of yours—”

“We can talk about my clue after you get some momentum behind that buck. Heavens, Zeng, you’d think you’d never flexed your hips in your entire life.”

“Well, I’m not Shakira, am I?” I groaned, flopping my head back against the mat in defeat. “This is stupid. There’s no way I’d remember all of this if someone actually knocked me over and decided to pin me to the floor. They’d probably poke me in the eye while I was trying to remember all the moves.”

Callum blew an exasperated raspberry. “If you only practice all the moves like three times, of course they’re going to poke you in the eye first,” he informed me in what I thought was a pretty needlessly snooty tone. “Now, plant your feet—the closer to your ass, the better—and buck your hips up. Make me move.”

I bucked my hips up as hard as I could. Annoyance—and, I guess, planting my feet closer to my ass—gave me the momentum I needed. Callum laughed as he pitched forward, apparently delighted by my violence. “Good.” His palms landed on either side of my head. “Now, think of me as a table. These”—he wiggled his feet, then his hands—“are the table legs. If you want to flip a table, you’re going to need to take out the support from one side. Pick one and trap the table legs on that side.”

I glared up at him. “When are we going to talk about the clue?”

He grinned down at me, unperturbed. “When you flip me onto my back.”

It was a weird little moment. Look, let’s be honest here: I’m not the kind of girl who spends a ton of time getting aggressively straddled by guys—or anyone, for that matter. It would have been impossible for the whole exercise not to be damn weird.

That’s what I wanted to chalk the moment up to. Otherwise, I’d have to read into why I was suddenly so aware of the weight of his hips on mine, or the breadth of his shoulders looming over me. He smelled like laundry detergent and fresh mint. It was pretty sexy, actually, a thought that I’d rather take to my grave than ever admit to anybody. Weird, weird, weird. I didn’t like this one bit.

I had to do something to cut through the weirdness. So I trapped an arm, trapped a leg, and bucked him over my shoulder as hard as I could.

He gave a thoroughly undignified squawk, followed by a thump, as his ass landed on the mat. I perched between his flailing legs, chin on my hands as I rested my elbows on his chest. “Okay, I’ve flipped you onto your back. What’s this clue you supposedly found?”

Those blue eyes of his had gone wide—with surprise or fury, I wasn’t sure. “Hot damn, Zeng.”

“Tell me about the clue,” I insisted, merciless. I dug my elbows a little harder into his sternum.

He winced. “Okay, okay! I should have called you bony wizard instead of squishy wizard. What did you stick to the ends of your elbows, kitchen knives?”

I am not without some pity in my cold black heart. I released Callum from my bony elbows and stood, offering a hand. Using it to haul himself to his feet, he chuckled. “Maybe clue is a strong word. But I think it’s worth examining all the same.”

He glanced from side to side. Just like that, the mask had slipped again, rendering him awkward and vulnerable, less preppy boy wonder and more, well, squishy wizard. When he was satisfied that none of the other girls were listening in on our conversation, he bent his head toward mine and said, “The other night, I overheard Felix on a call—”

“Overheard or eavesdropped?” I interrupted.

“The manor is very large, the door was open, and Felix’s voice carries,” said Callum indignantly. “Anyway, I overheard him on a call with this lady, and it got super weird.”

I stared at Callum. “You think it’s weird that your classically handsome and charming older brother has conversations over FaceTime with women sometimes?”

“Let me finish,” huffed Callum. “It wasn’t about the woman. That part doesn’t matter. It’s what I heard him say to her.”

“I swear to god, Solomon, if this is all an elaborate ruse for you to sabotage your big brother’s attempts at online dating or something—”

“I don’t know who the woman was,” Callum cut in, ignoring me. “But I heard Felix say this much to her, loud and clear: ‘You’re the one who wanted him dead.’ ”

I stopped breathing for a moment.

That flinty look had returned to Callum’s previously playful blue-eyed gaze. “So it would seem,” he said, “that my brother had an accomplice.”

After that incredibly awkward first self-defense class, I texted Mom to tell her that I’d been invited by the other girls in class to go replenish our calories at a local diner. It wasn’t entirely a lie—there had been some halfhearted talk among the other students about meeting up for waffles, and honestly, the talk of waffles nearly tempted me to follow them instead of Mister Hamlet Wannabe over here, but his father’s murder wouldn’t solve itself.

So instead of waffles, I got to sit with Callum in his car eating some incredibly sad protein bars he’d scrounged up for us. It was a pretty tragic step down from the crab cakes, but I got the impression that pointing this out wouldn’t be well timed. He seemed pretty busy with trying to convince me that the nicest member of his family was secretly a cold-blooded patricidal murderer.

“I never said cold-blooded patricidal murderer,” he protested. “Those weren’t my words. I just said he murdered him. No embellishments to speak of.”

I glared, though the effect was probably negated somewhat by my mouthful of stale protein bar. “The rest was implied.” I swallowed with effort. “Jesus, Solomon, how long have those protein bars been in your car?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to,” he answered absently. “In any case, I heard what I heard during that video call.”

“With a woman you couldn’t even identify!” I pointed out heatedly. “You heard seven words. You don’t even know if they were necessarily talking about your dad—”

“Who else would they be talking about, a random stranger from the Sunday obituaries?”

“I don’t know! But you said it yourself, clue is a big word for it, much less evidence.” I used air quotes as I spoke. “And for the sake of argument, let’s just say they really were talking about Sorcerer Solomon. You never heard Felix take actual responsibility for his death. All he said was that this lady—whoever she is—wanted Sorcerer Solomon dead. To me, that sounds like an accusation, not an admission of guilt.” An odd sort of hope bloomed in my chest as I added, “For all we know, Felix is doing the same thing we’re doing—trying to get to the bottom of your dad’s murder.”

For all we knew, Felix was just as innocent as I was.

Callum pursed his lips for a long moment. “I don’t see why you’re so offended by my theory,” he said at last, sounding sullen. “Frankly, I’m amazed you didn’t think of it yourself. You know the words of the prophecy as well as I do. And we both know my dad.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Say whatever else you want about the old man, but this one thing I know: Felix has always been his favorite. The son he loves.”

I almost said, in a voice thick with scorn, You say that like he doesn’t love you too. I stopped my tongue just in time. Barely. Instead, I looked carefully at Callum.

I should tell you at this point that it’s never struck me as wise to grow overfamiliar with the internal politics of the Solomon family. You want to know the basics, of course, when you’re apprenticing for a patriarch like Old Man Solomon. The messy divorce, the children from two different wives, the incredibly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant method of addressing the inherent awkwardness of this situation, which is to say refusing to address it at all. That’s not just common sense when working for a family of sorcerers. That’s common sense when working for literally any family of rich white people.

Callum looked back at me. “Quit staring at me like I’m a poor little rich boy.” He shrugged. “I’m just telling it like it is. Circe and I are used to it.”

Circe. Felix’s twin. Their sister. I frowned. “You don’t think Circe might object to you accusing her twin of murder?”

“Why would she?” Callum took a ferocious bite of his protein bar and eyed me sidelong. “Like I said, Circe and I are used to the way things are. You, on the other hand—”

“I’m not a member of your family,” I said quickly.

“Sure.” Callum tossed his wrapper into the glove compartment. “But you’re tight with Felix.”

I struggled with how to respond to that one. “He’s nice to me, is all,” I settled on.

A flicker of what might have been regret flashed across Callum’s face. “Ouch. Reprimand noted.”

“That’s not what I meant.” God, what a mess. “I’m not saying you aren’t nice. Felix just . . .” Paid attention to me. Treated me like I was something other than invisible. Asked me how my day was from time to time like he actually cared, and not just because it was polite. “I saw more of him than the rest of you.” There. That was at least true.

Callum shook his head. “Nah, you’re right.” His gaze flickered toward me, an oddly shuttered look on his face, even as the corner of his mouth tipped upward, dimpled and wry. “We should have hung out more.” He paused, then corrected himself: “I should have hung out with you more.”

I think I was about to tell him that hanging out with his dad’s apprentice wasn’t his job. Or at the very least, I was about to tell him that I didn’t hold it against him. I can’t actually remember for sure, because in that particular moment, Felix’s number flashed across the screen of my phone.

I froze, watching it buzz for what felt like an eternity. Then Callum gave me an unceremonious nudge. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Pick it up!”

“Pick up a call from a guy who you’re accusing of patricide?” I hissed. “Not to mention conspiracy to commit murder?”

“You’re the one who keeps defending him,” Callum shot back. “If Felix isn’t a murderer, this is your chance to prove it.”

“Pretty sure it’s supposed to be the other way around, genius.”

“Just pick up!”

Rolling my eyes, I swiped my thumb across the screen. “Hello?”

“Tabatha, hello.” Felix’s voice, deep and kind, sounded concerned. “I apologize for calling out of the blue like this—”

“Put it on speaker!” Callum stage-whispered.

“No,” I stage-whispered back. “Not you,” I told Felix hurriedly.

“Is that my little brother in the background?” asked Felix, sounding bewildered.

“Yes,” I said.

“No!” insisted Callum at the same time.

“Ah,” said Felix faintly. “May I ask . . . what you’re doing?”

“A . . . uh, s-school project,” I stammered. “Anyway, he’s being an ass, not that you’re surprised, I’m sure—”

“I am not being an ass! I’m simply— Ow! Don’t kick me!”

“Consider it revenge for the self-defense class,” I told Callum without sympathy, before returning my attention to his brother. “What’s up?” I asked Felix.

“Well, if you’re not too busy helping Callum out with the, ah, school project, I was wondering if you might like to raid Dad’s workshop for some old grimoires or notes. Lord knows my mother and sister have already helped themselves. I think his entire library of illusion manuals has been re-homed in Circe’s bedroom, next to her manga collection.”

I couldn’t help the twitch of amusement fighting to escape the edges of my mouth. “Oh? And what treasures has Angelique helped herself to?”

“What else? Notes on theoretical charms to enhance political power and preserve wealth.”

“Of course.” I rolled my eyes, sighing. The more esoteric magics— love spells, moneymaking charms, all that nonsense—were usually the province of charlatans and scam artists. Trust Sorcerer Solomon, naturally, to have kept a bunch of notes on how to legitimize those practices. Like the man hadn’t set the bar high enough for innovation in the occult world already.

“Anyway, I did try to save a few things from Dad’s library that I thought you might like. Come by the manor anytime to look through them and see if there’s anything you’d like to keep.”

I hesitated, eyeing Callum. “Shouldn’t you hang on to those?”

“Why?”

“Well.” I worried at my bottom lip for a moment before pointing out, “The séance during the last full moon got interrupted before your dad’s ghost could be summoned, so technically, he hasn’t named a successor as the new head of the Solomon family yet, right?”

A pause on the other end of the line before Felix relented. “True.”

“So shouldn’t we wait until a successor is named before you start giving away all his stuff? Since it’s technically going to belong to them.”

Felix laughed softly. “You’re entirely too honest for your own good, Zeng.”

“Hardly,” I said, my voice dry as I considered the lie I’d just fed my mother about befriending the girls in the women’s self-defense class. “Just trying not to end up catching any bad juju for taking what’s not mine. Last thing we need is even more shitty luck, wouldn’t you say?”

“Touché. Still, drop by the house sometime. Worse comes to worst, you can borrow a few books and return them at a later date, if the . . . designated successor ends up having a problem with it.” He paused. “Which seems unlikely.”

I almost shrugged before remembering that he couldn’t see me. “You never know.”

“I suppose not. Well, think about it, at least.”

“I will. Thank you.”

His hesitation was palpable, even over the phone line. “Well, if that’s all—”

“Wait!” I blurted out, and winced. Across from me, Callum covered his face with his hands, cringing.

“What’s the matter?” Polite concern colored Felix’s voice. “Do you know which books you want after all?”

“No, um, not quite.” I closed my eyes, trying to gather my wits. Focus, Zeng. You’ve got a murder to solve. “Just . . . you know he predicted his own death, right? Your dad.”

“I think everyone knows about that at this point,” said Felix wryly. “Probably why Elena Chang’s so interested in ruling the death as something other than an accident.”

“Right,” I said hurriedly, “but it’s kind of weird wording, right? The prophecy?”

A pause descended on the other end of the line. “What are you getting at, Tabatha?”

Crap. Was Felix onto me? From the daggers Callum was currently glaring at me, that was entirely possible. “I just can’t stop thinking about it,” I babbled. “Being his apprentice and all. Hearing all his prophecies, and having known about that one, and just not sure whether to believe it, or whether to think it was a mistake, or a joke, or a—”

“Tabatha, calm down. You’re panicking. Just breathe.”

Was I? Hell, some amateur sleuth I was, losing my shit on the phone with one of my murder suspects, and letting the suspect himself calm me down. I forced myself to inhale slowly, then exhale again. I wasn’t prepared for this. I needed time to plan. “I don’t understand why any of this happened,” I said at last, which at least was the truth. “And I feel awful about it.” Then, hating myself a little, I added, “I could use someone to talk to. If you ever have the time.”

“Oh, Tabatha.” The sympathy warming Felix’s voice made me want to curl up and die. “Of course. You’re always welcome here. We can talk anytime you’d like.”

“That would be amazing. I’ll, um, I’ll text you, then.” I bit my lip, then forced a modicum of cheer into my voice. “Thanks again!”

“Enjoy your day, Tabatha. And, ah, good luck with Callum.”

I snorted. “I’ll need it. Thanks, Felix. Bye.”

Callum stared at me with huge eyes as I hung up. “What?” I asked him, irritated.

“Zeng,” he said slowly. “That was brilliant. Way to get my brother alone.” He grinned. “I didn’t think you had it in you. Now you’ll be able to question Felix without interference.”

Which, granted, had been my plan, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit miffed. I frowned at him. “I don’t get you. First, you accuse your older brother of murdering your father. Now you want me to be alone in your dead dad’s workshop with him?”

“No,” said Callum patiently. “Like I said, I want you to take a golden opportunity to interrogate my possibly murderous older brother and see if you can trick him into revealing any suspicious behavior.”

“And how, pray tell, am I supposed to do that?” My on-the-spot amateur sleuth strategy hadn’t thought that far ahead while I was on the phone with Felix. I’d wanted more time to plan, but I had no idea where to start.

“I don’t know,” said Callum. “Feminine wiles?”

“Callum,” I said patiently, gesturing up and down at myself—my ratty old hoodie, the joggers with the hole in the knee that had only gotten torn further during that weird buck-trap-roll drill in the self-defense class. “Do I look like someone with a great many feminine wiles?”

He followed my gaze. “No, not exactly,” he allowed, “but Felix does like and trust you. He’d be a lot likelier to let his guard down around you than me or the rest of the family.”

I hated admitting it, but Callum was probably right.

“Lord.” I rubbed my temples. “Isn’t that just the perfect sign of a happy family? A guy who’d rather pour his heart out to his dead dad’s teenage apprentice than to his own siblings?”

“Does that mean you’ll do it?”

I sighed heavily, casting a moody stare out the passenger window of Callum’s car. “Fine. I’ll text Felix and tell him I’m free to come over later this week. But once I pick a date, you’re giving me a free ride to and from. I refuse to spend a hard-won allowance on Uber bills for an illicit sleuthing side hustle that I’m not even getting paid for.”

FIVE

Felix Solomon met me at the steps of Solomon Manor on a bright autumn morning that Sunday, dressed in flannel, hands tucked into the pockets of well-worn jeans. He looked like the kindly TA to an ancient and decrepit literature professor, and the steaming mug clasped between his hands only made him seem even more ridiculously friendly and approachable.

I sniffed the air as I drew closer. “Coffee?”

“Freshly brewed.” He grinned, toasting me with his mug.

“Ugh,” I said. “I told my mom I was getting brunch.” With my new, imaginary friends from the women’s self-defense class his unhinged brother had roped me into as a cover for our illicit murder investigation, but those were details that Felix didn’t need. “Now I wish I were actually getting brunch.”

Felix laughed. “There’s more coffee inside, if you want it, and pumpkin brioche, if you’re feeling peckish.”

“Oh, bless you,” I said fervently, following him into the house. I accepted the mug he offered me with greedy hands, and savored the first mouthful of dark roast as I waited for caffeine to hit my system. If Felix turned out to be a murderer, and this turned out to be poison, at least I’d die reasonably content.

In the meantime, Felix disappeared momentarily into a supply closet behind the kitchen. When he emerged, he was cradling an armful of grimoires. “I’m not sure that any of these will contain anything you haven’t already been forced to study a million times over under Dad’s watchful eye,” he announced, slightly muffled by the stack of books, “but I figured you would be the best judge of that.” He deposited the books carefully beside the brioche he’d sliced onto a plate for me.

I glanced at the titles, curious, as I tore into the brioche. Cinnamon hit my tongue with a welcome tang that offset the buttery warmth of the bread. It went astoundingly well with the coffee. Trying not to spill either crumbs or coffee on the pages of Sorcerer Solomon’s painstaking work, I ran a hand down the book covers. “Prophecy books,” I said softly. “These have got to be worth a fortune in occult circles.”

“Oh, they are,” said Felix, who added in a slightly pained voice, “Look, if you want them, take them, but please don’t auction them off on the internet or something, okay? The last thing I need is a lawsuit if those grimoires fall into the hands of some white-collar magical criminal wannabe who’s trying to illegally prophesize about stock markets or something—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I held up my hands, which was usually Felix’s move. Normally, I was the nervous, rambling babbler, and he was the calm and steady presence. “One, that would be a supremely dick-ish way to repay you for offering me your late father’s highly valuable personal effects as a sentimental gesture. And two . . .” I trailed off, suddenly hesitant.

Now was the moment. Now was the part in the conversation where I was supposed to spring my trap and get Felix to confess to something incriminating. As it turned out, I didn’t need to auction a dead man’s grimoires off on the internet to feel thoroughly dick-ish.

Felix blinked at me expectantly.

“I know the last thing you probably want to discuss is the prophecy your father made about his own death,” I said carefully. “But like I told you on the phone, I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe it’s just because I apprenticed under him, or because I’m supposed to specialize in prophecy too, but I just . . . I want to know what it meant.” I made air quotes: “ ‘I will die at the hands of my best beloved.’ Who the hell was even his best beloved, and why on earth, if he loved them, would they kill him?”

I shook my head with a frustration that was actually pretty genuine. “If I can’t even figure out what my own mentor’s last prophecy meant, then what the hell kind of prophet am I going to be?”

“Well, I think there’s a bit to unpack there,” said Felix. He didn’t seem particularly surprised by my outburst. He only sounded thoughtful, which made me feel even worse. “First of all, I don’t think it’s necessarily a prophet’s job to decipher the predictions of other fortune tellers—Dad could be pretty opaque when he wanted to be.” Wryly, he added, “Which was most of the time. So, I wouldn’t knock your own sorcerous ability just because you’re as puzzled by some of the things he’s said and done as the rest of us are. And as for what the prophecy itself actually meant . . .” He trailed off, looking hesitant.

I decided to press my luck. “You must have been thinking about it too. Even just a little.”

“Of course I have,” said Felix. “But, Tabatha, listen, you can’t always take a prophecy so literally word for word.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“ ‘I will die at the hands of my best beloved,’ ” Felix quoted. “You want to know what my father really loved above all else in this world?”

You, I almost said. Your brother thinks he loved you best, because everyone has always loved you best.

“I used to think that what he loved above all else in this world was his family,” I said carefully. “Somehow, I get the impression that that’s not what you’re about to say.”

The ghost of a smile—fleeting and sad—flashed across Felix’s face. “He does love us. Did. Or at least, what we represented. His legacy, his power, his vehicle for living far beyond his actual mortal years.” He leaned forward slightly. “Here’s what no one actually wants to say aloud about my father: what he loved most in the world wasn’t anyone or anything human. It was the occult itself. It was the rush of sorcery, the thrum of magic at work. What human love could compete with something like that?”

I took a moment to process what Felix meant. “So, when he said, ‘I will die at the hands of my best beloved’ . . . ” I began slowly.

“The police ruled my father’s death an accident,” said Felix. “More specifically, they ruled that the cause of his death was a work of sorcery that simply malfunctioned horribly. And I think it’s entirely possible that they were right.”

This theory was simultaneously so outlandish—and yet so oddly anticlimactic—that I literally just gaped at Felix for a few seconds. Even now, I’m a little flummoxed by what a simple end that would have been for a sorcerer as powerful as Solomon: finally biting off more than he could chew, magically speaking, creating a work of sorcery that ultimately resulted in the sorcerer’s demise.

At the time, though, the singular, desperate thought rearing its way to the top of my mind was Well, that will mean that Felix didn’t do it.

“You really think that’s possible?” I swallowed. “That it really was an accident. That no one murdered him.”

“I don’t know,” said Felix, with a frank and gentle honesty that startled me. I thought he’d push his theory a little harder. “But sometimes the simplest explanations are best.”

“I guess,” I said. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but I wanted to be. I shuffled from one foot to the other. “Um, thanks. For talking me through that.”

“Of course. We can talk anytime. It’s a healthy thing to do, for processing trauma—or so a whole bevy of family therapists have told me,” Felix said wryly. He smiled at the weak chuckle I gave. “Well, if that’s all you wanted to talk about—”

“Wait, actually, there was one more thing,” I blurted out.

Felix waited.

“I guess I just want to know why,” I said at last, chickening out and opting for the truth. “Why leave me the most valuable of your dad’s grimoires?”

“Oh.” Felix scratched the back of his head. “To be perfectly honest, I mostly just didn’t want them to go to waste.” He met my gaze and held it, looking slightly sheepish and more than slightly sad. “After all, you were his apprentice. And unlike myself or my twin, you have a true knack for prophetic sorcery.”

I shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. “What about your brother?”

“Callum?” Felix blinked, looking surprised again. “What about him?”

“He’s a prophet too,” I pointed out. “Well, prophet-in-training. Doesn’t he deserve a shot at the grimoires too?”

Felix’s expression flitted through an interesting series of variations that I couldn’t quite read. “Honestly?” Felix brushed long fingers over the spines of the grimoires. “I don’t think Callum would want the reminder.”

“Of what? His dad?”

“Of the things Dad expected of him,” Felix said softly. “Dad pressured all of us, but he pressured Callum most of all. I think maybe that’s also why, of the three of us, Callum fell out of love with the occult the hardest. He can still tell a fortune, cast an incantation, shape some sigils. But he doesn’t enjoy it the way I find joy in perfect kinetic craft—or even the way Circe delights in her illusions when she thinks no one’s looking.”

I swallowed. The coffee in the mug Felix had given me had cooled considerably by now. I set it aside. My heartbeat skittered around inside my chest, jackrabbit-fast, thanks to too much caffeine chugged too quickly. “Callum must have resented Sorcerer Solomon a lot, then.”

What Felix was saying made sense. I thought back to the bitterness in Callum’s tone when he’d insisted he was the least loved son. What if Callum wanted to pin the murder on Felix to avoid culpability? It was an absurd idea, but now that I’d considered it, the cursed thought refused to disappear from existence.

Better to believe that Sorcerer Solomon really might have died at the hands of a prettily, prophetically worded accident.

“Sure he did,” allowed Felix. He shrugged. “Then again, so did we all. I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but there was a lot to resent about our dad.”

Well, that wasn’t very helpful for narrowing down the field of suspects, now, was it?

As if he could sense my disappointment, Felix’s mannerisms shifted subtly. Suddenly, he was all gentle smiles again. “Anyway, let me know if there’s anything among that grimoire collection that you’d want to keep, at least until the séance gets rescheduled.” He puttered back over to the stove. “More coffee?”

His body language and tone made things clear to me: this awkward, stiltedly resentful conversation about his father—and, it would seem, a deeply shitty childhood for all three of the Solomon children—was over.

My heart continued to rattle around behind my bones. “No,” I said faintly. “No, thank you, I think I’m all right on coffee. I’ll just take a look at the books, then.”

Sadly, the failed Felix interrogation did not put an end to the ridiculous women’s self-defense class ruse. Nor did it put an end to Callum’s suspicions. We began falling into an absurd routine as the days wore on: I took self-defense lessons with Callum twice a week, during which he tortured me with calisthenics for an hour, followed by nosing fruitlessly around Solomon Manor, during which I tortured him with all the reasons why Felix having murdered their dad would be stupid and illogical.

“There’s no motive,” I kept saying, over and over again. “Every good murderer has a motive, right? At least according to Agatha Christie.”

“Yeah, well, Agatha Christie also never wrote a book where a mysterious and gruesome death turned out to be an accident,” retorted Callum.

“Like you read Agatha Christie,” I griped, but I couldn’t think of a good counterargument to that, because, hell, I’d never read an Agatha Christie where no one had murdered anyone either.

We debated circles around each other, before and during and after that self-defense class Callum kept insisting on dragging me to, and never seemed to get anywhere. Aside from lack of motive, our other problem was lack of suspects. The prophecy narrowed our suspect list considerably. Someone dear enough to Sorcerer Solomon’s heart to be considered his best beloved surely couldn’t apply to all that many people. Callum and I were candidates, of course, and Felix, plus Circe, Rowena, and Angelique. The problem was, that was where my list ended, and I wasn’t interested in openly hurling murder accusations at Solomon family members.

Well, most of the Solomon family members. I minded less when it came to Angelique. Not only did she find the body by scrying for deaths—a big red flag for suspicious behavior, so far as I was concerned—but she’d never exactly hidden her ruthless ambition, either. Frankly, she terrified me. And in the end, that was what stopped us in our investigative tracks: neither of us was willing to invoke her wrath by existing in her presence, much less questioning her.

Still, I had a hard time believing even Angelique could be capable of a murder as brutal as Sorcerer Solomon’s, and I definitely couldn’t believe she was anybody’s best beloved. That put us right back at square one, in terms of suspects, and Callum was too fixated on Felix to brainstorm other potential murderers with me. But neither of us was willing to throw in the towel on solving our very own murder mystery.

We were halfway through the usual routine one afternoon, on the day we both nearly died.

It started innocently enough. We’d just gotten out of class. I’d followed Callum out of the gym, grumbling to myself about mat burn and bruises on my knees. He’d ignored me cheerfully but held the passenger door open for me. I got in, rolling my eyes, still complaining as he slid into the driver’s seat. We shut the doors.

That was when a jet-black car with shaded windows pulled up in sight of Callum’s rearview mirror. That in itself wouldn’t have been cause for alarm.

We were both sorcerers, though—or sorcerers-in-training, at any rate. Which meant that when a spark of orange fire blossomed abruptly—just shy of that same rearview mirror—we both recognized it for what it was.

“Crap!” Callum reacted first, slamming the car into gear. The tires gave an ugly shriek as he pulled us out of the parking lot, narrowly avoiding the flames. “What kind of kinetic sorcerer goes after a Lexus?”

“I don’t know, I don’t drive!” I fumbled for my seat belt. Just barely, I managed to get it buckled before we swerved onto the road. “The angry proletariat kind, maybe?”

“You’re joking at a time like this?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I hissed. “Would you rather see me have a blubbering meltdown? Call it a coping mechanism!”

“Also, what do you mean, you don’t drive? We’re the same age!”

“Age has nothing to do with the ability to pass the learner’s permit test,” I griped. “We’re, like, seventeen! Why the hell would we know what kind of imaginary car seat to buy for our imaginary child?”

“You didn’t study, did you?” Beneath the tense line of fireball-induced worry in his voice, he actually managed to sound smug. “I’m surprised, squishy wizard.”

“Now who’s joking at an inappropriate moment.” I suppressed a shriek as he turned abruptly. “What was that for? There haven’t been any more fireballs since that first one!”

“No, but that maniac in the unmarked black car is still trying to tailgate us,” said Callum. “Which means the chances of more fireballs are likely.”

“Not on the open road like this!”

My finger dug into the nice leather seat beneath me. Wishful thinking forced my heartbeat into something half resembling a controlled rate. “Maybe you’ve lost them by now.”

“Zeng.” Callum’s voice was flat, his gaze dead on the road before us. “We have most definitely not lost them.”

I glanced into the passenger-side mirror. Sure enough, that plain black car still loomed right behind us. “Oh, hell.”

There are only so many things two teenage sorcerers-in-training can do when confronted with a maniac rogue sorcerer, presumably an adult and fully trained, who has just attempted to fireball and tailgate their car. One of those things, I already knew, would be incredibly stupid. To this day, I’m not a hundred percent sure why I did it.

All I know is that some mad urge sank its claws into me as I rolled down my window.

“What are you doing?” demanded Callum.

Good. So I wasn’t the only one who knew how bonkers this idea was. “There’s a kinetic sorcerer attempting to engage us in a car chase. Given that I’m not much of a kinetic specialist myself, the easiest way to change this very unpleasant situation is probably to . . . well, put a stop to the car rather than the sorcerer.”

And that was a kinetic spell that even I could pull off.

Well, I was pretty sure I could pull it off, at any rate. I didn’t particularly want to think about the potential consequences if I couldn’t. What I had in mind wasn’t a pyrokinetic spell, at least, so I didn’t have to worry about transforming one of those fireballs from bad to worse. I swallowed down nerves as I marshaled my focus. My world narrowed. There was me, the road, the black car behind us. I closed my eyes.

“Zeng, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Shush.” I didn’t open my eyes. “I need to focus.”

“Roll up the window! Tabatha, you can’t seriously think it’s a good idea—”

“Hey!” I interrupted. “I have enough trouble remembering this series of sigils without you yammering at me!”

“Oh gee, folks, she’s already having trouble remembering the sigils!” Callum’s voice was thick with sarcasm and laced through with a high, underlying note of near-panic. “Well, that’s comforting, now, isn’t it! You know what happens when sorcerers lose control of spells they can’t handle!”

“Just drive!” His driving was pretty impressive, all things considered. Not that I was a great judge, but I doubt I could have kept up an argument of this caliber while being tailgated by an unhinged sorcerer and not be dead by now. I don’t think he’d even missed a turn signal. Amazing.

Not all spell casting is the same, but the three classes of sorcery—illusion, kinetic, and prophecy—can be broken down in broad strokes like so: wishing, willing, and wondering. Illusionists create their mirages by wishing them real, the same way you might wish to be married to your middle school crush by writing their name over and over again in your notebooks. Kinetics, meanwhile, take it a step further. Instead of simply wishing, they will their desires into true existence: the crack in the ground that starts an earthquake, the whirlpool curving the center of a calm sea, or, well, a fireball flung at a spoiled teenager’s Lexus.

But if you’re a fortune teller, well. The last thing you should do is wish or will. The last thing you’re trained to do is to want anything at all when you’re casting your magic. Futures written by the hand of fate can’t afford the taint of human bias. In other words, the exact opposite of what the other two branches of sorcery necessitate. It’s part of what makes the craft of prophecy so desirable—and, of course, so rare and so difficult. Which is, perhaps, why I’ve always eaten shit when it comes to kinetic spell casting. It doesn’t matter how well you memorize the spells if the intent behind them takes the incorrect shape.

No pressure or anything, Zeng.

To my credit, I did my best. The spell to stall out an engine is a relatively simple one, so far as kinetic magic goes. Better yet, it’s not especially big or flashy magic. In a worst-case scenario, any spell-gone-wrong birthed by a loss of control on my part would be relatively minor.

At least, I hoped it would be relatively minor. Stress can do funny things to a sorcerer’s casting ability, and boy, I was certainly stressed in that moment. But I didn’t have time to worry further about that.

Physically, I remembered all the correct parts: the low hum under my breath, barely a buzz in my throat, followed by the flick of my fingers, the two-fingered sign my left hand formed while curling the three fingers of my right, as if beckoning the life from that ominous black car.

Its tires stuttered and squealed. Hope—an emotion certainly never permitted to cloud the spell casting I did as a prophet—fluttered tentative wings inside my chest. I could feel the kinetic spell working its power over the car. My mind stilled, my want going neutral.

That was a mistake. A typical well-trained, well-disciplined prophet’s mistake. The car roared back to life, hot on our heels again. I snarled in frustration. At least the spell sputtered out instead of taking on a life of its own.

“It’s going to be all right—we’re almost at the house,” said Callum. He sounded more like he needed to convince himself than me. “My sister and brother are home. We’ll have reinforcements there.”

“The same brother who you think murdered your father?” I griped.

“Hey, that doesn’t mean he wants to murder me! Or you, for that matter. He seems to like you just fine!”

I was pretty sure Felix had liked Old Man Solomon just fine too—as far as any kid could like a sometimes stressfully opaque-mannered parent—and wanted to say so. The timing, given the whole deadly magical car chase thing, probably wasn’t great, though. I focused instead on what was in front of me. True to Callum’s word, he was rounding the corner toward the familiar, spooky turrets of Solomon Manor.

We’d almost reached the driveway when the Lexus slammed to an abrupt stop. I yelped as my chest slammed against the seat belt. “What the hell did you stop for?”

“I didn’t!” Callum’s voice was tight with poorly contained fear.

“Callum, we don’t have time for—”

“I mean it, Zeng.” When I risked a glance at him, a bone-white face greeted me. Sweat beaded his brow as he stared at his own unmoving steering wheel. “Someone else stopped the car. Another sorcerer, using another kinetic spell.” A pause. “One that works.”

Ouch. I shrugged off the slight, passive-aggressive though it may have been. “The driver of the black car—”

“Not him.” Callum shook his head ever so slightly, as though he, like his car, had been paralyzed too. “The same spell struck him still, same as me. Look.”

I looked. Sure enough, the black car had pulled to a stop behind us, still as a grave. Now, presumably, should have been the moment for our rogue sorcerer to emerge from behind his wheel and finish the job he’d tried to start with that fireball in the gymnasium parking lot. But the car doors remained locked. No one moved.

Which meant, quite possibly, that no one could. Callum was right. A third sorcerer had emerged on the scene.

It took an embarrassingly, agonizingly long moment for me to put two and two together. Old Man Solomon would have been so disappointed at how stupid I’d gotten since his death. By the time I figured shit out, the mysterious third sorcerer on our scene was already tapping on my window.

What else could I do? I rolled it down and flashed him what I hoped was a suitably casual smile. “Hey, Felix.”

“Hey, Tabatha.” If keeping our car and our assailant’s car simultaneously locked in place was straining Solomon’s eldest son at all, he sure as hell didn’t show it. He smiled back at me gamely enough, all tousled russet hair and friendly eyes. Those eyes flicked past me toward his little brother. “Callum, why don’t you and Tabatha come inside for some tea?” He jerked his head toward the black car. “It seems we have an unexpected guest. It would be rude not to invite her in.”

Callum stared at his brother. “That driver tried to kill us both.”

Felix winced. “Did she? I was afraid that might happen.”

“You’re talking like you know her.”

“Because I do. And so do you.” Felix sighed and rubbed a hand through his hair. “I don’t suppose you remember that woman who used to come to all of Dad’s seminars back at the peak of his fame, do you?”

Callum, if possible, blanched further. “You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not.”

I coughed loudly. “Excuse me. But what the hell is going on?”

Felix cast an apologetic look toward me. “I’m sorry you’ve gotten mixed up in all this, Tabatha. But it appears you’re about to meet our father’s mistress.”

SIX

Here’s the opening of a joke for you: a sorcerer, a murder suspect, and a mistress take tea together. What, do you suppose, is the punch line?

I was busy trying to figure that out as I walked stiff-legged into the Solomons’ kitchen. The boys had stayed outside—presumably to deal with the occupant of the black car still frozen at the wheel by Felix’s kinetic magic. Apparently, it didn’t take long. The pair of them marched into the kitchen with identically dour faces. Between them was a young woman—maybe six or seven years older than us, ten tops—who looked like she’d slid right off the pages of someone’s urban fantasy novel. Capped with a bright pink undercut, she sported delicate features, narrow dark eyes, and the most impressive array of fine-line tattoos I’d ever seen spiderwebbing over her bare arms and reaching hungrily toward her matte black nails. The presumable source of the deadly fireball, and—supposedly—Sorcerer Solomon’s mistress.

Fear spiraled wildly inside of me, uncertain which direction to turn its attention to. I coughed. “Um. Julian Solomon’s . . . uh, friend, I presume.”

Pink Undercut Lady rolled a pair of impressively well-lined eyes. “Let me guess,” she drawled. “They told you I was his mistress, didn’t they.”

“Weren’t you?” I asked faintly.

“No,” she said, nonplussed. “For one thing, I’m gay.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling awkward, then in slightly accusatory tones to Felix, “Did you know that?”

“Yes,” said Pink Undercut at the same time that Felix said, “Not all affairs are romantic.”

They glared at each other for an extended moment.

“In any case,” Callum put in, “I do think the fireball was uncalled for, Hester.”

Pink Undercut—Hester—rolled her eyes again, blowing a raspberry. “What, that little bit of flash? Don’t be dramatic, kid. How else was I supposed to get you to lead me to your old man’s house?” She grinned at the identical moues of surprise forming on Callum’s and Felix’s mouths. “The lovely lady of the house, Angelique, didn’t exactly approve of my friendship with Sorcerer Solomon. She cast a kinetic spell banning me from this house years ago.” Fondly, Hester knocked at the ornate white walls of the kitchen. “The classic vampire curse. I can’t enter Solomon Manor unless invited by a Solomon of the blood. I figure neither you boys nor your sister would have me here willingly either. On the other hand, I knew that if the baby of the family felt his life was in danger from some nasty rogue sorcerer, he’d make a beeline here for reinforcements. Big Brother would no doubt come flying to a great heroic rescue and take me into the house for questioning before that cop from the occult crimes unit could stick her nose into your preciously private family business.” She spread her hands. “And voilà, my invitation.”

I stared at Hester. “You threw a fireball at me to trick Felix into inviting you into a house?”

“I didn’t throw a fireball at you—I don’t even know who you are,” said Hester. “I threw a fireball at Callum. Get the facts right, sweetheart.”

Felix’s mouth, usually curved into easygoing grins, had formed the thinnest line I’d ever seen. “I thought we’d settled our differences already, Hester.”

“What, that little conference call you invited me to the other night?” Hester rolled her eyes with elaborately choreographed disdain. “I’d hardly call it settling our differences, when you spent the entire time accusing me of wishing your father dead just because of what an enormous asshole he was.”

I caught my breath, casting a glance at Callum. From the way the younger Solomon boy locked eyes with me, we were sharing the same thought: this at least solved the mystery behind the woman Callum had overheard Felix calling all those nights ago. Felix hadn’t been debriefing with a conspirator to commit murder after all.

I shivered as the memory of those fireballs crackling around Callum’s car prickled at my skin. Felix may not have been involved in a conspiracy on the call that night. But it was entirely possible that he’d been arguing with a killer all the same.

Felix, for his part, just looked exhausted by the entire situation. Even if Hester wasn’t a murderer, she was, at minimum, annoying, and Callum’s brother seemed to agree. “Please cut to the chase,” he told her. “Why are you here, and what can we do to convince you to leave?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” demanded Hester. She sounded well and truly annoyed now. “I heard the old man croaked.” She flashed an unpleasant little smile at me and Callum. “But when I reached out to his sweetly beloved eldest son with my condolences, Felix here refused to issue me a proper and polite invitation to the metaphoric wake—despite that being common courtesy to a former apprentice.” Her chin lifted. “So you lot have left me with no choice but to take matters into my own hands. I’m here to claim what’s mine.” Winking, she blew a kiss in Felix’s direction. “And you won’t be making me leave until I’m good and ready, handsome.”

“You want his inheritance,” I breathed. “Sorcerer Solomon’s inheritance.”

Hester’s attention snapped toward me in an instant, kitchen-knife-sharp. “I’m sorry, who are you again?”

“I am—was—the apprentice.” I tried to straighten my shoulders, the way Mom was always harping on me to do. “Sorcerer Solomon’s apprentice, I mean.”

Hester’s gaze raked me up and down like she was searching for a flaw in a familiar design. Then she grinned. A bitter edge lurked at the corners of the expression. “Of course you are. You’re just his type. Magically, you dolt,” she amended when she saw the look of horror on my face. “Julian always fancied himself a mentor of overlooked phenoms. Let me guess: your parents want you to be a doctor or engineer or something?”

“Lawyer,” I said.

Hester snorted. “Even better.” She folded those gloriously tattooed fingers behind her head, widening her elbows as she stretched. “Yeah, you’re his type, all right. I should know. I was his apprentice once too.” She jerked her head toward Felix. “His poor mama hated that, naturally. If Angelique’s a bitch to you, don’t take it personally. She never liked the old man’s apprentices. Thinks the secrets of the Solomon occult practice should belong strictly within the Solomon family. Never mind that not a single Solomon child cares a lick for the old man’s legacy.”

“And what about you, Hester?” Felix’s voice was calm. Dangerously so. His expression hadn’t shifted, but the tips of his cheekbones were pink, the rest of his face bone white. “The way you drained him dry, demanding more and more of him? You never cared about my father, only the magic he could teach you, so don’t pretend you care about our family.”

Hester tipped her chin up further to meet his gaze. She wasn’t a tall woman, but in that moment, she seemed to loom head and shoulders above everyone else in the kitchen. “Don’t blame me, Felix,” she said very quietly. “I think you know, deep down, that it was never my fault.”

“Hester.” Felix’s voice was a warning.

“It was never my fault that your father loved magic more than he loved you.”

“Get out,” said Felix.

I took a step back. So did Callum. Neither Felix nor Hester was looking at us, but I didn’t belong here. Felix and Hester were caught in a world of their own, simmering with a cold, black bitterness that spanned a past that belonged to neither me nor Callum.

For a moment, I thought Hester might refuse Felix. I waited for her to stand her ground and spit crueler words in his face. My back nearly hit the wall of the kitchen. Mom had been right. I never should have come here.

Then Hester turned, bowing her head. “For what it’s worth,” she said quietly as she walked away. “Even back when I was still stupid enough to think the old man loved me—or anyone, for that matter—I always felt sorry for you.” She glanced over her shoulder toward Callum. Framed in the doorway, she met his eyes for just a moment, infinitely sad and surprisingly kind. “For all of you, really.”

The manor door swung shut behind her before anyone could work up an answer to that.

“Maybe Hester killed him,” I suggested conversationally.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Callum.

I scowled at him. We were sitting up in his bedroom. Felix had taken over the kitchen, suddenly seized by a need to tidy up, despite how I knew for a fact that the Solomons employed a cleaning lady who visited twice weekly. It wasn’t like we could chat murder suspects with Callum’s favorite suspect right there, brooding and scrubbing at a wineglass like the rosé selection had personally offended him. So, Callum’s room it was. It was pretty nice, for a teenage boy’s room. He kept the whole place surprisingly neat—or maybe the cleaning lady did. I had a feeling it was Callum’s touch, though. There was too much specificity to the way the room had been arranged, from the carefully categorized titles on the bookshelves to the handwritten notebooks sitting on top of his desk. I recognized Callum’s flowing script from the few classes we’d taken together at the high school: a loopy, surprisingly pretty cursive that seemed more at home in a Gothic grimoire from a cheesy movie about sorcerers than in a notebook of AP US History notes. You could take the boy out of Solomon Manor, but you couldn’t, it seemed, take the Solomon Manor out of the boy.

I was pretty sure it was also Callum’s hand that had hung the pictures and posters framed on his walls. They seemed too carefully chosen to be a stranger’s selection. There were a lot of pictures of his family. Surprisingly many were of his sister, Circe, smiling, which I didn’t think I’d ever seen happen in real life.

I glanced toward those pictures more than once as we argued back and forth. “What’s so ridiculous about my theory?” I demanded. “You heard what she said down there. She wanted a piece of your father’s legacy. Badly enough to throw a fireball at us. That’s way more violent than your brother’s ever gotten.”

“She wasn’t even in the house when he died.”

“Would she have to be?” I sat up on my elbows. “Modern curses are pretty wild. A lot of them can be cast from a distance.”

“Tabatha.” Callum fixed me with a surprisingly intense stare. “Believe me. Hester O’Riley was not my father’s best beloved by any stretch. Which means that, according to the prophecy, she can’t have killed him.”

“Aren’t you a little biased in all this yourself?” I found myself glancing back at the photos on the walls again. “I mean, you’re his son. You’re not exactly an impartial party in all this. Maybe there was something he did—or felt—that the rest of you weren’t privy to. Felix called Hester your father’s mistress.”

Callum snorted. “I can’t blame him for that one.”

I heaved a sigh. “What happened, exactly? With Hester and your dad. I never even knew he had another apprentice besides . . . well, besides me.”

“Probably for good reason,” said Callum. He traced my gaze to the photos on the wall. “There was a time when I would have conceded that you had a point with Hester,” he admitted. “She was Dad’s first apprentice, and back when she was under his wing, he . . . Well, there’s a reason Felix calls her his mistress, let’s just say. It might not have been that kind of relationship, but that didn’t stop my father from acting like the sun rose and set with Hester. It drove Felix mad.” Irony twisted his mouth. “It drove Felix’s mother madder. I legitimately used to think Angelique might try to curse Hester to death one of these days, witch-hunting police detectives be damned.”

“And you?” I asked softly. “Sorcerer Solomon favoring Hester never bothered you?”

“Why would it?” Callum sounded genuinely quizzical. “Dad never particularly favored me, so why should it matter at all which of us he did favor? He could dote on Hester, or he could dote on Felix, and it wouldn’t make much difference in my life, except for whose praises I’d hear sung instead of my own, you know?”

I did not know. In fact, I was a little appalled. Then again, I was also an only child.

“Anyway,” he continued, “things did eventually turn sour with Hester. None of us are entirely sure why, to be honest. Felix said that she got too greedy—wanted too much, too quickly. Circe said that she disappointed Dad—that she turned out not to be the perfect golden girl of the occult he’d always made her out to be.”

“And you?” I prompted, truly curious now. “What did you think?”

“I didn’t really think anything at all.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know her well enough, beyond whatever . . . paragon, I guess, the rest of the family made her out to be, for better or worse. But what I did know was that Dad used to love her, until eventually, he stopped. And when he stopped, we could all tell.” He gave me a look halfway between a smile and a grimace. “You can always tell.”

Would that have been my fate, had Sorcerer Solomon lived? Ours had been a pretty professional bond, all things considered. Certainly, I’d never felt close enough to him to worry about inadvertently usurping the affections of his own children. But maybe even his jovial mentorship would have cooled eventually. Maybe that was the fate of all his apprentices.

Or maybe Sorcerer Solomon’s kids were just really, really bitter. Either way, I wasn’t getting a great picture of the guy’s parenting skills.

“If he’d died maybe three years ago, with that prophecy, I’d have guessed Hester too,” said Callum. “But now?” He shrugged again. “Doesn’t fit.”

I wasn’t so sure. How could any of us claim to know who Sorcerer Solomon loved best? It was clearer than ever that none of us really knew the guy as well as we thought we did. “I think we should keep our options open,” I said. “Hester’s way angrier than Felix, anyway. That probably counts for something when it comes to the likelihood of committing murder.”

A crash just outside the door made us both jump. We exchanged a frantic look. Keep in mind, we’d just survived a car chase by an angry fireball-wielding sorceress barely an hour ago. We were on edge, to say the least.

“Stay here,” said Callum, and started toward the door.

He didn’t need to tell me twice. I rooted myself to his mattress like I might find salvation there, practically hiding behind the bulk of his big jock boy shoulders. He made it maybe halfway across the bedroom before his door burst open of its own accord.

I’d have recognized Sorcerer Solomon’s shadow anywhere, well before seeing the man himself. In that moment, looming across the floor of his youngest son’s bedroom carpet, it almost made me retch. “You’re not real,” I breathed.

“Aren’t I?” That voice was all him. Casually, the dead man stepped into the room. He looked exactly the way he had the last time I’d seen him. The last time before he’d died. The twinkling blue of his eyes, the silver of his hair, every last line of his face. Sorcerer Solomon, in the flesh. “If the two of you are going to sit around debating a murder, I think the murder-ee ought to have some say, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I saw your body,” I told him. Just the memory of it made my gorge rise. I forced myself to continue. “No one could have survived that. Not even you.”

“And who’s to say that what you saw is what you saw?” countered Sorcerer Solomon. Those twinkling eyes flickered between me and Callum. “Who’s to say that anything you see at all is real?”

My heart stuttered against my ribs as my throat tightened. I hadn’t thought of that, but now that I had, I couldn’t seem to stop thinking of it. It was all true, of course. This was a magic house in the truest sense, its bones built on a history steeped in the occult, the blood of its family thick with sorcery. I’d been Sorcerer Solomon’s apprentice. How could I have forgotten the tricks that magic can play on your eye? Your memory? Your very mind?

“Drop the illusion, Circe,” said Callum. His voice cut through the tension in the room like a slap. He sounded exhausted.

I blinked. My vision had blurred. I blinked a few more times as Callum’s bedroom rippled around me. Then, all at once, it settled into place, looking just as it had before. The same pictures on the walls. The same neatly alphabetized novels on the shelves.

With one noteworthy difference: Sorcerer Solomon wasn’t standing in front of me anymore.

Instead, a strawberry blonde with a near translucent complexion offered me a ghastly grin. Twirling her long, fine braid around one finger, Circe Solomon tilted her head as she leaned back in her little brother’s doorway. “What’s the matter, prophet-apprentice? Not a fan of illusion magic?”

“Oh, let her be,” said Callum, his tone chiding. “Your timing could have been better.”

Circe pouted at him. “A pity. You’re usually more fun than this, baby brother. What’s gotten into you to make you so dreary all of a sudden, hmm?”

“A death in the family,” deadpanned Callum without missing a beat.

A horrible pause stretched out between the three of us. I couldn’t decide where to look. Callum and Circe stared at one another, their mouths pressed into identically thin, humorless lines. I glanced frantically at one sibling, then another, and finally settled on staring at the carpet.

The first peal of laughter startled me. When I looked up, Callum and Circe were clutching their bellies, mouths twitching as they giggled at each other like a pair of idiots. I went from not knowing where to look to not knowing how to quit staring at them.

“Okay,” gasped Circe. “Okay, okay, okay, little brother, that’s not half bad.” She glanced at me. “Playing Nancy Drew, I presume.”

“Why can’t I be Nancy Drew?” asked Callum, indignant.

“Pfft.” Circe blew a raspberry at him. “You’re clearly Joe Hardy.” Before Callum could recover from this particular slight, her attention snapped back toward me. “Anyway, Callum’s right, Nancy Drew: Hester didn’t kill Dad.” She shrugged. “Dad didn’t love her enough for the prophecy to fit.”

“You know about the prophecy too?” I don’t know why the idea surprised me. Maybe because Circe Solomon had always struck me as so removed from the rest of her family. I’d simply assumed her father’s business didn’t interest her.

“Oh, we all know about the prophecy.” Circe twirled that thin red-gold braid around her finger, frowning at the wispy ends. “It’s all any of us have been able to talk about. Family dinners have been unbearable for weeks.”

“What does Felix think of all this?” I asked cautiously. I didn’t miss the sidelong look from Callum.

His sister grinned none too pleasantly. “He hasn’t been coming to family dinners.”

My heart lurched inside my chest. “So you think he did it too. Killed your dad.”

“Heavens, no.” Circe’s skinny hand went to her chest. She’d painted her nails red at one point, but the ends had been chewed on and chipped. “My twin is a lot of things, but he’s not a killer. Doesn’t have the balls. The one point where baby brother and I here disagree.”

Callum sighed. “I don’t like the idea. We just don’t have any other logical options.”

“Sure we do,” said Circe. “My mother.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re still mad that she made you go to cotillion instead of letting you marathon that weird demon show at your anime club in high school.”

“Excuse you, it was a volleyball anime, and a classic. The demon show was from my college anime club—keep up.”

“That doesn’t make it better!”

“Jock.”

“Weeb.”

I coughed delicately. “Guys. Can we stop talking about anime and get back to, you know, the murder?”

Circe quit grinning at Callum and looked at me, hard eyed. “Our father loved my mother,” she said bluntly. “He didn’t always show it, and he certainly didn’t like to say it, but a part of him never stopped loving her, even when he hated her. That’s not to say that he didn’t love Rowena too, but my mother always had a spell on him.” She shrugged. “Maybe literally. And she sure as hell has the balls to kill a guy, more than my soft boy twin does.”

I chewed this over. “She does have motive,” I said slowly. “You can’t tell me she wouldn’t love to get her hands on your dad’s inheritance, Callum.”

Callum didn’t look convinced. “She wasn’t in the house the night he died either.”

“And as I’ve pointed out,” I said, “curses can be cast from a distance. Angelique is one hell of a sorceress. Probably, I’d wager, a better one than Hester. Which also makes her a better suspect than Hester.”

“For sure a better one than Hester, on both the sorceress count and the murder suspect count,” said Circe, sounding bitter. “Well, Mother’s the better sorceress for the moment,” she relented. “Time will tell. But until Hester comes into her own, Mother’s never going to let her forget it either.”

Callum hesitated. “Felix—”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” I said at last, throwing up my hands. “Why don’t we do the obvious thing first? Instead of ruling anyone out or jumping to conclusions, why don’t we actually put in the work of gathering evidence?”

Circe’s head cocked. Amusement colored her pointy features. “Nancy Drew does raise a sensible point, Callum.”

“Oh, hell.” Callum glared at us both. Now it was his turn to throw his hands up. This was turning out to be a very gesticulative murder-mystery-solving brainstorming session. “Then where do you propose we start, exactly?”

I didn’t like my own answer very much, to be honest. “The scene of the murder. We’re going to have to dig through Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop.”

SEVEN

A sorcerer’s workshop is, to put it frankly, a spooky-ass place, and it’s worse by far if the sorcerer in question has been dead awhile. It’s not just the contents of the room, the physical components of magic, all the notes and grimoires and broken-down bits of debris from spells gone awry. It’s the energy an occultist leaves behind. It crawls its way under your skin, clings to what it finds there, and won’t let go, halfway between a haunting and a temporary possession.

So, naturally, we procrastinated.

Don’t get me wrong. There were also practical reasons to avoid hitting Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop right away. I’d been gone long enough that my parents would have started getting suspicious about just how long I’d spent hanging out with the other girls in the self-defense class. Leaving a few days for evidence to go colder still didn’t sit super well with me, but it was better than being discovered by my mother.

Which meant, unfortunately for me, that I had to attend yet another self-defense class, which might have actually been worse than digging through Sorcerer Solomon’s haunted-ass workshop.

“Timing and distance, timing and distance,” Callum kept grumbling at me as we circled each other on the mats. “If you forget everything else, remember that much.” He ducked low suddenly, shooting down on one knee. Before I could process what was happening, he’d pinched my knees together with his big stupid biceps, headbutted me in the belly, and sent me toppling head over ass onto the sweaty mats.

“Ow!” I yelled, more out of surprise than actual pain, as I landed. My punishment wasn’t over. My sad little attempt to struggle back to my feet was quickly stymied by his weight on my chest as he sat down smugly on top of me.

“Oof,” I grunted. “How many of those crab cakes have you been eating, anyway?”

He ignored me. “Were you paying any attention at all to the lesson today?”

“No, not really.”

He made a tsk-tsk sound. “Timing and distance,” he repeated. “The objective of the lesson is understanding range. I couldn’t have taken you to the floor if you hadn’t allowed me inside of yours. If you don’t want to get pinned, you have to control the distance. Create distance between us to protect yourself. Close the distance between us to attack me.”

I sat up on my elbows and glared at him. “I thought you were some hoity-toity fencing club boy. Why do you know so much about fighting without a sword?”

“Timing and distance is a principle in fencing too.” He grinned. “And if you must know, my mother is also overprotective. Self-defense lessons aren’t just for the ladies, you know.”

“Lucky for you,” drawled a put-upon voice behind him.

We sprang apart, straightening our clothes. The instructor—Ro—stood staring at us, amusement pulling one corner of her mouth upward. With her high blond ponytail and hoodie, she looked more like a retired cheerleader than a badass self-defense instructor, but what the hell did I know?

“I haven’t forgotten the parking lot incident from last week’s class, you know,” Ro informed Callum. “Or the confrontation at the house.”

Callum heaved a dramatic sigh, but I caught a blush of pink ghosting over his cheekbones. “We handled it, Mom.”

I blinked at them both, my gaze darting from one face to the other. My brain processed the pieces in slow motion. The shared golden hue of their hair and bright blue eyes, the creamy complexion of their skin, even the same slightly mischievous tilt to both mouths. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

“Ro,” I said dryly, “as in Rowena Solomon, I take it?”

Our self-defense instructor bobbed her head, dipping the barest hint of a curtsy, blue eyes dancing. “A pleasure to finally formally meet my late husband’s apprentice. I’m sorry not to have been around the house frequently enough to make your acquaintance sooner.” The smile slipped momentarily from her face. “Julian would be pleased to know you’re still keeping in touch with the family.”

Oh, boy, would he.

I rounded on Callum. “You could have told me your mom was our teacher.”

“But where would the fun have been in that? Ow!” Callum rubbed the back of his head, which Ro—Rowena Solomon—had just smacked with an unceremonious quickness. “That’s child endangerment, Mom.”

Ro ignored him. “I’m given to understand that my son fancies himself a regular Nancy Drew.”

“I’m the Nancy Drew,” I corrected before I could think better of it.

Ro grinned. “I thought he was more of a Joe Hardy myself.”

“Right?” I exclaimed. “That’s what Circe said!”

Callum buried his face in his hands, groaning. “I’ve changed my mind. Taking this class was a terrible cover idea.”

“Oh, it’s a wonderful cover,” insisted his mother in bright tones. “But we really do have to make sure the two of you sell it. Where have you been telling Mrs. Zeng that Tabatha goes after class wraps up each week?”

“Out with the other girls,” said Callum promptly.

“Uh huh,” said his mother, clearly unimpressed. “And what, pray tell, are you going to do when Mrs. Zeng inevitably starts asking Tabatha about all the new girlfriends she’s made at her empowering new women’s self-defense class?”

“Invent fake girlfriends?” suggested Callum, sounding only slightly less certain of himself.

Something inside me very nearly exploded. I’d thought things couldn’t get worse than being forced to physically exert myself, run from a crazy sorceress and her fireballs, and endure Circe Solomon’s creepy old dead-dad illusions, but every time I thought I’d hit a new level of humiliation, Callum seemed to drag me right into another one.

“You are so full of shit,” I hissed at him. “First, you make me sign up for this stupid class without even bothering to tell me that your mom is teaching it! Then, as if that’s not bad enough, you actually tell her that we’re trying to . . . trying to—”

“Solve my late husband’s murder?” Rowena Solomon interrupted in blandly pleasant tones.

I shrank in on myself a little. In my fury with Callum, I’d nearly forgotten exactly whom I was yelling about. “I didn’t mean to call your class stupid,” I mumbled. “I just—”

“Have a rather understandable hatred for cardio, and for that matter, anything involving sweat?” Mrs. Solomon grinned at me. “I used to be the same way, once upon a time.”

I looked Callum’s mom up and down dubiously. She didn’t look like a mom. Which was a stupid thing to think, probably—I know, intellectually, that moms can look like literally anyone. But Mrs. Solomon, with her bright blond princess hair and perfect skin and fitness-model abs, looked, well, too hot to be someone’s mom. “Sure,” I offered, in a tone that suggested I wasn’t very sure at all.

“Anyway, I have a better cover for the two of you,” continued Callum’s mom. “Tabatha here, if her mother asks, is going to be taking private lessons with me.” She winked. “Trust me when I say that the best alibi you can provide for a worried parent is one that can be vouched for by another parent.”

Callum narrowed his eyes at his mother, suspicion written across his features. “That is a good alibi,” he allowed slowly. “But why are you, as a parent, helping us lie to your own kind?”

“Ah, my poor son.” Mrs. Solomon patted him on the head. “I’ve raised you to be perhaps a titch too suspicious for your own good.”

“I think you’ve raised me to be just suspicious enough,” retorted Callum, carefully fussing his hair back into place. “What gives, Mom?”

Mrs. Solomon sighed. “I think we’re all aware that your father didn’t die of natural causes. But Detective Chang is hardly an impartial party, is she? And who else is there to handle violence among sorcerers? The previous Mrs. Solomon? She’s no more impartial than Chang. Truth be told, I had a mind to do a little poking around myself.” She spread her hands. “I’ve got my limitations, though. There are certain things I can’t do. Places I can’t go. Things I’ll simply never understand the way an insider would.”

Callum nodded slowly. “Because you’re not a sorcerer.” A pause. “And I am.”

Mrs. Solomon’s head inclined in acknowledgment.

“How are you so sure that . . .” Callum trailed off, sucked in a breath, then seemed to steel himself. “You don’t think I killed him.”

Genuine shock flickered through Mrs. Solomon’s bright blue eyes, a perfect mirror of her son’s. God, I had been an idiot not to see the family resemblance sooner. “Of course I don’t.” She hesitated. “But.”

“Oh, but.” Callum folded his arms.

“On a strictly logical level, no suspect can technically be ruled out,” said Mrs. Solomon. “Not you.” Those blue eyes flickered toward me. “Not your lovely friend here.” Her gaze wavered. “And not even me. Which puts us in a bit of a pickle. That’s why I think it’s good that the two of you are working together.”

Now it was my turn to stare at Callum’s mom. “You think it’s good that . . . two alleged maybe-murderers are working together.”

“Think about it.” The blue eyes glittered. “You suspect my son. My son suspects you. Which means that so long as the two of you are working together, neither of you will be overlooked.”

“And what about you?” I blurted out before I could think better of it. Beside me, Callum’s breath hitched. “Who makes sure you don’t get overlooked, Mrs. Solomon?”

To my surprise, she smiled. It was a tiny upturn at the corners of her mouth, nothing more, but it was a smile all the same. “Hopefully, the two of you.” The smile vanished as she shook her head, looking abruptly tired. “Would I prefer a world in which my husband’s death was being properly investigated by someone slightly better qualified than two teenage sorcerers? Absolutely. But alas, that’s not the world we have. Our alternative to the two of you is—”

“Detective Chang,” finished Callum. He winced. “No, I take your point.”

“So you’ll cover for us while we poke around the manor instead of taking your self-defense class?” I asked hopefully.

“Goodness, no,” said Mrs. Solomon. “You’ll very much still actually be taking my self-defense class. What kind of adult authority figure do you take me for? I just thought I’d give you two a ride to the manor afterward. It’ll sell the notion of these private lessons Miss Zeng is supposedly taking. If we’re lucky, it may even discourage further vehicular murder attempts by angry sorcerers.” She checked her watch. “On that note, we have exercise drills to finish up, and I, the rest of this class to teach. I’ll see you both in the parking lot afterward.” Her gaze flicked back toward us, holding each of ours in turn. “And let’s be clear—I am sanctioning your investigation, but with strict emphasis on the investigating part. Nothing else, period. No confrontations with dangerous suspects. If you find anything, you come straight to me.”

I stared at Callum as his mother sauntered off. “Is she always like that?”

“Nosy as hell, and a bit of a micromanager?” Callum shrugged. “Aren’t all moms?”

My arms crossed. “I feel like you should be more worried. Or annoyed.”

He blinked at me, looking genuinely perplexed. “One day, when we’re not in the middle of an amateur murder investigation, and also wasting valuable self-defense class time, I’m really going to have to ask you more about your relationship with your mother. But no, I’m not worried or annoyed, mostly because one, I know my mother didn’t kill my father, and two, it’s actually pretty helpful to have a trustworthy adult on our side.” He crouched. “Now, if you don’t mind, let’s finish the exercise so we can hurry up and catch that free ride home.”

Finishing the exercise went about as well as you’d expect it to. By the time Mrs. Solomon closed the class out, I was dripping with sweat and breathing like I’d just been running wind sprints. I was grateful that neither she nor her terror of a son engaged me in much conversation on the way to her car. It probably helped that they were too busy arguing with each other.

“We don’t need your help sorting through Dad’s workshop, Ma,” said Callum for what must have been the fifth or sixth time. “It’s all sorcerer nonsense in there.”

“I may not be a sorcerer, but I did spend more than a decade as a housewife,” retorted his mother. “I have better cleaning and sorting credentials than any teenagers, even sorcerous teenagers.”

“Probably,” agreed Callum, sounding more than a little testy at this point, “but what if—”

“You can’t make all your life choices based on your worries about what-ifs, Callum. For goodness’ sake, I thought you were a prophet.”

“All the more reason to live my life worrying about what-ifs,” Callum shot back, clearly just trying to be difficult now.

I rested my head on the back of the car seat, watching the highway zip by as I tuned the Solomons out. I could feel my eyelids starting to flutter dangerously. What a weird thing, listening to a parent and their kid argue like siblings, or even friends. Which isn’t to say that I never argued with Mom—just that those arguments tended to be a lot more one-sided.

Then again, Mom was a lawyer, and Mrs. Solomon was apparently some kind of fitness influencer karate teacher type, so maybe that was to be expected.

Callum had apparently won the argument with his mom while I was half dozing in the back of the car, because she didn’t accompany us on the way up to the workshop. He was weirdly silent the entire time, though, which made me wonder if maybe I’d missed something I shouldn’t have. I must have opened and closed my mouth a dozen times, my brain hunting for something to say, and none of it sticking to my tongue.

Actually stepping into the workshop was pretty anticlimactic, at first. It was like someone had hit Pause on the room and preserved it just the way it was in the hours before Sorcerer Solomon had died. The same books strewn haphazardly across the great oak desk by the bay windows, the same pens and ink stains on the overstuffed couch where I’d once fallen asleep during a particularly long day of work. It reminded me of the exhibits at museums that my parents used to take me to as a kid, the walk-through reenactments of another time and place, larger than life and frozen in time.

That, more than anything else, made me afraid to touch anything.

“What the hell are you two doing here?”

I swallowed a yelp as I spun around. Circe Solomon stood staring at me with narrowed green eyes. It was a jarring sight. Washed-out and weedy as she was, with the telltale back hunch of a girl who spent more time in front of a keyboard than anywhere else, Circe didn’t look much like Felix or Angelique. But with her eyes blazing at me that way, I’d have believed in a heartbeat that she was a younger version of her mother summoned to murder me on the spot.

“Um,” I said intelligently—hopefully loud enough to be heard over the heartbeat attempting to bust its way out of my chest. “I . . . well.”

Slowly, her expression relaxed into a smirk. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Playing more Nancy Drew, are we?” Her gaze darted between me and Callum. “Or is it something more mundane? I didn’t think the nerdy ones were your type, baby brother.”

The least Callum could have done was blush as bright as I did in that moment. Instead, he grinned at his sister, all douchey movie-star bright. “I’m not as shallow as you think.”

Ouch. Did that count as negging?

“What about you, Circe?” Callum folded his arms. “Getting in on some amateur sleuthing yourself?”

Circe rolled her eyes. “Hardly.” She waved a book in our faces. One of Sorcerer Solomon’s old grimoires. “And before you two master detectives add me to your murder suspect list, relax. I was just looking for this. Couldn’t remember the spell for an illusion I’m working on.” Her mouth twisted slightly downward at the edges. “Dad may have pooh-poohed illusionists, but at least he was a completionist when it came to note-taking on major branches of sorcery. I figured he’d have a cheat sheet.”

“Shouldn’t we still be keeping you on the suspect list, though?” I asked with inspired bravado. “A cheat sheet isn’t an alibi.” I honestly hadn’t given much thought to the idea of Callum’s shut-in sister as a murderer, but seeing her sneak around the workshop, watching us with her mother’s eyes, lent fuel to a newly reawakened suspicion.

Those green eyes of hers rested on me impassively. “No,” she said, without a trace of defensiveness or nervous energy. “You know the prophecy, right? ‘I shall die at the hands of my best beloved.’ ” Her mouth twisted itself into a bitter little smile. “He didn’t love me—little Circe, the sad little illusionist, the disappointment—or at least, he didn’t love me nearly enough for me to kill him.” She turned to go. “So you can both chill out.”

I tried to sneak a look at the grimoire’s title, but Circe was already sauntering toward the door. “Anyway, enjoy sleuthing. Or making out, whatever.” She wiggled her fingers goodbye with a dryly sarcastic giggle, and was gone.

I cleared my throat and forced myself to face Callum. “Dude. What if she’s talking bullshit? Couldn’t she have killed your dad?”

I didn’t care what Circe had said about being ill favored. She was still Old Man Solomon’s little girl, his only daughter, and dads loved their daughters. It was the way of the world, so far as I was concerned.

Callum looked down his nose at me, eyebrows climbing. “Circe? Anime club–obsessed, sulky nerd, illusionist Circe? You think she murdered the most renowned sorcerer on the East Coast?”

“I love that the first defense you can think of for her is that she’s some kind of weird nerd, and not that she’s, you know, your sister.” I scowled at him. “Then again, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You still think it’s Felix, don’t you?”

And just like that, the wind went right out of Callum’s sails. His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know.” His voice was clipped, hovering between defensiveness and the beginnings of exhaustion. “Hell, I don’t know, it could be. It could also be Circe. It could be Angelique, for that matter. It’s not like Dad ever made it clear who or what he loved beyond magic itself.”

Without thinking, I put my hand on his elbow. “Hey,” I said softly.

He blinked rapidly, several times, and shook his head. “Sorry.” His voice was rough. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. It’s just . . . I didn’t realize, it’s the first time I’ve set foot in here since he . . . you know.”

“I’m sorry.” I bowed my head. My hand hadn’t dropped from his elbow. “I could have exercised a little more sensitivity about taking you to the scene of your dad’s murder.”

He barked a laugh. The elbow relaxed against my palm. “I took you here as much as you took me.” I didn’t think he was just talking about the workshop. “Anyway. One way we’re definitely not going to solve this mystery is standing around talking about who it might be without any actual evidence. We need real leads, so we should probably look through the grimoires first. It’s where he probably would have made note of anything . . . personal.” A little twitch of a shrug. “Which, let’s be real, Dad was never great at separating from the professional.”

I hesitated. Then, bluntly: “Are you sure I should even be here?”

He laughed again, startled, but the sound was a little smoother. “You’re fine. More than fine, really. It’s like Mom said. The work needs to be done, and it’s not like we can rely on Detective Chang to do it.” He stepped into the room and jerked his head toward the shelves. “The grimoires. Let’s get to them.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever attempted to organize a library of grimoires before, but let me tell you, so far as murder investigation tasks go, it’s not a very exciting one. It wasn’t really anything I hadn’t seen over the course of my apprenticeship: the endless notes and records and data that I’d told Sorcerer Solomon half a million times to just put in an Excel sheet.

Yes, even sorcerers have to do admin, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be old-fashioned as all hell about it.

The one thing that did catch my eye, finally, was a cabinet in a corner of the workshop. It looked like an antique—something you might have picked up from an auction house, all dark wood and brass embossing. It was shunted off into its little nook against the wall of the workshop, almost like Sorcerer Solomon—or whoever had last touched the thing—wanted to be rid of it. The last rays of late afternoon sun had given way to the hazy orange half-light of dusk through the window, which cast spookier shadows across the cabinet than it might otherwise have deserved.

Still, it drew my eye. I didn’t want to ignore that instinct. Maybe I wasn’t a real sorcerer yet, but I’d been Sorcerer Solomon’s apprentice, all the same. If something in his workshop was attracting my notice, I figured it was at least worth looking at.

The cabinet, unfortunately for me, had other ideas. No sooner had I started toward it than cold began to rattle my bones. I stopped about four feet short of the cabinet, gooseflesh prickling my skin, shivering so hard, I couldn’t continue. “What—”

A hand, warm on my elbow, yanked me aside. “He’s sealed it.”

Abruptly, heat sank back into my bones as my shaking subsided. I looked up at Callum. He still had his hand at my elbow. I didn’t bother pulling away from his warmth. The cold may have been gone, but the memory of it lingered on the insides of my skin. “What the hell was that?”

Callum’s expression was grim, blue eyes narrowed to slits as he stared down at the box in the corner. “My father’s secrets, clearly. That was as strong a warding spell as I’ve ever felt.”

Of course. New warmth flooded my cheeks. I’d learned warding spells in my first week as an apprentice under Callum’s father. It had been so long since I’d reviewed anything other than fortune-telling, though, that I’d completely forgotten how Sorcerer Solomon’s wards felt: cruel as winter and cold as ice, seeping into the bones whenever you approached the warded object until you thought you might never be warm again.

On one hand, what an embarrassing mistake, not to recognize one of his signature magics. On the other hand: Lord almighty, what in hell was he hiding in that cabinet?

“There’s got to be a way to undo the ward,” I said aloud. “He’s dead, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yeah, but his magic sure isn’t,” said Callum grimly. “If there’s a way to break it, though, it’s gotta be in this room somewhere. Have you gone through all the grimoires?”

I sighed. “No. And I doubt he’d keep it anywhere that obvious. But there’s a counterspell for every spell. It’s just a matter of figuring out the right one.” I looked around the room, frustrated, willing it to show me something, anything, that might be of use.

My gaze landed on a sheet of paper sandwiched between the pages of one of Sorcerer Solomon’s notebooks. It wasn’t the existence of the paper itself so much as the handwriting scrawled across it that caught my eye. Keep in mind, I’d apprenticed for Sorcerer Solomon for years at this point. I knew the way his writing looked. The elegant scrawl across the sheet looked nothing like his usual blocky freehand writing.

Frowning, I plucked it free from the notebook. “Hey, isn’t this—”

Quick as a viper, Callum’s hand was around mine. “Never mind that. Give it here.”

Of course, when someone grabs your hand and tells you to never mind whatever you’re holding, all that does is make you want to know what it is. I slithered my fingers free of his grasp. The writing on the paper wasn’t Sorcerer Solomon’s, but I recognized it. I’d seen it before, more than once. “You wrote this, didn’t you?”

“Tabatha—”

He reached again, fencer-quick, but I saw it coming this time and danced out of the way as I read the scrawl aloud. “ ‘I will die at the hands of—’ ” I faltered. “ ‘At the hands of my best beloved,’ ” I finished faintly. “ ‘So shall it be.’ ”

The sheet of paper floated back to the top of the desk as I dropped my hand.

Callum was already shaking his head. “It’s just a stupid note, Tabatha.”

“It’s not just a stupid note.” I stared at Callum’s handwriting, somehow accusingly stark, where that sheet of paper rested on top of his father’s notebook. Or what I thought had been his father’s notebook. “That was your dad’s prophecy of his own death. So why is it written in your hand?”

“You knew my dad—he needed notetakers sometimes. It’s really not a big deal.”

“The more you tell me it’s not a big deal, the bigger a deal it obviously is,” I said. He refused to meet my gaze. “Callum. I worked for your dad, remember? I knew who did most of his note-taking. It was me, maybe occasionally Felix, but—”

Callum gave a wild little laugh. “And we’re back to Felix again.”

A nervous little bubble of irritation swelled to life inside my chest. “Yeah, we are. I get that you and your brother have issues.” Up to and including, apparently, suspicions of patricide. I sucked in a breath, and persisted: “Still, that doesn’t change the fact that he was the one who went the extra mile to help me out when I was stuck on late-night duty.”

“And I didn’t. That’s what you’re pointing out, right?” Callum rubbed a palm over his face. “All right. Let me ask you this. Did you ever wonder why? I mean, both Felix and I are sorcerers, right? It’s only fair we should have been splitting Dad’s workshop duties evenly with you.”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” I snapped. “That isn’t the point, Callum. We need to—”

“No, no, it’s more important than you think.” Callum finally looked me in the eye. The smile he offered me was thin, ghosting at the edges of his mouth. “You never saw me helping out with Dad’s work because it was never when you were around. Granted, you were around a lot. But you don’t live here. And what he had me do, no one was supposed to know about.”

I took a step back. “What are you talking about?”

Callum picked up the sheet of notepaper and waved it around with a flourish. “This.” He glanced at his own handwriting and scoffed. For a moment, he looked like he might crumple the page. Then, very carefully, he set it back on the desk, atop the notebooks. “You’re right. I wrote that,” he said bluntly. “Because I’ve been writing almost all of Dad’s prophecies for some time now—or at least, the lion’s share of them. For about two years, to be exact.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“Yeah.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “The craft of casting magic is all about harnessing willpower, right? The truest form of mind over matter. Arguably more so for the power of prophecy than any of the other magics, since we can’t use sigils or incantations as a cheat, you know?”

“Where are you going with this? What on earth does that have to do with being . . . some kind of occult ghostwriter for Sorcerer Solomon?”

“I’m getting there,” said Callum. “Dad’s mind is—sorry, was . . . not what it once was.” A clouded look entered his eyes. “In proper medical circles, they don’t call what happens to us dementia—at least, not officially. Still, symptoms of dementia aren’t so different from the symptoms that start afflicting us once our brains have decided to betray us.”

I frowned, remembering an old grade school lesson. “Are you talking about the memory loss that some sorcerers deal with? But that’s—”

“Rare? Not something most healthy occult practitioners need to worry about? Sure,” he acknowledged. “But it’s still definitely a thing among sorcerers who overexert themselves—most doctors seem to think it’s a side effect of too much stress on the brain from years of obsessive magical practice. Still, Dad was always so careful. Guess even the great Sorcerer Solomon wasn’t immune to occult-induced brain trauma, though.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I insisted. “I mean, I can see how his lifestyle and priorities maybe weren’t great for keeping his mind healthy, but he just . . . he always seemed fine. That’s all.”

I wasn’t some unschooled idiot. I knew about the increased risk of memory loss for occult practitioners. Its dangers were a required part of any sorcery basics curriculum for kids who took occult electives in school. We learned about the risk for brain damage, right alongside those scary stories about spells gone wrong, sorcerers who lose control of the occult forces they summon, et cetera and so forth. The sort of thing that would go in the fine print on a medicine bottle, if you could sell sorcery in pill form.

Still, most of us were so busy being terrified of the horror stories about backfiring spells and magic run amok in the hands of an incompetent sorcerer, we could hardly spare any anxiety over a relatively rare mental condition, and one that would afflict us only far in the future. After all, even now, the majority of sorcerers—even the ones who go on to become noted professionals in the field—live and die with perfectly healthy brains and their faculties reasonably intact.

But Callum was right: a tiny percentage—usually the geniuses of the field, the truly obsessed, the ones who lived and breathed the occult, who went on to become true innovators with few other interests in life—started losing touch with reality as they got older.

Too much strain on the brain, indeed.

In a particularly cruel stroke of irony, magically induced brain damage typically stole a sorcerer’s ability to practice their craft before it stole anything else. One day, you were a master of the occult, and the next, suddenly all your incantations and sigils would start failing you. After all, a spell is only as powerful as the mind behind it. You’d usually have three years, maybe four, before everything else—your memories, your ability to reason, to recognize your loved ones—started to fade, along with your magic.

It was, to put it succinctly, a thoroughly awful process.

Still, it happened rarely enough that possible brain damage hadn’t even numbered among my parents’ top qualms when I’d picked a sorcery apprenticeship over the debate team or the robotics club. Though in hindsight, maybe they just assumed I’d never be a genius. Trust my own parents to accidentally neg me, even unintentionally.

“Dad was usually fine,” allowed Callum. “I don’t blame you for missing the signs—I did, at first, too. His wasn’t an extreme case—at least, it wasn’t yet, when he died. And for what it’s worth, on the few days that he wasn’t fine, he was a master class in masking. As one of his apprentices, you should know better than almost anyone what that looked like. No show of weakness. And eccentric enough to brush off any weirdness as quirky, part and parcel of his brand of spooky, opaque occult celebrity. He didn’t want anyone to know. Which is where he put me to use.”

“Writing the prophecies when he couldn’t,” I said slowly.

“Bit of a shocker, isn’t it? You’d think that if Dad were to pick a sorcerous child to ghostwrite his famous prophecies for him, it would be Felix, but alas, Felix is a kinetic specialist.” Callum shrugged. “The only member of the family who inherited the same knack for prophecy is, well, me. Unfortunately for Dad and me both.”

I sat down hard on a stack of books. “He wanted you to cover up his illness. That’s why he had you write your prophecies under his name. That’s a hell of a burden to put on your kid.”

The side of Callum’s mouth pulled upward, but I couldn’t call it a smile. He looked too sad. “Sure,” he said. “But the great Sorcerer Solomon is—was—my dad. Who was I to deny him?”

“Good god,” I said, shaking my head. “You couldn’t have told me about this little secret a teensy bit earlier?”

“What would have been the point?” Callum asked dully. “You’re—you were his apprentice, not mine. And as you so astutely pointed out, it’s his name that goes on the work at the end of the day. When was I going to tell you, anyway? In the middle of a workshop session? It’s not really the kind of thing that you can smoothly segue into over small talk.”

“When were you supposed to tell me?” I repeated incredulously, rising from my stack of books. “I think, say, the moment I agreed to investigate his murder with you might have been an opportune moment!” I paced the length of the workshop. “You said you were writing the lion’s share of his prophecies toward the end, before he died. Define lion’s share, Callum. Just how many of his prophecies were secretly yours all along?”

“Not all of them,” said Callum. “Even after it started waning, his skill never deserted him entirely. He was still Sorcerer Solomon to the very end. By the time he died, he only needed me to write like . . . maybe seventy-five percent or so of them.”

“Seventy-five percent?” I practically yelled. The beginnings of a horrendous stress headache brewed treacherously under the depths of my skull. “Please tell me,” I said, brandishing that accursed sheet of notepaper in his face, “that this prophecy he made about his own death was truly his own, and that you really were just taking notes for him, or some shit. Please tell me that Sorcerer Solomon was the one who predicted he’d die at the hands of his best beloved.”

“Oh,” said Callum in an uncharacteristically small voice. “No, that . . . that one really was mine.”

I sucked in a gust of air, sharp as a knife in my lungs. Here’s the thing about the particular magic of a prophet: as sorcerers, our ability to predict the future is only as good as the lens through which we perceive it. When you, the trusty fortune teller, predict that your favorite cookies will be out of stock at the local grocery store, it’s because you know that the gingerbread wafers are your favorite. When you predict that you’re going to be beaten to the top of the honor roll by the AP Calc rival you find most annoying, it’s because you personally think that Jackson Allerdale has been kind of a pompous dick ever since he got put in all those sixth-grade honors classes. And when you, say, predict that you will die at the hands of the person you love most in all the world, then it’s because, presumably, you know who that is.

But if another fortune teller makes that call? Well, the prophecy only goes as far as their knowledge takes them. Authorship matters. And here Callum Solomon stood, blinking owlish blue eyes at me, like he didn’t have a damn clue about any of the implications of the massive shitshow he’d made of this stupid amateur sleuthing project.

“Oh, hell.” It took everything I had not to grab him by those great brawny jock shoulders of his and give him a good shake. “You should have told me,” I repeated.

“Tabatha, I—”

I wasn’t in the mood for more excuses. “Callum, don’t you get it? This changes everything about that last prophecy. The fact that you were the one who wrote it, and not him? That means ‘my best beloved’ might not be his best beloved at all. It’s just who you think his best beloved is.”

“Well, that makes our jobs a lot easier, then, doesn’t it?” Callum offered a sardonic smile, sharper than the thin-lipped one he’d given me earlier. “We all know who Dad’s favorite kid is.”

“God, this Felix thing is becoming an obsession!” I yelled. I glared hard at him. “Why are you so eager to pin this on him anyway? Because from where I’m standing, I only see one person who’s been hiding something big about your dad, and it’s not Felix.”

Callum’s eyes widened for just a moment before his expression went dangerously neutral. “What are you saying? You think it was me?” He took a step toward me. “And so what if it was? What if you’ve been working with a murderer this whole time?”

I backed up instinctively, and promptly knocked over the stack of books I’d been sitting on. Callum’s fingers closed around my wrist, all high school athleticism, before I could fall. He tugged me to my feet. Automatically, my other hand grabbed his shoulder, steadying myself.

It brought us nose to nose. “Well?” he breathed, looking right at me. “You think I killed him?”

I didn’t say anything. I’m not sure if I could have, in that moment, even if I’d wanted to. I couldn’t seem to quit staring at him, the desperate, bitter look in those blue eyes, the hunger for condemnation.

Instead of answering the question directly, I lifted my chin. “Sorcerer Solomon told me to find you when he died. He told me to stay by your side.” I ignored the way my stomach plummeted at the memory, turned sour now by unpleasant, freshly discovered context. “Did you write that for him too?”

Because that too, of course, would change everything. Sorcerer Solomon foreseeing that my safety depended on staying by Callum’s side was one thing. Callum foreseeing it—or hell, just pretending that he’d foreseen it—was something else entirely. There were a lot of things that a guy who’d offed his dad could do to a girl he’d tricked into following him around like a lost puppy.

Yet here I stood, heart trying to bang its way out of my chest but my feet still stuck in place, like my shoes were glued to that workshop floor. The scene of the crime.

And possible murderer here before me. The two of us alone. Isolated.

Callum closed his eyes. For a moment, I didn’t think he’d answer my question at all. Then he shook his head minutely. “No,” he said. “No, I never predicted anything about you for Dad. But I remember him telling me about that when I gave him the prophecy.” He looked at me, exhaustion heavy on his features. “That I should look out for you after he died. At the time, I thought maybe that made you a suspect for the murder.”

My blood ran hot, then cold. “And now?” I asked, half afraid of the answer.

Also, more than half afraid of Callum himself. It was an alien feeling. I disliked it.

“Now I think,” he began, then trailed off. He cast his gaze sideways and mumbled, “Now I think that maybe, for once, maybe Dad was trying to do right by me.”

That could have meant any number of things. I was about to say so when the door burst open.

Both Callum and I whirled around. Circe Solomon was back but looked nothing like she had a couple of hours ago, when we’d first stumbled across her in the workshop. Pale and drawn and utterly herself, no hint of an illusion clinging to her form, she stood wide eyed and panting at the doorway. “It’s been rescheduled,” she said without preamble. “Your mom sent me up here to tell you.”

“What has?” demanded Callum.

“What else?” Circe swallowed a gulp of air and said, “Dad’s séance. The next full moon is around the corner.” She glanced past Callum toward me, eyes narrowed. “And this time, the apprentice has a formal invitation.”

I should explain, at this point, that a formal invitation is technically considered a Very Different Thing—capitalized letters fully deliberate—from a phone call from a family member. This wasn’t Felix asking me to come along for sentimentality. This was the Solomon family declaring me, in official terms, a potential inheritor to their patriarch’s sorcerous works.

“It was Rowena’s idea, not mine,” Circe insisted, as if implying my relationship with the Solomon clan would be a great social crime. Which, in Angelique Reed’s eyes, it probably would, in fairness. “Either of you has an issue with it, take it up with her.”

Callum frowned at his sister. “My mother’s not a sorcerer.”

“But she is—was—the wife of the patriarch sorcerer at the time of his death.” Circe shrugged. “You know how families like ours get about the proper order of succession. Marriage matters. And technically, Rowena’s will overrules pretty much everyone’s except darling eldest son Felix’s.” She made a face at the invocation of her twin’s name.

Callum’s brows climbed. “Bet your mother must love that.”

“Oh, just adores it,” said Circe breezily. Her pale green gaze landed on mine. “Get excited,” she suggested. “You may just have a shot at being named my father’s successor.”

I want to tell you right now that I balked. I want to tell you that I didn’t get even a little, tiny bit excited. Sorcerer Solomon was dead. I’d been his apprentice. I’d teamed up with his son to try to solve his murder. The last thing I wanted was to feel like I’d profited off Callum’s loss. But some awful little part of me—the one that had campaigned to apprentice for Sorcerer Solomon instead of joining a debate team, or learning Python for the robotics club, or, god forbid, interning for my mother’s law firm—thrilled at the thought of Julian Solomon himself naming me his heir. Me, the girl who’d been born about as ordinary and middle class and, well, un-occult-ish as they came.

“Fat chance,” I said instead, trying to sound dismissive, and hoping desperately that I was half the illusionist that Circe was.

Now, I should note here that inviting apprentices—or former apprentices—to the séance of a dead sorcerer is a relatively young tradition in occult circles. Usually, it’s a family-only affair. After all, who would a dead sorcerer bequeath his magical secrets and inheritance and earth-bound legacy to, if not members of his own family? Before being commercialized, sorcery was a pretty insular practice, its secrets handed down from one generation to the next in single families and guarded jealously by their members. Along with mainstream acceptance and professionalization came the apprenticeship system—which meant a wider pool of potential inheritors.

I never thought of myself as one of them, though. Even these days, apprentices are usually invited to a séance as a formality. The dead sorcerer’s legacy almost always goes to a spouse or eldest child. Some traditions die hard. Maybe that was why some part of me wanted it.

I should also note, for the record, that I was a fool back then. After all, most dead sorcerers hadn’t relied on their teenage sons to ghostwrite their world-famous prophecies, so what the hell could I really be sure of at this point?

“This could be a good thing for our investigation, actually,” Callum said after Circe left.

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Me being invited to your dead dad’s séance?”

“You being invited to an event attended only by Solomon family members and inner circle,” said Callum. “Think about it. My father was murdered by his allegedly best beloved—”

“—or who you think his best beloved was,” I muttered under my breath.

“—and the séance will take place in a room filled exclusively with the people he loved most in life. Well, presumably.”

It was a pretty good point, actually. I wasn’t in much of a mood to concede it to Callum, whom I was still pretty pissed at for the whole “lying to me about ghostwriting a not-insignificant number of his dad’s prophecies” thing. And that wasn’t even getting into my newly heightened estimation of his murder suspect status. But I was my mother’s daughter, and I couldn’t deny the logic of what he’d said: we wouldn’t have many opportunities besides Sorcerer Solomon’s séance to observe all of his loved ones in a single space.

“Fine,” I bit out. “We’ll keep an eye out for any weird behavior from séance guests, I guess.”

Plans didn’t progress much further beyond that. Callum offered to drop me off at home—well, a block from home, where he wouldn’t be spotted by my mother. He didn’t breathe a word during the entire drive, though, his mouth a tight line, his hands uncharacteristically white-knuckled on the steering wheel. It was such a departure from his obnoxiously happy-go-lucky default mode that I almost wished I’d just walked home like I’d planned on, instead.

But it was dark out, and I was both lazy and more than a little afraid of my own shadow in the wake of, well, everything that had happened over the course of the day. So when Callum offered to take me home, I didn’t say no. Worst-case scenario, he really had killed his dad and was going to kill me next, but he probably wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it in his own car.

Probably.

Callum pulled up to the curb—about a block from my neighborhood, as promised—but when he parked the car, he did it so suddenly, my collarbone jarred against the strap of my seat belt. “Jesus,” I hissed under my breath, all set to complain that I thought I was the one who’d failed my driver’s test.

Callum interrupted before I could. “He hated letting me do it at first,” he said, speaking as abruptly as he’d parked. His words shattered that odd near-silence between us, like stones on the surface of a pond. “Writing the prophecies for him, I mean.”

Lord. What to say to that? I eyed him carefully. He didn’t eye me back, staring straight ahead at the curb, his mind clearly elsewhere. Hopefully not on, you know, murdering me. But he was also pretty clearly in a talking mood. And if he was in a talking mood, maybe I could get answers that would help us in our investigation.

Even if our investigation ended in the Joe Hardy to my Nancy Drew revealed as the true villain all along. Was it something I could stomach? Was it something I’d even survive, once the shit hit the fan? Callum and I might be roughly equal in sorcerous talent, but our stats didn’t exactly match up elsewhere: he was bigger, stronger, an athlete, and a rich, popular white boy. I was exactly none of those things. If Callum decided to turn against me, I wasn’t about to bet on my own odds.

And yet. I’d asked him if he’d been the mastermind behind his father’s insistence that I stay by his side after Sorcerer Solomon died. He’d said no.

And I—for absolutely no actual, evidence-based reason—believed him. Staring at him now—the broad set of his muscle-packed shoulders, the powerful, well-sculpted hands drumming on the steering wheel, hands that could no doubt bruise and break me, if he so chose—I wet my lips. Tread carefully, Zeng. Tread very carefully.

“How did the ruse start?” I asked. “Dementia isn’t the kind of thing that just gets brushed under the carpet.”

“But that’s the thing. It wasn’t dementia—not in the normal, scientific sense.” Slowly, he exhaled, those hands still drumming on the steering wheel. I tried not to imagine them stained in blood. “Like I said, memory loss in sorcerers is its own phenomenon—something that uniquely afflicts the most obsessive and dedicated of practitioners. We don’t even have a name for our ailment. Science has never done a great job of fully understanding the particularities of what magic does to the human brain. So instead, doctors have turned it into our problem. To mitigate the effects, based on guesswork, and trial and error.”

He scoffed faintly before continuing, “I’m sure you still remember all the self-care basics and health warnings from the Sorcery 101 teachers during those baby elective classes in like fifth grade or whatever. Those speeches about limiting the amount of time you spend on the occult per day, monitoring the way you feel after a lot of casting in a short period of time, et cetera, et cetera.”

I nodded, unable to say anything else.

“Anyway. Once occult-induced brain damage sets in, though, that’s that.” He shrugged. “It’s not as bad as it could be, I guess. There are other diseases of the brain that are far worse—up to and including true dementia. Sorcerers afflicted by our own unique disease still mostly function fine in day-to-day life. We don’t start forgetting everyday things, or find ourselves confused. Those symptoms happen later, in the more advanced stages of the illness.”

Callum took a careful breath. “But we do lose most of our ability to reliably cast our magic, and fortune tellers in particular, instead of losing memories of the past . . . well. We lose our vision of the future. For some prophets, the ones who have made the occult their entire source of identity, that’s worse than any form of memory loss.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. I could guess who belonged in the “some prophets” category.

“So when Dad realized that he couldn’t read the events ahead of him like a book the way he always used to, the way he’d done since he was our age—when all he saw was a blank page—he knew exactly what was going on. And, of course, once he realized that the condition couldn’t be reversed, he didn’t want anyone else to know. Ever.”

“Ever?”

“You asked why I didn’t tell you sooner.” Callum aimed a humorless smile at me. “I won’t pretend to be a saint. But I do keep my promises, Zeng. Including the ones I made to my ailing father, who swore me to secrecy over the loss of the gifts that built our family almost its entire modern-day fortune.” He gave a darksome little chuckle. “I guess Dad didn’t figure on his sorcery apprentice becoming Joe Hardy after he died, though.”

“Nancy Drew,” I corrected automatically. My head spun. A kaleidoscope of past possibility flooded my mind, wild and dazzling and awful in all its vast array of what might have been. When had Sorcerer Solomon’s own mind begun to fail him? When had those marvelous, legendary gifts of prophecy begun to fade—truly fade? He hadn’t missed a beat in a single one of our lessons, always twinkling blue eyes and knowing winks and the trollish grins of the elder and wiser mentor. He’d always seemed so utterly confident in himself, so at ease in his own skin as a sorcerer, eternal and invulnerable to the petty concerns of the rest of us mere mortals. When had he started faking it?

When did he start lying to me?

“Did Felix or Circe know?” I asked, my voice wooden.

“Amazingly, no.” Callum’s smile had a bitter edge to it. “No one knew except me. And if Dad had had his way, I wouldn’t have known either. He never told me. I had to figure it out on my own. I almost didn’t. I probably wouldn’t have if we hadn’t shared the same particular gifts. You’re a prophet too, so you’d know, right? A great fortune teller can fool almost anyone who’s not also a fortune teller—even other sorcerers. But even an ain’t-shit fortune teller can tell, after a certain point, when the great fortune teller is bullshitting the rest of the world. It was the way he worded his prophecies—more ambiguity than necessary, little turns of phrase that would give him an easy way out if they didn’t come true just so.” Callum paused. “I did almost tell the family. I wanted to. I . . . I really, really wanted to.”

I swallowed. “What stopped you?”

Callum closed his eyes, resting his head against the back of the car seat. “I don’t know. Maybe loyalty. Maybe selfishness.” His eyelids fluttered open so he could stare, blank faced, at the ceiling of the car. “It was kind of nice, you know. Being needed by Dad for once. Finally having something that only I could do for him, as the only other fortune teller in the family.” He glanced toward me. “Well, me, and presumably you.”

I shook my head instinctively. “I’m not family, though—I’m not—I wasn’t his kid. It wouldn’t have been right.”

The side of Callum’s mouth crooked upward. “I’m not so sure being his kid or not being his kid makes it more or less right. It just is. Was.” He sighed. “Besides, you’re his apprentice. And a good one, or you wouldn’t have earned the right to an appearance at the séance.” With some amusement, he added, “Not that Angelique would ever acknowledge it.”

The reminder nearly froze my heartbeat in place. “God. She’s one hundred percent going to kill me when she sees me there.”

“Nah.” This time when Callum grinned, he looked like he actually meant it, the expression a little weary but soft around the edges, crinkling the corners of his eyes. “My mom will beat her up if she tries.”

The notion was so absurd, I couldn’t help the bubble of laughter that burst out of me. “You could have told me, you know,” I finally managed between gasps. Wiping at my streaming eyes, I elaborated, “About ghostwriting your dad’s prophecies, I mean. I wouldn’t have told anyone. Fortune tellers ought to stick together.”

Callum glanced at me, startled. Then the smile returned, a little shy, playing about the edges of his mouth. “Maybe I should have.”

“Definitely,” I declared. I shook my head. “Well, there’s no helping it now. What’s done is done.” My chest tightened a little as I added, maybe a touch too casually, “And we still have a murderer to catch.”

Surprise blossomed in his face, then wariness. “So you don’t think I killed him after all?”

I hesitated. I can admit to myself now—remembering what it felt like to sit in his car and see the cautious hope in his gaze—that in that moment, I really did hesitate. Looking at him, with those big blue eyes looking right back at me, I’d have called him guileless. I’d have called him soft. I’d have called him innocent.

Which is maybe why I also found myself choking out, “I don’t know.”

And yeah, before you ask me—and I know you want to ask me—I was telling the truth. I was a little afraid of him. And I was a little entranced by him. Neither feeling made me naive to the fact that he’d lied to me about the real author of Sorcerer Solomon’s prophecies. Callum had been in the right place at the right time to kill his father. But neither did it blind me to the sincerity in both his father’s voice and Callum’s, when they’d bound me to Callum’s side.

“In fairness,” I found myself saying, “if you didn’t kill him, then you still have every reason to suspect that I did.”

I met his gaze head-on and told him right to his face, before I could chicken out, “We agreed to ferret out the real murderer. That means seeing this thing through, even if one of us doesn’t like the answer we arrive at, right?”

Callum didn’t look away from me immediately, nor did his expression shutter right away. Instead, he stared at me for a beat longer, eyelashes at half-mast, some intangible want hanging heavy behind those eyes of his. “Fair enough,” he said at last. Another pause, then, “See you tomorrow?”

The question mark lingered on the end of his voice. He looked half afraid of the answer.

I hadn’t even touched the car door handle yet. Still stuck in that moment, I guess. It’s always been weird to me, how beats of time can hold you captive that way with no real rhyme or reason. I always figured that as someone who by nature deals with shit that hasn’t happened yet, I ought to have had a better hold on time itself. Yet here we were, two teen fortune-telling sorcerers-in-training, sitting in a car and staring gobsmacked at one another for no logical reason.

I leaned toward him, one hand drifting listlessly toward his face. I don’t know why, or what for. Assurance, or comfort, or some intangible else-thing I couldn’t put into words. Hell, maybe I just wanted to show him—physically, even if I couldn’t muster the words vocally—how sorry I was. Sorry that his father had died. Sorry that I couldn’t commit 100 percent to believing in his innocence. And sorry, maybe most of all, that I couldn’t prove to him that I wasn’t a killer either.

That blond hair of his was mussed, probably from the self-defense class earlier, or maybe just from the number of times he’d dragged his fingers through it while rummaging through his dad’s study. I imagined him writing prophecies on scraps of paper in that flowing hand, tucking them away like dirty little secrets into Sorcerer Solomon’s grimoires, offering up his own power to preserve his father’s. I wondered what a toll that must have taken. The anxiety and resentment and aching exhaustion of the whole ruse. I wondered how long anyone could bear it. And when, precisely, they’d snap.

My fingers paused. Then, awkwardly and very deliberately, I brushed the golden fringe out of his eyes, folding stray locks back into place like I was some old-fashioned schoolmarm. He blinked at me a few times, but didn’t object. Then, because apparently I hadn’t already made myself enough of a fool, I patted him on the shoulder. Also very awkwardly.

“Sure,” I said at last. “Yeah. Tomorrow. We’ll see each other tomorrow.”

EIGHT

The problem—and I do feel like I should confess right now, before I continue any further with this account—the problem is that I really, really didn’t want Callum to have murdered his dad. That’s probably pretty obvious by now, but before you roll your eyes, sigh, and skip ahead, hear me out: I had several reasons for wanting Callum to be innocent. The most obvious reason was that the more time I spent with a murderer, the likelier I’d catch on to him, and the more I caught on to him, the likelier it was that the murderer would kill me too. The second most obvious reason was that my mom would almost definitely find out I’d been hanging out with Callum Solomon against her express wishes, and I wouldn’t be able to sweep the whole thing under the rug once Sorcerer Solomon’s murder was solved, the way I’d definitely been hoping to. Exposing a dude for patricide is not the kind of thing that you can just quietly hide from your parents forever.

The third, and probably stupidest, reason was that, well, I actually kind of liked Callum now that I’d gotten to know him a bit better. It was the little things: the rides home in his car, the way he listened when I spoke—even if he did usually have some smart-aleck remark about whatever I’d said—even his inexplicable investment in my actually learning his mom’s stupid self-defense class syllabus. Callum Solomon may not have been as openly accommodating and genteel as Felix, but Sorcerer Solomon’s youngest son was, well, a pretty nice dude, against all odds. Nice might not be the most impressive descriptor to bequeath upon someone, but nice was also how Felix had won me over, so clearly, there was something to be said for niceness in a Solomon sorcerer.

The whole situation left me in a decidedly weird state of mind the night of the séance. Déjà vu clung to every atom of my being as I made my way to Solomon Manor. The fat white glow of the full moon over the pointed rooftop sent me right back to that first night. The one where I simply would have been Felix’s guest, ornamental, making an appearance for show.

I told myself this was no different, really. But there’s a difference between telling yourself something and believing that you aren’t, yourself, a big fat liar.

This time, it was Rowena Solomon who greeted me at the doorway. “Tabatha.” She smiled and hugged me. “Thank you so much for coming.”

I returned the embrace a little awkwardly. “Least I could do.”

Mrs. Solomon ushered me inside. “We’ll be starting shortly. Can I get you anything? Water? Tea?”

“Well, look who’s playing the gallant hostess.”

It was practically a Pavlovian response, the way my blood froze in my veins at the sound of that voice. Angelique Reed, resplendent in mourning black—or perhaps simply traditional witch’s garb, depending on your perspective—swanned down the manor’s great spiral staircase into the foyer. Those bright green eyes of hers locked on mine. “And so the second apprentice joins us. Charming.”

“Um, second?” I managed to squeak out.

The smile that slid across Angelique’s features was positively catlike. “Hester O’Riley is already here. She was invited too, of course. The more the merrier, isn’t that right, Rowena?”

Mrs. Solomon glanced sidelong up at Angelique. I watched the exchange of expressions carefully. It felt like trying to predict a shoot-out between cowboys in an old Western. “Considering what happened to the last séance we scheduled on a full moon, I imagine any additions to this one will only be an improvement, unless the modified guest list includes Elena Chang.”

Angelique’s bright red lip curled. “Indeed.”

“Did someone say my name?” A familiar pink undercut poked its head out from the yawning living room doors. “I hope it’s not to curse me out of my rightful inheritance. That ought to wait until our man’s ghost has his official say, am I right?”

Everyone took a moment to stare at Hester, presumably aghast. Angelique looked ready to have a coronary and simultaneously desperate to conceal it. “No one’s cursing anyone, my dear,” she said with stiffly forced warmth. “But we really should get going. No sense waiting for yet another full moon to get some closure for the family.”

I caught sight of all three Solomon siblings as I followed Angelique and Rowena into the living room. They looked like an oil painting, their hair bright above the somber black of their formal séance garb. It was funny: I couldn’t recall ever seeing the three of them standing so close to each other before. Long ivory candles lined the walls of the living room, dripping wax beneath the flickering orange. Firelight caught at threads of red and gold in the Solomon siblings’ hair while casting ghastly little shadows into the sharp-angled planes of their ghost-white faces. Callum played the centerpiece, a barrier between the twins, who kept their eyes fixed on the floor instead of on each other.

Callum was also the only one who met my eyes as I walked in, giving me the same little nod of the chin I saw him giving other jocks in the hallways of our high school.

I walked over to join them, more out of a search for familiarity than anything else. “Hey.”

Circe glanced up at me, amused. “Avoiding your competition, are we?”

“Circe.” Felix’s voice was a gentle rebuke. “Be kind.”

I followed Circe’s gaze across the floor to the spot where Hester O’Riley lingered on the periphery of the séance space. Caught amidst the shadows of the living room, she looked like some blithe spirit, her pink hair just another wild, dancing candle flame illuminating the dark. She was the only one not dressed in black. Instead, she wore crimson, a blood-red gown cut to display her milky shoulders and the jut of her collarbones, hugging her figure from bust to floor. I had to hand it to my predecessor: she knew how to make a statement with her clothes, especially when the statement was “screw you.”

It also made me see, all at once, how I must have looked to an outsider, in comparison: plainly clothed in black, per tradition, and conservatively so. I tugged self-consciously at the high collar of my modest black gown as I slid awkwardly into place beside Callum. “I feel like a Mormon at a funeral,” I muttered.

“Well,” he murmured back, clearly delighted, “now I can’t unsee it.”

I probably should have taken that moment to speak to Hester. I certainly thought about it. Fireballs or not, she was still pretty damn suspicious to me, and I wasn’t sure when I’d get another shot at questioning her. She certainly didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d be down to hang out with a Mormon-dressing high schooler.

Before I could work up the nerve to approach my suspect, though, Rowena took center stage. Callum’s mother entered the middle of the living room with the same athletic grace I’d seen her display countless times now in that ratty old gymnasium. She glanced around the room: me and the Solomon children on one side, Hester O’Riley on the other, and Angelique Reed facing her down from between us, green eyes bright beneath the candlelight.

To my surprise, she smiled at Angelique. “As most of you would be quick to point out, in one way or another,” said Rowena Solomon, “I’m the odd one out among you.”

An uncomfortable stir rippled through the room. She’d addressed us all, but her gaze had never left Angelique’s. “I have no sorcerous talent, no real affinity for the occult beyond what little I’ve picked up from spending time with my son and late husband,” she continued. “Nor have I particularly felt the need to develop it.” She glanced toward my end of the room, gaze settling now on Callum, who’d gone uncharacteristically still beside me. “When I first married Julian, I told him that I had my own wants and passions and interests in life. I had all the respect in the world for the Solomon legacy, and the work it took to uphold, but I would never, myself, be a sorcerer.” She paused then. “And if Julian had loved me any less for that, I never would have married him.”

If I’d found the tension in the room uncomfortable earlier, boy, did I have bad news for the me of five minutes ago.

“I knew my child would be a sorcerer, all the same,” continued Rowena. She nodded toward Callum, still smiling, an almost apologetic little upturn of her mouth. “That part was a nonnegotiable. It had been foretold, after all, by Julian himself. He’d always known that all his children would be sorcerers. I may be no sorcerer myself, but as I’ve said, I respect my husband’s craft. Particularly when it comes to fortune-telling.”

I kept my neck and head very still, eyes fixed unblinking on Rowena Solomon. I hoped it made me look attentive. In reality, I was, of course, really just resisting with all my might the instinctive urge to turn and gawk at Callum. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that Sorcerer Solomon would foretell his own children’s fates—and less surprised still that it involved something as technically mundane as inheriting the family business. But now I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d also predicted that one of his children would take over his fortune-telling. If he’d known how early he’d lose touch with the shadowy little pieces of fate he’d once so easily seen and understood.

“So without further ado,” continued Rowena, “I would like to invite Felix Solomon—as is his right as the firstborn son of my husband—to summon forth the ghost of his father.”

Callum’s breath hitched. I glanced sharply toward him, unable to keep myself in check this time. He wasn’t looking at me, though. He was watching his brother drift toward his mother. The expression on Felix’s face was carefully schooled, but I detected a slight lift of the brows, a bit of surprise in his eyes.

The summoner at a séance is typically chosen by whoever leads the séance. You can usually guess who it’s going to be based on who the leader’s favorite is. Summoning the ghost of a dead sorcerer, after all, is a pretty advanced bit of magic. And typically, an excellent way to passive-aggressively show off to the ghost all the reasons why you’d be the best inheritor of his occult legacy. Every sorcerer hopes to leave his spells and grimoires to a successor who can actually do something impressive with it all. No matter how much a sorcerer accomplishes in life, none of it matters if the next guy who controls the lineage of his magical legacy is a complete and utter dweeb. In fact, people being the way they are, they’re a lot likelier to just remember the dead sorcerer for being “that poor idiot who wasted it all on the complete and utter dweeb.”

Now, I can’t imagine it was a tremendous shock to any of us that Rowena had won the right to lead the séance. After all, she was the wife of the deceased, and for all intents and purposes, the new head of the family, sorcerer or not. So why had she bequeathed the honor of her husband’s summoning to anyone other than her own son? And why, in particular, had she chosen the one person who might be able to challenge her headship of the Solomon family?

Felix, to his credit, recovered swiftly and played his role wonderfully. He strode forward, palms open, those long red-gold lashes drifting to half-mast.

I waited. He had a choice here. Individual sorcerers all have their preferences when it comes to how they choose to cast their magic. Fortune-telling aside, all other spell casting takes on two main forms: spoken incantations, and sigils drawn by hand. To be considered a true sorcerer, you generally need proficiency in both, but that’s not to say that stereotypes don’t exist. Incantations are mostly associated with the petty magics—a minor kinetic spell to light a candle, or an illusion to disguise a blemish. Sigils, on the other hand—silent, elegant, almost a dance of the sorcerer’s hands—are the province of adepts, or so the snottier stereotypes would have you believe. To use a sigil is to imply the gravity of a spell and its power.

Personally, I feel no difference whether I’m casting via incantation or sigil. Sometimes, you need your voice, and sometimes, you need your hands. Strep throat and carpal tunnel can knock the best of sorcerers off their game, and I’m pretty sure the stereotypes only exist because some ancient-ass community sage from the Salem days decided that sigils lent themselves better to complex spell-work, and we simply failed to question it for three centuries.

Hey, no one ever said sorcerers were great with change.

Anyway, it put Felix in the position to make a statement without having to say anything explicit at all, before the ritual even began. He could imply the elitism of his family line with a sequence of sigils to summon his father’s ghost, a refined Solomon boy to the core. Or, if he so chose, he could play it cool, declaring Sorcerer Solomon’s séance a casual no big deal. He could, with a few spoken words, put himself above, or at least apart from, the pomp and circumstance of his family.

Either way, that same family would judge him, each member no doubt making their own private—or maybe not so private—assumptions about the choice. Looking around the room—the narrowed, observantly hungry eyes of the séance’s witnesses all leaning toward Felix in anticipation, like they were ready to devour him whole no matter what he did—I felt my palms go clammy. Without meaning to, I locked eyes with the gilt-edged antique mirror hanging above the living room mantelpiece. My own reflection stared back at me, her posture hunched forward, her eyes just as eager as every other pair in the room. An odd sort of shame settled into my belly.

For maybe the first time since our acquaintance, I didn’t envy Felix Solomon even a little bit.

Felix hesitated. Only for a moment, the choice playing across his features. Then, with the exact sort of fluency you’d expect from a seasoned sorcerer, he sketched out the sigils of summoning through the air, long hands precise as they traced the spell into place. The faintest hint of light followed the trail of his fingers, the power behind his magic making itself known, a silver script hovering in midair. Behind him, the candle flames shot high, just once, flickered, and returned to their normal state.

He clapped his hands together, eyes drifting shut. Some summoners like to talk during a séance once they’ve finished the casting, whether by incantation or sigil work. It’s customary to say a few words in a plain tongue, either way. Sorcerers are lovers of ambience and aesthetic, after all. They’ll call for the dead verbally, plea or demand, depending on the personality of the sorcerer—or maybe the personality of the ghost. Some will fall to their knees. Some beg. Some even weep. Death heightens all emotions and plays tricks on everyone’s mind. Anything can happen during a séance.

Anything at all.

Felix did not speak, or cry, or beg, though. He did not fall to his knees. He finished casting his sigils. Then he lowered his hands, closed his eyes, and waited for his father’s ghost to arrive.

For a few taut moments, nothing happened at all. I shifted from one foot to the other, uneasy despite myself. Maybe Felix should have fallen to his knees. Maybe Felix should have begged. Maybe Sorcerer Solomon’s ghost really just craved his eldest son’s tears.

Then the candles went out. Not the way candles normally go out, either, all sputtering and flickering until they fade away into that little blackened wick. These blinked out in an instant, like they were electrical lights, and a switch had been flicked.

Darkness, black as ink. A few gasps, murmurs here and there. Then, as suddenly as they’d gone out, the flames returned to the wicks as the candles flickered back on, one by one. In the returned glow, we could see the room as it was before, the same black clothes, the same drawn faces, and Felix still there in the center of the living room, surrounded by white wax candles, his head bent.

The only difference was that standing before him was Sorcerer Solomon.

It wasn’t quite Sorcerer Solomon, I suppose. Ghosts are as close to the living replica of a dead person as you can really get, but they’re not perfect. He looked like himself, as long as you didn’t stare too long. Look a ghost too long in the face, and their features start to change. Maybe the eyes go the wrong color. Maybe the mouth isn’t quite right. It’s not so different from trying to remember a face in a crowd, from days, or months, or years ago. You might get the hair color, the skin tone, the height right, but you aren’t so sure about the other bits. There’s a theory in more academic circles of the occult that ghosts are really just blips in the memories of the living.

When Sorcerer Solomon’s ghost spoke, though, he sounded just as he had in life, warm and solid and quietly amused, like he was keeping a secret no one else knew. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said the ghost. “I suppose there’s something that can bring you all together in one place after all.”

Felix’s face was waxen, but his lips twitched at that. “You’re not any funnier in death than you were in life, Dad.”

“Nonsense.” The ghost made a dismissive sound. “An untimely demise makes comics of us all.” He paused. “Well, perhaps overly timely in my case, I suppose. The prophecy really did go precisely according to the letter.”

Felix leaned forward, an almost hungry expression on his usually friendly face. It was hard to tell, with all that flickering candlelight making everyone’s faces so ghoulish, but I could swear he’d gone paler still. “It’s true, then,” Felix breathed. “You were murdered.”

“Ah, ah, ah. Now, that would be a spoiler, wouldn’t it?” The ghost’s eyes twinkled. Blue, as they’d been in life. Or were they black now? It was so hard to tell in this light. I looked away from it all, suddenly uncomfortable.

From the corner of my eye, I caught Hester O’Riley suddenly striding forward, uninvited, to the center of the living room. “You’re here to tell us who you’re leaving all your fancy magical secrets to, aren’t you?” She stopped just short of the ghost. “So why can’t you tell us who killed you?”

Like she was daring him. Telling him she wasn’t afraid of whatever the answer might be. Challenge glinted in those bold, bright eyes of hers. For a moment, I saw what Julian Solomon must have seen in her, all those years ago, when he’d taken her on as his apprentice. Maybe Hester and I weren’t very much alike—after all, I was many things, but I didn’t consider myself the kinetic-fireball-flinging type—but we did have one thing in common. I could see it in her gaze, same as mine every time I looked myself in the eye.

We both loved the occult, more than almost anything, despite our utter failure to be born into the sorcerous greatness of an ancient magical family. And we were both ambitious bitches. We’d never have taken on apprenticeships in this great, huge spooky house if we weren’t. And we’d certainly never have accepted invitations to our one-time master’s séance in that same spooky-ass house.

My stomach churned. Deep down, maybe we were all just the same kind of greedy.

“Hester.” The ghost’s tone shifted. It was a subtle little thing, but it was there in his voice. A softening lilt that I’d never heard in Julian Solomon’s voice while alive. Or maybe that was just his ghost playing tricks on my memory again. “Of everyone here, I’m most surprised to see you.”

Hester lifted her chin. Defiant, even in the face of a séance for the greatest sorcerer on the East Coast, surrounded by a family of occultists who saw her as an interloper at best and a traitor at worst. “Then you’ve lost your touch, old man. The Julian I knew would have prophesied my return long before he bit the dust.”

The ghost gave a creaky little laugh. “Who’s to say I didn’t? But to answer your question, my dear, this is a séance.” He spread his hands wide. “There are rules that govern the return of the dead to the land of the living. You should know that. I certainly taught you well enough.” A hint of disappointment had crept into his tone. “I am bound to bequeath my will, and only that. That is what I was summoned for, and that is what I shall do. Beyond that, I have nothing to offer the living. That’s what it means to be dead.”

“Then get on with it,” snapped Angelique. Her face was as ashen as Felix’s, but her green eyes blazed with some unnameable emotion. “You have one job, Julian, so just get it done.”

“Angelique,” sighed the ghost. This time, he was the one who drifted toward her. “So businesslike, as always. So impatient.”

She flinched. I blinked. I’d never seen Angelique Reed flinch from anyone or anything before. It had honestly been tough to imagine until this point. She recovered and drew herself up, ballerina tall, as if to compensate for the moment of perceived weakness. “Not all of us live in a constantly amorphous future, Julian. Name your successor. And then begone, ghost.”

“Mom.” Sullen, scowling Circe spoke up for the first time since the séance had begun. Gone was the smirking, devil-may-care girl wearing her dead father’s face as a black-humored joke. Now she just sounded wounded and angry. “You don’t have to talk to him like that. It’s Dad.”

Angelique rounded on her daughter. “I don’t see that it’s any concern of yours,” she snapped. “You’re certainly not in the running. As if the great Sorcerer Solomon would bequeath his legacy to a common peddler of some silly, useless illusion magic—”

“That’s enough, Mom,” interrupted Felix. His hand was at his mother’s elbow, gentle but firm. “There’s no need to go insulting Circe—”

Angelique yanked herself free from his grasp, laughing in disbelief. “You think that was an insult to your sister?” She whirled around the room, eyes huge and bright beneath those candles. “Circe’s lack of talent for fortune-telling has never been her fault. Nor has yours. But your father never saw it that way. Did you, Julian?”

She wasn’t looking at the ghost, though. Instead, that glittering emerald gaze of hers had pinned itself on Callum. “All you ever wanted out of our children was a perfect little replica of yourself. Circe and her feeble little illusions could never suffice. Even Felix could never suffice, for all his sorcerous talents, since they never included a knack for your precious prophecies. All you wanted was a fortune teller.” Her chest heaved. “And nothing else mattered at all, did it?”

“Oh, Angelique. My dear.” The ghost actually looked sad. “I’m not naming Callum as my heir, if that’s what you’re so concerned with.”

Rowena Solomon had been standing silent through the entire séance, off to the side of the room, while the sorcerers argued. Now her head snapped up as if struck. “Excuse me?”

“It’s for the best, Ro.” Her husband’s ghost caught her gaze and held it. “Surely you know the reasons why.” He looked around at the rest of the room. “I won’t be naming any of my children, in fact. No, not even you, Felix. I’m afraid it’s for your own good, all three of you.”

Angelique’s mouth parted. A wary sort of hope had dawned on her face. “Then surely . . .”

She trailed off as the ghost’s hands touched hers. Translucent fingers slipped through hers. For just a moment, Sorcerer Solomon looked young again, younger than I’d ever seen him. It made Angelique, beautiful as she was, seem old in comparison. Another trick of the ghost, surely.

He closed his eyes, forehead bent toward hers. “No, Angelique. I’m afraid I won’t be naming you either, my dear.”

The ghost’s gaze raked first toward Hester, then Rowena, before settling at last on me. And I swear, in that moment, all my blood went as cold as the death we’d undone that night, as Julian Solomon said, “Tabatha Zeng. You are no longer my apprentice. I declare you, from this day forward, a prophet-sorcerer in your own right, and as such, I bequeath unto you the legacy of the Solomon family sorcery. It is my word. So shall it be.”

And with that, like the ghost he was, Julian Solomon vanished for the last time, leaving only flickering candlelight in his wake.

NINE

For a few horrific, frozen moments, I thought I’d die in that room that night. I thought I’d go to the same awful grave Sorcerer Solomon had.

At first, nothing happened. Felix and Angelique stared at me from the center of the room, slightly agape, as if seeing me for the first time.

And then everything happened at once. Hester was the first to recover. She began to laugh, raucous and disbelieving, clutching her belly as she bent over double. “Oh, that’s too rich,” she gasped. “Not even passing me over for a blood relative. What did I tell you? What did I tell you from the very beginning?” She glared daggers at me even as she fought back further giggles, her voice high with the beginnings of hysteria. “You really are just his type.”

“Pull yourself together, girl,” snapped Angelique. “I didn’t invite you here to throw a tantrum at another apprentice.”

“Not just another apprentice now, though, is she?” Hester drew herself upright. “You heard Sorcerer Solomon’s will. She’s the inheritor of your family’s magic. The new head of the ancient and illustrious Solomon family.” She shot an almost apologetic look toward Rowena. “Sorry, Mrs. Solomon. I’m sure the power trip was nice while it lasted.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” said Angelique. “Clearly, something’s the matter with the séance. That couldn’t have been Julian’s true will. He’d never leave his legacy to an outsider.” She smacked Felix across the shoulder. “What did you do, boy?”

Felix rounded on his mother. “I did exactly what I was told,” he snapped. “As I always have. I was asked to attend this séance. I did. I was called to act as summoner. I did. I was told to call Dad back from the grave to bestow his will. I did. And now his will is done, and you don’t like it, so as usual, you’re looking for a loophole—”

“Shouldn’t she, though?” asked Circe in heated tones. She pulled herself free from Callum’s side and joined her twin at the center of the living room. “At the very least, it should have been Callum. Even Hester would have been the better choice. O’Riley’s completely and utterly unhinged, but at least she’s a fully-fledged adult sorcerer. What the hell is some high school girl gonna do with the weight of all Dad’s work sitting on her shoulders? What’s going to happen when the rest of the sorcery world comes knocking at the doors of Solomon Manor, expecting feats of shock and awe in the style of the original Sorcerer Solomon? You think a normal teenager born to a family with no magical legacy whatsoever is going to be able to handle the worst shit our world throws at her?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” snapped Felix. “Tabatha’s not a complete neophyte. She’s been Dad’s apprentice since her freshman year of high school—”

“Wow, he really does pick them younger and younger, doesn’t he?” crowed Hester.

And with that, all of them were shouting and talking at once, multiple arguments filling the living room and hitting a horrible fever pitch.

They could kill me. The thought was hysterical, intrusive, but I couldn’t unthink it once the notion entered my brain. Circe was right. Hester aside, the rest of them were all members of Sorcerer Solomon’s actual family, and I was just the latest apprentice. They’d been born into the occult. It was everything to them. And here I was, the outsider, daughter to a lawyer and an engineer, of all things, playing the interloper. Their world was dark and ancient and full of sharp edges. Who was to say I wouldn’t make a bungle of it all? How dare I take their magical legacy, their family’s most beloved treasure?

They could take it back just as easily, of course. Undoing Julian’s will would be as simple as undoing me. And presumably, someone in that room had already killed once. What was one more murder?

Someone grabbed my elbow. I’d worked myself into such a state that I nearly screamed.

“Don’t you dare scream,” Callum hissed in my ear.

Which, very pettily, kind of made me want to scream just to be contrary.

“Come with me,” he continued. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

I hesitated. The freeze part of the whole “fight, flight, or freeze” instinct was clearly strong with me tonight. There was no real reason to trust Callum any further than I trusted the rest of his family. No real reason except that a dead man had told me to.

The same dead man who’d just pinned his entire family legacy on me.

“Crap,” I said, more to myself than anyone else, and I let Callum drag me sidelong out the living room doors.

The rest of them followed us, of course. You know those slapstick chase sequences in movies? Well, it wasn’t that, exactly, but it came embarrassingly close. The rest of the family poured out after us, their pleas and questions and curses a mounting crescendo. I could make out some of it:

“You conniving little bitch, don’t you dare run!” Angelique, her voice a low snarl.

“Stop it! Just stop!” Circe, that practiced monotone of hers half gone as she hissed, barely loudly enough to be heard, “Just let her go, Mom. There’s no point in trying to chase—”

She was drowned out immediately by another peal of raucous laughter that could only have belonged to Hester. “Please, this is just so utterly hilarious.” A gasp of air. “You people—you Solomons—have always just been an overgrown clown car of too much money and not enough sense. Why, I half think you deserve—”

“Tabatha, please, I just want to talk—” Felix, gentle and desperate, drowned out in quick succession by louder, angrier voices.

“She planned this! She must have!” insisted Angelique.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Rowena, at last, sharp and frantic. “Tabatha, you can’t just—”

I didn’t answer any of them. Instead, I held fast to Callum’s hand, ignoring the sweat-slick slide of his palm against mine as I laced our fingers.

Come hell or high water, you stick to that boy like glue, you hear? It is the surest chance we have of keeping everyone safe.

I shrugged off an instinctive shudder at the memory of Sorcerer Solomon’s voice in my ear. But I clung to his son all the same, like a swimmer caught in a riptide, like those sturdy calloused fingers were the only thing tugging me back to shore.

“Get in the car.” Callum didn’t wait for me to obey, half shoving me into the passenger seat of his vehicle. If I’d had my wits about me, I probably could have said something snide about the last time we’d tried fleeing angry sorcerers in this car. I’m sure I could have worked a fireball reference in there somewhere, especially with the way Hester was cackling her fool head off.

Before I could finish puzzling it out, Callum had already pulled out of the manor’s driveway with a shriek of rubber on pavement. “Seat belt,” he snapped at me.

“Really?” I managed. “I’m not five years old, you know, I can—”

“Seat belt!” The tires made a positively murderous sound as he rounded the corner. I posted one hand against the door before the car could fling my head against the window.

“Seat belt,” I agreed, my voice faint with resignation. Also, terror. I buckled up.

A good thing I did. I’d forgotten what a madman Callum could be at the steering wheel when he felt threatened. And few things, in fairness, feel more threatening than a pack of thoroughly scorned Solomons—plus one unhinged apprentice—at your back.

Callum’s imitation of The Fast and the Furious carried on for some time. Even after the shouts of his family had long since faded from behind us, he drove like a man pursued by the devil itself. Maybe that’s what Julian Solomon had been all along. What the hell kind of dad snubbed not one but three of his kids, all in favor of his teenage apprentice?

I quashed the thought before it could find voice on my tongue. There had to be a more tactful way to confront the elephant in the room with Callum. Preferably once the car slowed down.

Maybe among his various sorcerous tricks was a mind-reading spell, because Callum heaved a long, gusty sigh all at once and pulled the car over. I hadn’t really been paying attention to exactly where our little getaway car was headed, and I found myself genuinely surprised at our surroundings.

It was the gym. The same sad, decrepit gym where he’d cooked up our ridiculous cover story and forced me to take what amounted to extra pain-themed PE classes from his mom. Only right now, luckily for us, both the gym and its parking lot were empty. Almost eerily so.

For a long, horribly taut moment, neither of us spoke. Then I unbuckled my seat belt and faced Callum Solomon at last. “I don’t want it,” I told him bluntly.

He blinked several times before answering me. “Don’t want what?”

“Another crab cake appetizer.” I rolled my eyes. “What do you think, genius? Your father’s inheritance. The secret spells. The legacy.” I swallowed. “The grimoires. Any of it.”

With a sigh, he unbuckled his seat belt and tucked his knees against his chest. It made him look absurdly childlike. “Is this because you found out I was the one really writing the prophecies?”

“No!” Surprise at the question startled me into honesty.

“Then why not?” He seemed genuinely curious, speculation swimming across his features as he studied me from his perch in the driver’s seat. There was a birdlike quality to the way he tilted his head at me. “You want to be a sorcerer after you finish school, right? With my dad’s inheritance, you probably wouldn’t even need to bother with school. It’s any prospective occultist’s golden ticket to the big leagues.”

I snorted. “First of all, if you think there’s any kind of inheritance, magical or otherwise, that could convince my mother that I can simply not finish school, you’re more nuts than Hester O’Riley in full fireballing mode. And second of all, a shot at honorary nepotism isn’t why I agreed to apprentice for your dad.”

“Isn’t it?” Weirdly, Callum didn’t actually sound all that accusatory, even as he challenged me. “If you want a job as a sorcerer—”

“I don’t want a job as a sorcerer,” I interrupted, growing impatient despite myself. At his raised eyebrows, I corrected myself, appropriately sheepish. “Well, I don’t just want a job as a sorcerer. I want . . . I want to be good at this shit, okay?”

I looked away from him abruptly, pretending to be fascinated by the barren parking lot outside his car window. I don’t know why admitting that I wanted not to suck at the thing for which I’d been working my ass off for going on four years embarrassed me so much. Being earnest feels awkward. Or at least, it does to me. “My mom never wanted me to be a sorcerer,” I informed the sad empty parking space next to Callum’s car. “Like, she . . . doesn’t hate it, I guess? And I think she even liked that I landed that apprenticeship under your dad, because then at least she could tell the other lawyers at her firm—and all my passive-aggressive humble-bragging Chinese aunties—that I was apprenticing under this rich, famous guy.” My shoulders went up to my ears as the words slipped from my tongue, one embarrassing confession after the next. “If I’m not going to go to law school, or engineering school, or whatever—and if the thing I’ve decided I want to do with my life is considered pretty damn weird in most immigrant households—the least I can do is score an apprenticeship under the very best.”

“Apprenticing under the best doesn’t mean you become the best, though,” said Callum. “Which, before you yell at me, doesn’t mean that I, in any way, shape, or form, am telling you that you can’t be the best. Just . . . You didn’t have to apprentice under my dad to do it. You’re not good at sorcery just because of him.”

I snuck a sidelong glance at him. “Callum Solomon. Dare I ask if that was a compliment?”

“Come now, don’t go fishing on this, the evening of my dead father’s séance,” Callum deadpanned. He spoiled it by smiling. “You are good at this, squishy wizard. Don’t let anyone let you overthink into believing otherwise. And don’t let my dad’s name overshadow what you’ve actually accomplished. And what you will accomplish.”

“Was that a pep talk or a prophecy?”

“Yes.” Callum’s smile became a full-on grin. “Though don’t be afraid of milking the name recognition either. It’s pretty nice, and at this point, you deserve some kind of recompense for getting dragged into the whole family mess.”

My cautiously lifting mood plummeted at the reminder. “I still don’t want it.” My fists clenched nervously in my lap. “I don’t get it. Why would he do this?”

Callum sighed. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

“What’s there to get?” The facts seemed pretty plain to me. “I’m not family, not really. Apprentices aren’t supposed to inherit from sorcerers, at least not big-name sorcerers with plenty of sorcerous family that could as easily take up their mantle.”

“Ah. Therein lies the rub,” said Callum. “There’s sorcerous family, and then there’s fortune-telling family. Dad never had the latter, not really.”

Now, that was a downright lie. “You, Callum Solomon, have been writing his prophecies for god knows how many—”

He cut off my indignant rant. “I never wanted to, though. I never would have wanted to be named heir to his legacy, either.” The words were blunt, starkly so. That, more than anything else, gave me reason to believe them. “There’s a reason you only ever saw Felix lurking around and offering to help, and never me. I can write prophecies, sure. I was even willing to write them to keep Dad afloat. But I’ve never enjoyed it.” He shrugged. “I don’t hate it. I don’t love it. I’d just rather be fencing, or wrestling, or enjoying a good crab cake. I like my mundane pleasures.”

He paused, then said very carefully, “See, it was never really the fortune-telling or the sorcery I wanted. What I wanted was for Dad to be pleased with me. Three guesses what the easiest path to that was.”

He didn’t sound particularly angry or sad, but I felt like he’d punched me. I thought of Mom, and how much she’d wanted me to do mock trial, or sign up for pre-law club. I’d always blown her off because mock trial is, frankly, boring compared with real magic, but I’d always understood why she did it. Mom tried to shape me in her own image out of love, but she also knew, at the end of the day, that we’d never be the same people. It drove us both crazy, and Dad crazier. But I’d never doubted that either of them loved me less for it.

My heart hurt for Callum.

Callum chuckled to himself—not quite bitter, but deeply wry. “Angelique and the twins had the heart, but none of the skills. I had the skills, but none of the heart. And Hester had so much heart, it nearly tricked Dad into thinking she had the skills, until she disappointed him too. And then there’s you.” He stared at me for a long moment, blue eyes unreadable in the dark. So like and unlike his father’s. “The heart and the skills, all wrapped up in one unassuming package.”

My breath hitched. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He didn’t sound derisive, but he didn’t sound especially warm, either. If I’d had to hazard a guess, I’d have said that he sounded wistful.

“I’ve got half a mind to run away from all this, you know,” I told him. I even kind of meant it. Especially in that moment. “What if I just straight up ghosted your whole screwed-up family? Quit sorcery and never showed up at Solomon Manor again? Skipped town entirely, even? Convinced my parents to get jobs on the other side of the country or something?”

“You wouldn’t, though.” Callum’s expression hadn’t changed. “Because you do love sorcery. And you do love fortune-telling. You want this more than anything. Even if you don’t want to be tied up in my family’s business forever, you do want to be tied up in the occult.”

I couldn’t deny it without lying.

“I bet I could still get away with ghosting all of you.” I looked him right in the eye, daring him to contradict me. “I could leave all this behind, and then you’d get stuck with your dad’s inheritance.”

“Thanks, I hate it,” said Callum dryly. “I’d rather just go on the lam with you.”

We both froze. He’d said it so casually, practically a slip of the tongue, but the implications hung heavy over me. From the look on his face, he felt it too. I’d rather just go on the lam with you. Callum Solomon would rather stay at my side—just as his father had once begged me to stay at Callum’s—than pick up his family’s mantle. He’d rather run away with me. He’d rather leave this all behind too.

I hate myself a little for the way my gaze slipped automatically toward his mouth. The fullness of his lips, and how prettily they sat on a freshly shaved jawline. I realize how shallow—how inappropriate for the gravity of the situation—that sounds. But I’d seen a dead body, nearly gotten incinerated by a fireball, and been chased off the premises of my after-school job by an unhinged family of sorcerers, all in the space of what? Two months? You’ll forgive me for being kind of stressed. And sometimes, stress taps into, let’s say, the baser parts of your brain.

And let’s be real: I’m a teenage girl, and Callum Solomon has never exactly been ugly.

I stared at him. He stared back. And, miracle of miracles, also looked right at my mouth. Barely breathing, I inched forward slightly. He tilted his head, eyelashes low.

Easy there, Zeng. He could still be a murderer.

That reminder—more than any of my internal admonishments—jolted me out of horny territory right back into reality. With an incredibly, painfully fake little cough, I pulled back, the motion abrupt and awkward as I clipped myself on my own seat belt buckle. “Ouch!”

He blinked a few times. His mouth twitched. And then, quite abruptly, the boy I’d been making thirsty eyes at seconds beforehand was laughing his ass off at me. I smacked his arm with all the indignation I could muster. A useless exercise. He just laughed harder.

At this point, I did the only reasonable thing I could. I started laughing too. Once I started, it was surprisingly difficult to stop. It was like all the stress and panic and misery of the past few weeks had bubbled up inside my chest, and was only now being released. It felt like I was crying—there were certainly enough tears running down my cheeks—except for the misplaced mirth bubbling through my entire body.

“I think I’m in hysterics,” I gasped.

Callum wheezed, head buried in his hands. His shoulders shook with silent, slightly unhinged amusement. “I don’t disagree,” he informed his palms.

This went on for some time. I gave up on trying to regain my dignity. It felt good to be ridiculous for a little while. It didn’t particularly fix anything, mind you. I still had enough wits about me to recognize that much, even as I busted my own gut with giggles worthy of an eighties sitcom cheerleader.

“Don’t run away,” Callum gasped out at last, once we’d both managed to calm down. “I think your mother would kill me, if mine doesn’t manage it first. Also, I really don’t want to have to deal with all this crap on my own. And also.” He paused. For air. Maybe, for air. Probably. “Also.”

“Also?”

“I’d miss you.”

What could you say to that, really? I swallowed the last of my mirth. Maybe he was a murderer. Maybe he’d even murdered his own father. I couldn’t rule anything out.

And yet. “I’d miss you too.” And then, because I couldn’t completely ignore the mess we were in: “Do you think whoever killed your dad is going to kill me next to claim the inheritance or something?” A hilariously terrible thought sprang into my head. “Oh god, you don’t still think it’s Felix, do you? He’s definitely better than me at sorcery, and he’s a kinetic specialist, so if we fought, I’d definitely—”

“I don’t know anymore,” Callum interrupted. He sighed, the sound hard and heavy. “Maybe Dad killed himself. Maybe that’s what’s made the most sense all along. Think about it. He said he’d be killed by his best beloved, right? Well, maybe his best beloved was just his own damn self all along.” A resigned sort of bitterness laced his words. “It sure would explain a lot.”

Part of me wanted to defend Sorcerer Solomon, even now. Clearly, the guy hadn’t been the best dad, but he was still a dad. I thought of my own dad. How he’d always played the buffer whenever Mom and I fought. How he quietly puttered about doing the cooking for all our family meals, carefully inserting the odd home-cooked treat between all the guilty pleasure Chinese takeout that Mom always spooned out of plastic containers at dinner, in true bastardized, Americanized fashion. How much he cared. How much he always, always cared.

Thinking about Dad that way made my heart twist. Sorcerer Solomon had always been good to me. But he’d never been like that. He’d never been anything like Dad, not even in the presence of his own kids. Least of all, perhaps, in the presence of his own kids, judging from the way Callum and his siblings behaved.

“We’d still have to prove it,” I pointed out.

His eyebrows climbed. “Still determined to play Nancy Drew, huh?”

“If I’m not going to run away?” I shook my head slowly. A cold, awful truth had settled into my belly. A day ago—hell, an hour ago—I would have freaked out. Now I found my brain settling into cold-edged problem-solving mode. Fix what can be fixed, as efficiently as possible. Maybe I was my mother’s daughter after all. “I think I have to find out what really happened to Sorcerer Solomon, now more than ever. People are going to think it’s me, Callum. People are going to think I did it.”

“And how do you propose to prove that you didn’t?” He paused. “Are you going to cast a prophecy spell? You’re allowed to. Dad’s ghost did graduate you from your apprenticeship. Technically.”

I hadn’t even thought about that part, in truth. The idea picked my heart rate up, but I shook my head. “Maybe I’m allowed to, but I don’t love the idea of jumping straight into unsupervised fortune-telling. Not when we have safer options.”

“Which are what, exactly? None of our suspects are exactly in the frame of mind to speak to us.”

I winced. It was true. We’d lost the chance to question potential murderers at the séance. But that wasn’t the only thing we could do. I drew in another breath. “If I really am the inheritor of Sorcerer Solomon’s legacy, then unsupervised prophecy magic isn’t the only perk I get. Being your father’s heir means there’s nothing—and I mean, nothing—among his occult effects that should be off-limits to me now. Which means we have access to what we didn’t before. Including warded objects.”

The inside of Callum’s car was warm, the October night unseasonably mild. And still, I felt it: a sense memory, the ghost of ice seeping into my bones, freezing my body in place, locking me out of Sorcerer Solomon’s secrets. The last time that had happened, I’d just been the apprentice to a dead man. But now, by his ghost’s own doing, I was something more. I was his heir. Everything that had once been his was also mine now.

I looked Callum in the eye. “We’re going to have to go back into the workshop. And I’m going to open up that damn cabinet he warded.”

TEN

The last place I actually wanted to go was Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop. If I’d kind of dreaded going up there the first time, my second venture into that room—in the aftermath of a séance on a full moon, after seeing the ghost of a man who’d died in that exact spot—was that much worse. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that being named as Sorcerer Solomon’s inheritor had painted a far bigger target on my back than any mere apprenticeship ever could have. In the long term, I needed to unlock the cabinet in that workshop. I needed any clue I could find to who really killed Sorcerer Solomon—even if it was himself. It was my best and only chance at, well, not looking even more like a murderer than I already had at the start of all this. But in the short term, the most dangerous place I could possibly be right now was Solomon Manor. And the most dangerous place in Solomon Manor itself? The workshop, naturally.

Okay, scratch what I said earlier. There was no “kind of” about it. I 100 percent hated that Callum and I were going back to that goddamn workshop.

But we were going back all the same.

In the meantime, shockingly little about my life had changed. You’d think inheriting an unprecedented legacy of sorcerous power would make a little bit more of a stir, but I wasn’t advertising it, and the Solomons themselves certainly weren’t going to. I had about five unread text messages from Felix, but aside from the vague sense of stress that emerged every time I saw the accusatory little notifications on my phone, I found myself going through the motions of the same mundane existence I always had. I went to school. I did my homework. I did my ample best to avoid arguments with Mom over household chores.

And I went to Rowena Solomon’s self-defense classes with Callum. Well, what used to be Rowena Solomon’s self-defense classes. The first time I returned, I was near a hundred percent sure she’d try to talk to me about what exactly I intended to do with her husband’s inheritance.

Instead, she didn’t show up at all.

“Mom’s taking a leave of absence for a little while,” said Callum, by way of explanation. He’d already paired off the rest of the girls in the class for warm-up drills, and was only circling up to me now. “I’m playing substitute teacher until . . .” Here, he hesitated.

My belly churned unpleasantly. “Until your mom gets over your dad snubbing you in my favor?”

Callum shook his head. “It’s not like that. It’s more . . .” He sighed. “Her position in the family has always been precarious, you know? The only non-sorcerer, yet the most influential Solomon by proxy because of her marriage. My inheriting would have offered a little more protection, but she wasn’t counting on it. She thought it might be Felix, or even Angelique. She didn’t bank on it being—”

“Me,” I finished softly. The interloper. Misplaced guilt tightened up the knots in my gut. “She knows I didn’t expect it either, right? She’s got to know.”

“I told her,” said Callum. “I told her you didn’t even want it, for that matter. She believes you. She just . . . needs some time, to reformulate.” A dark look passed over his features. “You might imagine why. Angelique’s been on the warpath ever since the séance. Giving rampage a whole new definition.”

I winced. “Is Angelique still at the manor? We can’t exactly investigate the workshop if she murders me on sight.”

“Well, then.” Callum settled into a fighting stance. “Don’t let her catch sight of you. Now, let’s fix your jab.”

The workshop felt different the second time.

Even now, it’s tough to put into words exactly what had changed. All I know is that there was a version of the workshop before that séance and a version of the workshop after—and the one after gave off a whole different energy. I shivered as I entered. I’d always been skeptical of the more superstitious side of the occult. Sure, we could have kinetics and illusionists and fortune tellers. We could even have ghosts and séances. But I’d never really believed in the notion of good or bad juju that didn’t stem directly from a specific spell or sorcerer’s power. I’d never thought a place—an inanimate place—could take on a life and personality of its own.

Yet I swore, as I darkened its doors, that this dead man’s workshop was alive and well.

Callum clearly felt it too, though maybe not quite as potently as I did. His brow furrowed as he crossed the threshold. He sniffed the air. “Be careful.”

I glanced at him sidelong. “You think he’s still here haunting the place?”

“I think that given our streak of luck lately, we’re better off not tempting fate.”

Couldn’t argue with that. Gingerly, I crossed the room until I stood directly in front of the cabinet. No cold assailed me, no claws of ice digging into my bones. I walked until I hovered directly over the lid.

Behind me, Callum gave a long, low whistle. “Well, I’ll be damned. Guess you really are his inheritor now.”

I ignored him. With shaking hands, I reached for the lock on the door. To my surprise, it came off with a couple of tugs. I looked at Callum, dangling it between two fingers. As I lifted the lock, two glittering pieces of cheap plastic scattered and clinked to the floor. It took me a second to recognize them as decorative hairpins—broken ones. “Someone’s already been inside this thing.” I examined the pieces of plastic. “Probably picked the lock with hairpins. It’s an old trick.”

Callum shrugged. “Or Dad just left the cabinet unlocked and assumed that his wards alone would suffice.”

I wasn’t convinced. “What about the broken hairpins?”

“It’s a workshop. There’re all kinds of junk up here, so I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions just yet. But I agree that we should keep an eye out.”

“Here goes nothing,” I said, and slid the door of the cabinet open with a creak.

My heart rate spiked like crazy. At first, I thought the box was empty. The inside was dark, not filled to the brim with grimoires or occult artifacts or bewitched candles, or any other manner of thing you might expect from a creepy warded cabinet in a murdered sorcerer’s magical workshop. When I got the nerve to look a little more closely at the insides, though, I was even more confused by what I found.

It was a computer system, painstakingly wired up to the back wall of the cabinet. It sat there alone, this odd metal contraption, looking weirdly out of place in its technological modernity amidst the austere and ancient vibes of a sorcerer’s workshop at the heart of Solomon Manor. Wires poked through a hole in the top near the back and disappeared above it into some particularly elaborate wood paneling.

I jerked my head toward the wires. “Want to see if we can figure out what this thing is hooked up to?”

“Let’s,” said Callum grimly.

The wires, after much tracing and retracing, turned out to be hooked to a camera system. More specifically, two hidden cameras that sat in opposite corners of the workshop. My heartbeat pounded a steady staccato of anticipation that seemed to rattle my very bones. I glanced at Callum. “A security camera system?”

“To protect the grimoires and other occult artifacts, presumably,” agreed Callum.

My heart continued to race. “Any chance we can download the footage onto a laptop so we can take a look?”

Callum looked thoughtful. “I’ll bet half my trust fund that this camera system matches the one that our family uses for general security around the manor. Should be easy enough to hook up.”

Callum’s bet turned out to be correct. About twenty minutes and some focused tinkering from Callum later, we had a wealth of video files pulled up on his laptop.

They looked innocent enough at first glance. They were mostly video and audio recordings, as expected, split up into short clips and labeled by date.

I glanced at Callum and felt my eyebrows climb. “Did your dad have a secret second career as a documentary filmmaker?”

“Not as far as I know.” Callum frowned, scrolling through the footage. “I think he was probably just really, really paranoid.”

“Huh.” I squinted at the files. “Was it all really just security? You think he recorded some of his work on camera as a memory aid, maybe? For note-taking purposes, given . . . you know?”

“Given that his memories were going to go eventually?” Callum looked grimly thoughtful. “Maybe.” He clicked downward. A Word document sat nestled amidst the video footage. “Oh hey, there’s a note. At least, I assume it’s a note.”

“Only one way to find out.” I gave him a nod. “Let’s open it.”

The words in the document were precise and to the point:

To my chosen successor,

If you have found this footage, that means that I came to an end that I deserved, and for that, I am grateful. I have kept cameras running at nearly all times in my workshop for more than two decades—for my own protection, certainly, but also in an effort to preserve a record of the person who I am as a man and as a sorcerer. I find, these days, that the two are increasingly inextricable, for good or for ill. I had hoped, once upon a time, to be remembered above all else for my magic.

I do not know, anymore, if that is truly what I wish. But what I have become increasingly certain of—as my living days wind down to a fate that cannot be rewritten—is that being remembered above all else for my magic is, at the very least, what I as a man deserve.

If I may ask one thing of you, dear successor, it is that you do not allow my memory to be easily erased. To that end, please peruse whatever you find on these recordings as you see fit.

With all my very best regards and cherished wishes,
Julian Aurelius Solomon

I suppressed a shiver. “So he set up that whole security system, knowing he’d be murdered.”

I’d always known Sorcerer Solomon to be meticulous, but he’d never told me about the cameras in his workshop. Maybe I should have guessed, given the risks inherent in being who he was—a highly visible member of a still-controversial profession, a wealthy individual who’d probably be a prime target for ransom or blackmail, an aging man contending with the particular brand of brain trauma specific to his calling—but I’d never thought to ask. I wished, maybe foolishly, that he’d told me. As I’d discovered in the weeks since his death, there had been an awful lot that Sorcerer Solomon hadn’t told me, but I guess I just wished he’d told me about the cameras.

After all, I’d spent hours every week in his workshop—under the invisible eye of those cameras. Maybe it was selfish of me, but I just really, really hated that I’d been watched the whole time, without ever knowing. That the things I’d done and said, my triumphs and failures, my private vulnerabilities, were all recorded for posterity, preserved without my knowledge or consent.

Slowly, I looked at Callum, half afraid of what I’d find in his face. He wore a faint grimace, but no sense of shock or surprise lingered in his eyes. “He was obsessed with keeping records of everything,” said Callum. “Me, my brother and sister, our moms, even Hester, back when she used to work for him here. Even when he was still at the height of his power, before his mind started to go, he always needed to hit some kind of . . . I don’t know, a Save button on moments in time. Always said it was the prophet in him, making sure there was an objective catalog of events as they transpired so that he’d never be in danger of losing track of the past while chasing the future.” He snorted, bitter and derisive. “Personally? I always thought that was a handy excuse Dad made up so that he could spy on his family and everyone close enough to us to be considered his. It was a form of control he needed for his own peace of mind. He’d probably have mummified us all like ancient Egyptian royalty or some shit if he could have gotten away with it.”

I swallowed hard, processing that. “Look,” I said carefully. “If you’d rather not get into the recordings—”

“Are you kidding me?” Now the shock I’d expected from him earlier flitted across his features. “After we’ve been wondering and wondering what was inside that damn cabinet?”

I bit my lip. “You’ll probably be on some of them. Your siblings too. And . . . and me, as well. If there’s anything private that you’d rather I didn’t see, I just wouldn’t want to cross that line.”

Abruptly, Callum softened. “I’m a son of Julian Aurelius Solomon,” he informed me wryly. “I’ve been studied and recorded and scrutinized my entire life—and only mostly by my father. Trust me, you’re not gonna see anything about me on those recordings that’s going to faze me. But if you’re uncomfortable with it, we don’t have to do this. We’ll find another way to gather evidence against whoever the killer is.” A bit more lightly, he added, “You’ve seen crime shows, right? There’s always another way.”

We weren’t living on a crime show, though. And this was one of the few real clues our search had actually turned up. “I’ll be fine,” I said, with a confidence that I hoped would feel real at some point. “And if it’s really like twenty years’ worth of footage, we should probably start going through it sooner rather than later.” I offered him a firmly placed smile. “No time like the present, right?”

Callum didn’t look entirely convinced by my act, but he was polite enough to nod and play along. “As long as you’re sure.”

“Let’s start with the stuff that’s closer to the night of his death,” I said hurriedly. “Maybe the cameras caught something that no one else saw.” Maybe we’d even get a look at the murderer’s face, and then there would be no reason to go through all the other, potentially terrible, mortifying footage buried on the security cameras. Unlikely, but never say never. Before I could change my mind, I reached over his hands to click on a random file.

My intent was not, of course, to pull up the video that I wound up pulling up. I’d just wanted to quit dreading cold water and dive into the deep end of the pool. And in the process, my stupid thumbs, naturally, picked the wrong file. Still, I didn’t pause the recording. It was a super-old one, from long before I’d started working for Sorcerer Solomon, so at least it wouldn’t have anything weird or embarrassing or otherwise incriminating about me on there. I guess I figured that once I played one of those videos—any of those videos—at least my lurking sense of dread over the general existence of Sorcerer Solomon’s creepy secret library of recordings would be put to bed.

Unfortunately for me, my fat-fingered hands probably found the worst possible video to click on for that purpose.

The screen was all gray fuzz at first. The audio booted up before the image quality came into focus. “This was a mistake,” said Rowena Solomon’s detached voice. She sounded tinny, slightly distorted by the audio quality, but the voice still belonged unmistakably to Callum’s mother.

“It’s not, Ro. You know it’s not.”

My breath hitched. Sorcerer Solomon—Julian—a plea lingering in his tone that I’d never heard in life. He sounded younger, desperate, not at all sure of himself. Not at all like the man who’d taught me the ways of the occult.

The gray recording fuzz on the video cleared. A pair of blurry figures un-blurred themselves before my eyes. One was Rowena. Physically, she looked almost exactly the same as she usually did. Her hair was a little shorter, sensibly bobbed so that the golden points brushed her milk-white collarbones. I could tell that she was a little younger too—there was a softness to her features that must have sharpened with the years, but she’d done such a good job of maintaining her complexion that I had to squint to spot the differences between this Rowena and the one I knew.

Julian Solomon, though, I hardly recognized. His hair was still silver, but it sat full and thick on top of his head, immaculately styled, bright as the blue of his eyes. Gone was the prematurely age-bent stoop to his back; gone were the weary lines in his face. He stood straight and proud, broad-shouldered and young and, well, handsome. Undeniably handsome.

He looked, horribly, like Felix. But an even hotter and more inappropriately aged Felix than the one I knew.

“You knew this was a part of the life when you married me,” the uncomfortably hotter and younger version of Sorcerer Solomon told Rowena. “Our son . . .”

“Callum’s barely more than a baby, Julian!” snapped Rowena. “You promised, Julian. You promised me that it would be different with us than it was with Angelique and the twins.”

“And it will be,” insisted Julian. “He has gifts that Circe and even Felix never showed at his age—”

Rowena turned from him abruptly, the movement sharp and angry. “There you go, missing the point again. We’ve talked about this. Callum’s a person, not just a sorcerer’s son. I don’t want your love for him to be contingent on his affinity for the occult.”

“It’s not!” shouted Julian. “Of course it’s not!”

“So if he had no gift of prophecy, no sorcery skills at all, you’d still love him? You’d still protect him?”

Before Julian could answer that, the recording ended.

I’d been sitting stock-still in fascinated horror through most of the recording. Slowly, dreadfully, I remembered where I was and who I was sitting next to. Without a word, I made to shut Callum’s laptop lid.

His hands caught mine before I could. “Don’t.” His voice was quiet and rough. “There’s another video queued up right after this one. Let’s watch that one.” With a slightly black-humored lilt to his tone, he added, “Who knows? Maybe in the next one, he actually answers Mom’s question.”

Unable to think of a good protest to Callum’s request, I clicked on the next video listed in the files. I might as well have been puppeteered by the fingers of dread itself at this point.

This video booted up way faster than the first one had. I caught the fiery red of Angelique Reed’s bright hair as it floated free from the silver pins of an immaculate updo. She was caught in someone’s embrace. He’d undone her hair as he pinned her up against the wall. I caught the flex of his shoulders, the swell of well-defined muscle in his back.

I wanted to turn away. Before I could, the man in Angelique’s embrace lifted his head, blue eyes bright beneath half-mast lashes. If I could have moved, I’d have tripped over my own feet. It was the young Sorcerer Solomon again, around the same age he’d been during the argument with Rowena.

Rowena, whom I finally saw in a corner of the screen, half concealed by a hastily cracked door, observing the scene in silence. She didn’t look surprised. She didn’t even look sad. Simply resigned, as though she’d expected to find her husband cheating on her with his ex-wife, and was merely confirming what she already knew.

“Tell me you love me,” gasped Angelique against Julian’s neck.

“I love you,” he murmured. He sounded dazed, like he couldn’t believe what was really happening, and didn’t care. He buried his face in that long red hair of hers. “I love you, I love you, I love you. So, so much.”

“Then tell me you’ll do it.”

“Do what?”

“Leave your legacy to our children.” She kissed her way up his neck. “To me.” She kissed the side of his jaw. “To what we built.” She kissed him once, hard, on the mouth. “To us.”

Julian returned the kiss, briefly, before pulling himself free from her embrace. “Oh, Angelique. My dear.” He cupped her face with one hand. “You know I can’t do that. Whoever inherits my legacy needs to be—”

“A fortune teller?” Angelique scoffed. “Felix could learn. Even Circe could. They’re your children. Perhaps they don’t have the so-called natural gifts that your whore’s little boy—”

“Don’t. That’s my son too, Angelique.”

“They could learn.” A pleading note had entered Angelique’s voice. “All they need is a chance, Julian. One chance from their father. Cut Rowena and her boy out. Choose us.” She kissed him again, desperately. “Choose your real family.”

Then that recording ended too.

“Callum,” I said in a slightly strangled voice. “Maybe we really shouldn’t be watching these. Maybe this is all just a little bit too—”

“Let’s just skip ahead to the night the asshole died and get the answers we need,” Callum interrupted. A pause. “Please.”

I flinched. He hadn’t raised his voice at all. But there was this dead, resigned quality to the way he spoke to me in that moment that I hated. I’d rather have gotten into a screaming, knockdown, drag-out fight than hear him speak that way again. It matched the look on his face right then: no anger, no shock, no sadness. No twist or lift to his features. Just a brittle, resigned sort of blankness around his eyes and mouth. It was as though the things we’d just seen had turned him into a mannequin, carved in Callum’s likeness, but no longer Callum at all.

“Okay,” I said, hating how my voice trembled. “But after this one, let’s stop, okay? Or at least take a break.”

He didn’t answer. Exhaling slowly, I clicked on the final video in the queue.

This time, Rowena was nowhere to be seen. All I could see, at first, was Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop, nearly exactly the same as it was now, the same as I’d always seen it. It took me a moment to notice the darkened windows, the soft lights on the desk and shelves. It was deep night in this video, the inky blackness beyond the workshop a sharp contrast to the bright afternoon sun pouring through the workshop windows of my own present day.

At the desk sat Sorcerer Solomon. Not the young and handsome one, but the one I’d known for three years, old before his time, silver haired and wizened, so seemingly powerful, yet so tired. I looked at the time stamp in the corner of the screen, searching for a date and time to confirm that we had the right video, and immediately felt ill when I saw it.

It was the night he’d died. A few hours after I’d left. Only a few hours before he’d eventually be found, bloody and dismembered under the harsh glare of the morning sun. And here, trapped in present day, watching the past unfold, I could do nothing to change his fate.

That’s always been the cruelest part of being a fortune teller.

As I watched, frozen in place, Julian Solomon—probably less than an hour away from his own death—squinted down at a sheet of paper stuck between two grimoires. My heart turned over inside my chest. I couldn’t see the handwriting from here, but I was willing to bet it was Callum’s.

Someone knocked at his door. He didn’t look up. “Not right now, Felix.”

“I’m not Felix,” said the slightly muffled voice behind the workshop door.

The recording flickered in and out, flashing across several distorted images, then skipped ahead. “What the hell?” I murmured.

The video picked up again. The screen still showed the workshop, but the telltale reddish glow of a rising sun had begun creeping through the windows. The time stamp on the video told me that we’d reached the morning that Julian Solomon’s corpse would be discovered—or what remained of it. The desk was in disarray, papers strewn across the surface, the grimoire lying discarded on the floor.

And right beside that grimoire, casually outstretched, was a dismembered hand.

“Jesus Christ!” I flung myself away from the laptop with a full body flinch, chest and stomach both heaving. With a tremendous effort, I forced my brain to process what I’d just seen: Julian Solomon, on the last night he’d been alive, about to answer the door to the workshop. Then a technical glitch before cutting directly to the morning after the murder.

Which meant that someone had deleted the most damning section of the recording: the one that would have shown the face of the guest behind the workshop door.

It was the most we’d learned in one sitting. And it was a total dead end.

Options raced through my mind before I settled, at last, on the one I’d been avoiding. “Maybe it’s time,” I said slowly. “Maybe this means I should do it.”

“Do what?”

“You said it yourself. I’m technically allowed to cast unsupervised prophecy magic now.” I stared grimly at the now darkened screen. “We’ve exhausted our options for doing things the nonmagical way, with deductive reasoning and solid evidence. Maybe it’s time to peek at the future and see how this whole mess shakes out.”

“Zeng.” Caution colored his voice, edged in alarm. “Think about this.”

“I have.” Now that I’d settled on a path forward, I couldn’t afford to let him talk me out of it. “It won’t take long. I’m not going to bite off more than I can chew. It’s just one little peek.”

“Tabatha—”

“Shush.” I closed my eyes. “I need silence to make this work.”

To his credit, silence was exactly what he gave me. The question I asked of my magic was simple. Tell me, I whispered to myself. Tell me something true: What will it take to solve this godforsaken mystery at long last? What will reveal the murderer’s face?

As I let my mind drift, breathing in and out, an image began to take shape. Blue eyes. Blond hair.

Callum, I assumed. It had to be Callum, right? I frowned, reaching further within the vision. What about Callum?

Before I could answer my own question, the sound of a crash shattered the air, followed by raised voices. It took me several seconds to realize that the noise wasn’t coming from Callum’s computer.

Callum, for his part, had been rooted to the spot, staring unblinkingly at the blackened screen of his computer, pale and still as a gargoyle. At the sound of the commotion, he startled back to life, springing to his feet. We locked eyes with each other, just for a moment. He had the most wild, unguarded look on his face. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

Then, without a word, he barreled right past me and out the door. I scrambled along in his wake. “Callum! Slow down!”

He did not slow down. Instead, he followed the sounds of shouting and crashing down the hallway, toward the stairs.

The source of the chaos quickly made itself known. At the foot of Solomon Manor’s ancient spiral staircase was Rowena Solomon, entangled with what appeared to be a masked intruder. He wasn’t too much larger than her, but he was brawny and well muscled, and had her pinned by the throat to the wall of the foyer. “Who—” I began.

“Not who,” said Callum tightly. “What. That thing’s not human. Check out the face.”

I followed his gaze, settling on the mask. Which, I quickly realized, wasn’t a mask at all. The black covering rippled and contorted over the space where the nose and mouth should have been. So too did the rest of what I’d thought was the clothing. None of it moved the way it should have on a human body, too inky and dark, a void amidst the backdrop of the mahogany foyer.

Shadows, I realized. The intruder was nothing but a mass of writhing shadows.

Before Callum or I could move, Mrs. Solomon wove one arm between both of the shadow creature’s, connected her own hands, and wrenched herself free of the chokehold. As the masked thing stumbled back, she threw a knee that connected solidly with its belly. Hissing, it flinched away from her.

Evidently, humanoid eldritch abominations could still get the wind knocked out of them.

Callum raced down the staircase. “Get the hell away from my mother!” He wasn’t a kinetic sorcerer, not the way Felix was, but he was still a Solomon. The air around him crackled with barely suppressed power, his blue eyes practically aglow with rage. One of his hands had already begun to twitch toward a sigil formation.

The masked creature clearly knew when it was outmatched. It retreated through the door. Callum, leaping off the final steps of the staircase, started to give chase.

Too late. With a final hiss, the creature vanished into thin air.

Callum’s hands began to shape sigils through the air, his gaze going flinty. I recognized the spell, one to seek and destroy. “Oh no, you don’t.”

“Don’t!” His mother caught ahold of his fingers before he could complete the sigil formations. “Callum. Callum! Honey, it was just an illusion! Leave it!”

Callum yanked himself free from her grip, then immediately pulled her close, staring her in the face with terrified eyes. “Are you hurt? What the hell kind of illusion can manifest into an independent solid form that way? Even Circe can’t do that.”

“No one can. At least, no one we know.” Rowena coughed, wincing. “They’d have to summon a massive amount of power—and the only person we knew who could pull that off was your father.” She cracked her neck with a groan.

“Mom, maybe we should take you to a doctor—”

“I’m fine, Callum. A little bruised, maybe, but fine.”

“What even happened?”

“I have no idea.” She shook her head, massaging the back of her neck. “It was like something out of a bad true-crime podcast. One moment, I was down here, heading to the study to deal with some paperwork. The next, an enraged masked intruder had waltzed straight into our foyer.” Her eyes narrowed. “The door should have been locked.”

“It usually is.” Callum’s frown mirrored his mother’s. “Did it hurt anyone else?”

“Not that I saw. No one else was in the house. Felix is out for lunch with some college friends, and I sent Circe off to run some errands at the grocery store a couple of hours ago.”

“Well, if no one else was in the house, then who on earth could have summoned that thing?”

Keep in mind, I’d been taking all this drama in from the top of the stairs, still stumbling a few steps behind Callum. Which gave me a bird’s-eye view of the whole foyer. That, I suppose, is how I spotted what both Callum and his mother had missed.

I screamed. I couldn’t help myself.

Because lying like a discarded doll, tossed to the side of the foyer—and clearly long separated from its owner—was a single, beautifully tattooed human hand with familiar, matte black nails.

ELEVEN

I wish I could tell you we found the rest of Hester O’Riley’s body in better condition than we found the dismembered pieces of Sorcerer Solomon, that awful morning after his death, but by now, you surely know that this isn’t that kind of story. To her credit, Rowena was the one who recovered first and began the business of finding Hester. I think, up until we did, that we’d held out hope that maybe she was alive somehow. People can survive losing a hand, after all.

What no one can survive, though, is losing their head, which was the part of her we found next, shoved into the corner of the hallway connecting the foyer and the kitchen. The rest of the body—arms and legs and torso—sat in a bloody pile a few feet away.

There’s not much to tell after that, on account of how I spent what must have been the next hour emptying my stomach into the toilet.

By the time I’d cleaned myself up, Detective Chang had already arrived on the scene, her head bent low in conference with an ashen-faced Rowena Solomon, who stood like a shield in front of Callum. I caught eyes with the detective for just a moment. She raised her eyebrows at me.

This time, I didn’t say a word to her. Instead, I walked away, my stride jerky and brisk, and called my mother.

She picked up on the first ring. “Tabatha? What on earth is—”

“I’ve been lying to you,” I told her. My voice was wet and blunt. Talk about ripping a Band-Aid off quick. “I haven’t been going to a women’s self-defense class. I mean, I have, but that’s not all I’ve been doing. Callum Solomon’s mother teaches it, and I’ve been using it as an excuse to spend time with him at their house.”

The other end of the line went silent. Dangerously silent. I closed my eyes.

When my mother spoke, her voice was shockingly quiet. “I know.”

My eyes flew open. “You know?”

“Tabatha.” She sounded darkly amused. “You’re not as clever as you think you are. You’ve never voluntarily participated in an athletic activity a day in your life. Why wouldn’t I be suspicious of this sudden enthusiasm for getting punched in the face on a weekly basis? I looked up the instructor for your course, and put two and two together.”

“Why didn’t you make me stop, then?”

Mom sighed. “I thought about it,” she admitted. “But what good would that have done? If you were willing to exercise—exercise!—to spend time with Callum, clearly it’s a friendship that matters to you. I may not approve of the Solomons as a whole, or the general mess and drama that seems to trail in their wake, but I’m not going to begrudge you a genuine friendship. Lord knows it’s something you could use more of.”

Friendship. I opened my mouth to confess that she’d gotten that part wrong, actually, that my relationship with Callum was all business. Then I closed it again. Was Callum my friend? I’d definitely spent more time with him than almost anyone else my age in the past several weeks. During that time, we’d gone through shit together that would have bonded the worst of enemies, but that wasn’t all.

I’d miss him if he weren’t in my life. I’d already admitted that. To his face, even. If that didn’t make us friends, what did?

“Anyway,” continued my mother amidst my becomingly gape-mouthed silence, “as much as I’m loving this newfound sense of honesty from my only daughter, I must wonder where it’s coming from. What happened? Did you two have a fight?”

“Uh,” I said. “Not exactly.”

“A misunderstanding, then?” Dread crept into Mom’s voice. “Good Lord, you haven’t slept together, have you? If you’re pregnant, I swear to god—”

“No, Mom, I’m not having sex, and I’m not pregnant!” I paused. “I might be a murder witness, though. To a second murder, I mean.”

For a long, terrible moment, Mom said nothing at all. During which I took the opportunity to add, all in a rush, “Also, Sorcerer Solomon’s wife held a séance to summon back her husband’s ghost to determine the inheritor for the family’s occult legacy, and I kind of, um. Well, instead of picking any of his actual kids or wives, Sorcerer Solomon’s ghost chose, uh. Chose me.”

Mom sucked a breath in, a sharp little inhalation, like she’d braced for a punch. “Are you at the house?”

I didn’t have to ask which house. “Yes.”

“And Elena is there too?”

I risked a glance toward the other room, where Detective Chang was still talking to Callum’s mom. “Of course.”

“Don’t move. I’ll be right there.”

In the end, Mom took me home.

I don’t know what she said to Detective Chang. I don’t even know what she said to Rowena Solomon. She told me to wait in the car while she dealt with them both, and by the time she returned, at least another hour had passed. But Detective Chang didn’t come out to ask me more loaded questions, and Callum’s mother didn’t try to convince me to stay and answer any, so whatever Mom said, I assume she worked her lawyerly magic.

“What happened in there?” I ventured as Mom buckled herself in and pulled out of the Solomon Manor driveway.

“Your guess is as good as mine.” I snuck a glance at Mom’s face. Tight lipped and stubborn jawed, she kept her gaze pinned on the road ahead. She looked more like she’d just gotten out of a difficult trial than a grotesque murder scene. “Elena will have her hands full with the investigation.”

“Am I a suspect?”

“No.”

“Will I have to answer more questions from her?”

Mom didn’t respond.

“Mom! I was there when the body was found. There’s no way—”

“Tabatha, please. Wait until we’re off the road.”

Hester O’Riley had once thrown a fireball at me, trying to force my ride off the road. And now Hester O’Riley was dead. I swallowed the memory, and shut up.

Mom didn’t say another word for the rest of the drive. When we did finally get home, she walked inside, dropped her keys on the kitchen table, then sat down hard in one of the chairs. “I think I need a drink,” she announced.

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Are you allowed to say that in front of me?”

“It’ll be legal for you to drink in practically every country except this one in less than a year,” retorted Mom. She rubbed the space between her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Elena doesn’t believe that you killed that woman. Hell, I don’t think she even believes that you killed Julian Solomon anymore, if she ever did in the first place. But it’s pretty obvious that she can’t rule what happened to him as a suicide anymore. Not with another body showing up, dead in the exact same manner, in the exact same house.”

“So what’s going to happen?”

“There will be questions,” said Mom. “For you. For Rowena Solomon. For Callum Solomon. But if I were to hazard a guess as to whom she actually suspects . . .” Here, Mom hesitated.

“Who?”

“Tabatha, I don’t know that it’s appropriate for me to—”

“Just tell me, Mom.”

Mom looked me in the eye. “Elena’s looking at getting the case referred back to the standard homicide unit.”

Two and two clicked together with a remarkable slowness inside my head. “Wait,” I said stupidly. “Wait, wait, wait. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. Standard homicide are the normcore cops. They only handle murders of a non-sorcerous nature. Those dismembered bodies are pretty damn sorcerous, if you ask me.”

Mom shook her head. “Standard homicide only handles non-sorcerous murderers.”

I stared at her. “Detective Chang suspects Callum’s mom.”

Mom hadn’t stopped looking at me. “I heard a little about those video recordings you two delved into upstairs.”

I exhaled sharply. “So Callum talked.”

“To me, yes. He says that the two of you saw . . . certain incidents, saved on tape, that occurred in his father’s workshop. My understanding is that it was all saved via security footage, kept in some kind of lockbox.”

“A cabinet,” I corrected. I sank into the chair opposite Mom. “We saw some stuff,” I admitted. “We didn’t have time to go through all the security footage, but what we did see was— Look, I know you’ve never been the biggest Sorcerer Solomon fan, but I didn’t think he was the kind of guy who’d treat his family the way we saw in those recordings. Maybe that’s naive of me.” I shrugged. “But the way he talked about Callum as a baby, and the way he treated Mrs. Solomon, cheating on her with his ex-wife like—” I cut myself off. “Wait. Is that why Detective Chang suspects Rowena? Because of her husband’s affairs? What is this, a 1950s telenovela?”

“People have killed for less,” said Mom.

“Yeah, but not Callum’s mom.” I scoffed. “Besides, you’re really telling me that a non-sorcerer could literally dismember not one but two people? Without anyone noticing? What, you think she hides a chainsaw under her skirt or something?”

Mom didn’t laugh. “I may not be a sorcerer, but I’ve been watching you ever since you started that apprenticeship under Julian Solomon during your freshman year in high school. Did you know that I started reading up on the history of sorcery that same day you came home screaming with excitement over being accepted?”

I remembered that day. The way Mom had sighed and said, “Well, at least it’s a big name you can put on your résumé for college applications.” The way I’d refused to let her nonchalance deflate me.

I blinked at her. “You’ve read about sorcery? Like, you, personally? Why on earth would you do that?”

Mom gave me a long, hard look, her head tilted to one side. “You really underestimate the power of parental interest, don’t you?” She sighed, but in a very different way from how she’d sighed at me during that day in my freshman year, at the start of this whole mess. “I may not care for sorcery. I may not care for the fact that my only daughter has been dead set on a career in the field since the age of fourteen, and I may hope and wish that college changes your mind. But.” She smiled faintly. “I can’t live in denial, can I? You love the occult. And you’ve done the work—so much work!—to start building toward your dreams. That’s enough to make any half-decent parent proud. So what could I do but learn about what you love?”

I swallowed hard. I’m not much of a crier, not really—not since middle school, at least. I don’t blubber often. But then again, Mom also doesn’t praise me often.

“So I learned about it,” continued Mom. “As best I could.” Her mouth twitched. “Old law student habits, I suppose. And, do you know, it taught me something interesting about what non-sorcerers can do with artifacts of the occult.” She’d stopped smiling now. “As it turns out, you don’t have to be a sorcerer to use sorcery to kill. All you need is access to a spell that a sorcerer created. Tell me, how many pieces of Julian Solomon’s occult paraphernalia and unfinished magical experiments did his wife have access to? Left unthinkingly lying about in a workshop she could enter or exit at any time? After all, she was his wife, right? And a non-sorcerous wife to boot. Why wouldn’t he have trusted her?”

Magic did require skill, but when it came down to it, it was about will. Someone with enough desire could probably pull off a spell, if they had the right one around. I bit my lip, all primed to deny the awful thing that Mom was suggesting. Instead, I asked, in a small voice, “You really think she would? Kill her husband with his own creations?”

“I think,” said Mom, “that there’s not a lot that a mother wouldn’t do to protect her child.”

“From what?” I wanted to know. “Even in that recording we saw of Sorcerer Solomon’s affair with his first wife, it’s not like he was acquiescing to any of Angelique’s demands. It was pretty clear that he still meant to leave everything to Callum and Rowena.”

“And then,” said Mom carefully, “he left it all to you, instead. What does that tell you about what may or may not have transpired in the time between that affair Rowena Solomon witnessed and the night of Julian Solomon’s death?”

“Not much.” I folded my arms. An obstinate sensibility had taken hold of me, rooting me to the spot. I didn’t know Callum’s mom well, but I liked her. I liked that she’d helped us without being asked, and I liked her easy rapport with her son. I didn’t want to believe that she was capable of using her own husband’s power to tear human bodies limb from limb. “People can change their minds, can’t they?”

“Sure,” Mom allowed. “But it says something unpleasant about Julian Solomon’s character if he was fickle enough to deny all three of his children an occult inheritance after—and this is just casual observation as an outsider and a parent, but here it is, all the same—hinging all his affection for them based on their occult abilities. If Callum’s mother knew not only that he’d—however briefly—entertained both an affair and the pleas of his first wife to cut her son out of his legacy? And then, to add insult to injury, in the end, he left it all to an outsider to the family, entirely? Well, I’d call that motive. And as we’ve discussed, we know she had the means.”

“What about Hester O’Riley? Why kill her too?”

Mom gave an exhausted little shrug. “I honestly don’t know. But I’d guess it would be because O’Riley may have figured Rowena out. Or at least suspected her. It wouldn’t be the first time a murderer has killed twice to cover up the circumstances of the first crime, once a witness got wise.”

I felt sick. “Mom. We can’t prove any of that.”

“No, and I don’t particularly like the possibility either,” said Mom. “It’s an ugly situation, no matter how you spin it. But Rowena Solomon’s guilt or innocence is not for us to decide. It is, ironically, going to be left to Elena after all.”

“And she agrees with you?”

Mom didn’t say anything. Which was worse, in some ways, than saying yes. My face grew hot all at once.

So, I spoke instead. “Screw this.” My voice was soft and thick.

That startled Mom enough to open her mouth again, at least. “Tabatha! Language!”

I chuckled wetly. “I think we’re a little past swearing reprimands, given all the murder and lies and dismemberment, wouldn’t you say?”

“Tabatha—”

“I’m going up to my room,” I interrupted. My breath was coming hot and heavy now, my chest too full and tight with everything I felt. Everything I wished I didn’t feel. It was all too much, too fast. “You can tell me how long I’m grounded for later. Excuse me.”

And, as politely as I could, I—the girl who prided myself on not being a crier—fled my mother’s presence to have myself a good long howl of a sob-fest in my childhood bedroom.

TWELVE

I can’t tell you how long I cried. If you were to ask me why the idea of Rowena Solomon killing her husband set me off bawling like a baby, I’m not sure I could tell you that much either. It might have been any number of things. The shock of a second murder, certainly. Also, perhaps, the secondhand emotions from all those ugly memories locked in the Pandora’s box of recordings hidden in Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop. Maybe even just the general sense of being verklempt because of an honest emotional conversation with my mother. But I had myself a good bawl, I can tell you that much.

I was so busy having myself that good bawl, in fact, that I nearly missed my phone ringing. I let it go for about three rings so I could blow my nose before picking up. “Hello?”

“Jeez, Zeng,” said Callum. “Do you have a cold or something?”

“Allergies,” I said automatically.

“Well, I hope they’re not bad. I’m at your house.”

“You’re what?” I squawked.

“Specifically, I’m out under your window.”

I didn’t believe him, so naturally, I cracked open my window to call him on his bullshit. Instead, I found him staring up at me, one hand in his pocket, blue eyes innocent as the day, all that blond hair of his backlit by the purpling sky of dusk.

I leaned my elbows against the windowsill. “This isn’t an eighties movie, you know. You could just text me and tell me to come meet you in a park or something if you wanted to talk. Or better yet, FaceTime.”

“I thought you might be grounded.”

“So you decided to sneak up to my bedroom window?”

“Easy there, Molly Ringwald—I’m a solid twelve feet at least from your bedroom window.” He squinted up at me. “Although.” Experimentally, he tested a foot against the brick ledge at the corner.

“No,” I said immediately. “If you scale this wall, fall, and break your neck, it won’t matter who’s been murdering people at your house, because I will be immediately murdered by your entire family.”

“Oh, relax.” Callum traced his fingers through the air, the lazy impression of a sigil. Immediately, the wind picked up around him. “I’m not much of a kinetic sorcerer—not like Felix—but I know enough to give gravity a run for its money.” With a faint grunt, he began to climb his way up, brick by brick, buoyed by that unnatural little breeze he’d summoned. It gusted around him like a rock climber’s belay, ready to catch him if he slipped.

When he reached my window, with horrifically casual ease, he stepped off the ledge entirely. I slapped both palms over my mouth to hold in the instinctive scream.

He flailed about in the air for a moment. His little summoned gust of wind went wild beneath his feet, blowing this way and that, before settling to keep him afloat. “Ha,” he said, looking dazed and pleased with himself as he buoyed himself about in the air in front of my window. “I wasn’t at all sure that would actually work, to be honest.”

“And what was going to be your plan if it didn’t?” I demanded.

He shrugged. The wind had whipped his hair across his eyes, hiding them temporarily from view. “It’s not such a long fall, is it?”

“Long enough!” I snapped, and I grabbed him by the forearms. “All right, John Hughes, let’s hope you fit through this window.”

He did, in fact, fit through the window, though it took a good deal of squeezing and grunting and a couple of muffled yelps of protest from him when I gave him a particularly vicious tug that definitely tore the crotch of his jeans. “Those are designer!”

“Oh, are they? I’m sorry.” I dragged him the rest of the way through the window and dropped him with a plop on the floor. “You know what would have saved your threads? FaceTime.”

He grinned up at me. “You wound me.” The grin fled as soon as it had appeared, giving way to a concerned squint. “You’ve been crying.”

I reddened. “I told you I have allergies.”

“What are you allergic to, then?”

“They’re seasonal. I’m not a crier,” I added for good measure, which I only belatedly realized made me sound very much like a crier.

“Uh huh.” He sat up, still peering at my face with that odd expression plastered all over his. “What happened?”

A hysterical little laugh bubbled out of me. “What happened? What didn’t?” I sat down on my bed—or threw myself down on it, really. The mattress springs creaked in protest at the violence of the movement. “We went through a bunch of footage of your dad being awful to your mom. We found another magically dismembered body in your house. And your mom . . .” I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish. That awful, hot feeling was scalding the space beneath my skin again and filling my throat.

Callum didn’t look away that entire time. “You think she’s the killer.”

“My mom does.” I shook my head, as if that would clear it. “Or thinks it’s possible, anyway. Me, I just . . . I don’t know what to think anymore, Callum. That was some messed-up stuff we saw on your dad’s security cameras.”

He didn’t try to deny it. Instead, he sat down beside me on the bed. “Did any of it surprise you?”

Startled, I glanced at him. “You ask that like none of it surprised you.”

He just shrugged. “I know my family.”

“You knew about your dad’s affair?”

Another shrug. “It wasn’t a big leap to make.”

“And none of that bothers you?”

He gave a low, dry chuckle. “Does it matter? We can’t all have families likes yours, Zeng. Some of us get the philandering dads and the murder-suspect moms.”

“Stop,” I snapped. Maybe I couldn’t always read him, but I could read this much. “You don’t believe that your mom really did it. Besides, the pieces don’t fit perfectly, do they?”

“What do you mean by that?”

I racked my brain, trying to find the words to explain what I meant. But something about the suspicions cast on Rowena just felt off—not just because she was Callum’s mom, but because of the logistics of the entire situation. “I could get killing your dad in a jealous rage—like, I don’t think it would be likely, but I could maybe see it, especially if she got sick of watching the way he treated you and your siblings. But then there was Hester.” I pursed my mouth. “My mom argued that your mom could have been killing an inconvenient witness, by offing Hester. But then, what was that illusion-creature that attacked her afterward?” I shook my head. “Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it was a random magical experiment, escaped from Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop or something. But I think the likelier scenario is that whoever summoned that illusion also murdered Hester O’Riley, then left her dismembered body hidden in the foyer. They were probably trying to make their escape from the scene of the crime when Rowena walked in. Boom, they panic, cast a frantic illusory spell to buy time and distract her while they flee.” I frowned. “But why kill Hester? What did she have in common with your dad? He was rich and famous, and she was just a nobody, comparatively speaking. Aside from her apprenticeship at Solomon Manor, the Venn diagram between those two is . . . whatever the opposite of a circle is.”

“They do have something in common, though.” A flicker of something flashed through Callum’s eyes, bright and hard. “Both Hester and my father were sorcerers—not just sorcerers, but prophets.” A bit dryly, he added with a tongue-in-cheek flourish, “The rarest and most prestigious of sorcerers.”

I felt my frown deepen. “You think the murderer—whoever it was—has a thing against fortune tellers? Enough to want to murder and dismember them?” Gooseflesh pricked at my skin. Both of us were fortune tellers. “But why?”

“I don’t know.” Callum’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t even know if that’s what’s really going on here or if I just really, really don’t want to believe my mom could be the killer.”

“You don’t believe that,” I insisted. A raw, aggressive edge had crept into my voice. “I refuse to believe that you believe your mother could do those things.”

He blinked up at me, startled. He must have realized his face had betrayed him, because he didn’t bother concealing the quiver in his voice when he said, “Maybe I’m an idiot, but no, Zeng. No, I really don’t think my mother killed two people.”

My chest went tight. “You’re not an idiot,” I said thickly. Impulsively, I pulled him into a hug. Maybe it was a stupid thing to do, with my mom still presumably downstairs and a killer with access to sorcerous means still unidentified. But god, it felt right, the way he filled up the space between my arms, warm and solid, and I couldn’t help leaning into him when he returned the embrace, natural as breathing. “Hey,” I said into his hair. “It’s going to be all right. One way or another. We’ll figure it out, right?”

“I know.” He pulled back from me, just a few inches, and looked me in the eye. His hands came up to cup my face. “I’m going to make it all right.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that. And I didn’t have time to ask, either, because a split second later, his lips were on mine.

I don’t know if you’ve been kissed before. And if you have, I don’t know if you remember your first. But I can tell you something about kissing Callum Solomon: he makes everything else you might worry about while kissing someone fall right out of your head. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that I’d never had a boyfriend, and that the only other kiss I’d had was an awkward middle school peck during a shitty game of truth-or-dare. All that mattered was Callum, Callum, Callum, and the way he fit himself around me, spread across my bed, gently pulling me closer so that he could keep kissing me.

I wish I could tell you that we came to our senses and stopped, apologized to each other, and sprang apart in mutual embarrassment. I wish I could tell you that I had enough wits about me to recognize that truly, his timing could not have been worse, and put a proper stop to the hormone-fueled nonsense at hand. But I can’t tell you either of those things, because in truth, I kissed him right back, and I liked doing it.

It wasn’t until I heard the telltale sounds of Dad’s car pulling into the garage that my hands froze halfway under his shirt. I jerked my head back from his. Somehow, I’d wound up straddled across his thighs. When the hell had I climbed on top of him? The top two buttons on his shirt collar were undone.

Callum’s gaze slid down to my hands, up to his own unbuttoned shirt, then finally back to my face. He raised his eyebrows at me.

I turned bright red. “You should go.”

His head flopped back on my pillow. I allowed myself a moment to take in how ridiculous and out of place he looked right then: this golden-haired all-American WASP jock of a boy, caught against the garish floral-printed pillowcases that had been part and parcel of my childhood bedroom since my elementary school days. “I should go,” he agreed.

He didn’t, though. Not for a long moment. Instead, he just lay there in my bed, hair fanned out over those bright pink petals on my pillows. “There’s something I want you to know,” he said. “It’s important.”

Now it was my turn to raise my eyebrows at him. “So important that you couldn’t have fit it in before . . .” I gestured vaguely at the tangled comforter one of us had kicked off the bed halfway through the make-out session. “. . . you know, all of this?”

Callum didn’t laugh. Propping himself up on his elbows, he swung his legs over the side of my bed. He reached over and, with painstaking care, tucked a stray lock of my hair behind my ear, his palm lingering on the side of my face. Just for a moment. Then he dropped his hand. “I’ve never had a Nancy Drew to my Joe Hardy before,” he said. “It was pretty great.”

“Was?” I echoed. Faint alarm bells went off in the back of my mind.

He shook his head, his gaze distracted. “I should go,” he said again.

I frowned as he made his way toward my bedroom door. “Uh, maybe not that way, considering that both my parents are downstairs? They may not be sorcerers, but I’m pretty sure they’d still find a way to add a third murder to the tally.” I winced. “Sorry. Too soon.”

“Ah, don’t worry about me, Zeng.” Callum glanced over his shoulder at me, a fleeting grin dancing across his features. “Circe’s not the only member of the family with some talent with illusions. I’ll make it through just fine. I always do.”

And then he too was gone.

Remarkably, my parents didn’t ground me. Part of me—admittedly, maybe the cowardly part—sort of wished that they had. All evidence to the contrary, I’m not stupid. If Sorcerer Solomon’s killer was in fact going after fortune tellers, I’d definitely be a target. The only thing that might buy me the murderer’s grace was my status as a mere apprentice rather than a full-fledged sorcerer.

Of course, the fact that I’d been named Julian Solomon’s heir probably left that meager protection in tatters. I’d never been less excited at the prospect of being considered a real sorcerer.

Perhaps even more remarkable than my parents’ sudden belief in my right to freedom and independence, Callum’s supposed mastery over his sister’s illusory tricks turned out to be legit—or at least, legit enough that if either Mom or Dad caught him sneaking out of my bedroom, neither of them commented on it. Two days ambled past, somehow sluggish and swift all at once. Mom took a couple of calls from Elena Chang. Sometimes, I overheard the faint sounds from downstairs of an argument on the phone, usually when I was up in my room with my homework. Mom never told me what they argued about, or why, but the detective didn’t summon me down to the station, and I—maybe figuring it was better that I didn’t know—simply never asked.

I didn’t see or hear from Callum the entire time, and my casual texts—hey, how’s it going and want to meet up? and even hope everything’s OK—went unanswered. It was such a stupid thing to worry over, in light of everything else going tits-up around us. Yet I couldn’t quiet the stupid, shallow voice in the back of my head that was like, Maybe you’re just a really bad kisser, and now he never wants to exist in your presence again. Even though, rationally, if I were really that bad at kissing, presumably he would have stopped and made his excuses after the first ten seconds. Or thirty. Or five minutes.

I couldn’t quit thinking about the way he’d looked before he’d left. Like he was already thinking that our—what could you call it exactly? A friendship? A partnership? A bizarre, budding pseudo-romance-situation-ship that stubbornly refused to be labeled?—like he was thinking that it was already over. Like it had been over, maybe, even before he kissed me.

Which was why it was all the more jarring, what I woke up to on the third day. All I felt at first was a hand on my shoulder. Then my father’s voice in my ear as he shook me urgently from the last layers of sleep: “Tabatha. Tabatha, wake up, please. There’s something you need to know.”

I groaned into my pillow. Cracking my eyelids open even slightly told me everything I needed to know, which was that it was still dark out—too dark, certainly, to be woken this rudely on a Saturday morning. “Dad. This is an absurd hour, even for you. Go back to bed. Mom will thank you for it.”

Dad did not go back to bed. “I’m sorry, Tabatha, but it can’t wait. It’s about the Solomon boy. And the most recent death in his house.”

Okay, I’ll admit it: that did the trick of piercing through my veil of early morning gloom. I rolled over and tugged myself up onto one elbow, squinting at Dad. “Solomon boy? You don’t mean Callum, do you?”

“The younger one. The one that your mother says you’ve . . . been spending most of your time with recently.” Dad coughed uncomfortably. He was still in his pajamas—the old-man flannel kind that looked both unaccountably dorky and dangerously comfy. This set was covered in polka dots. The cheery pattern, visible even in the early morning darkness of my bedroom, sat at odds with the somber, stricken expression on his face.

I sighed. “That’s Callum, all right,” I said. “What about him?”

“He’s just signed a confession.”

I didn’t process the words immediately. “Confession?” I sat up a little straighter in bed, frowning. “What’s he confessing to?”

“The murder of the woman they found in the house a few days ago.” Dad paused. “And the murder of Julian Solomon. His father.”

Now I was fully awake. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sense or no, he’s put the words down in writing.” Dad studied me carefully. “You’re a fortune teller and a sorcerer-to-be, are you not? Your mother tells me that both you and your . . . Callum write down futures. He should know the power of the written word better than most.”

“Yeah, which is why it doesn’t make sense,” I said impatiently. I tried to quell the bubble of panic rising in my chest. “When did this happen? How did you find out?”

“Your mother.” Dad’s expression went wry. “She and the good detective have apparently been having words.”

I frowned. “Isn’t this illegal? All of this should be hush-hush, right?”

“Not when it comes to matters of sorcery. Too many unaccounted-for variables. What we do know is that Callum Solomon signed two murder confessions this morning—on the condition that they leave his mother out of the whole nasty business. He was quite insistent that she had no part in any foul play.”

I breathed out slowly. “He’s taking the fall for her.”

“Tabatha, we don’t know—”

“I don’t know if she did it or not,” I interrupted. “But I know Callum didn’t. Which means he’s trying to protect her. He’d rather rot in prison than see his mother there.” I swore under my breath. “That idiot.” Impressive levels of filial love and piety, but an idiot all the same.

Of course, everything made sense now. The unanswered texts. The way he’d disappeared out the door nearly as swiftly as he’d appeared at my bedroom window. Even the way he’d kissed me, urgent and desperate and marked by an edge of something in him that knew that anything that happened between us would be temporary.

Dad sighed. “I should never have given you all those Agatha Christies for your birthday when you were a child.” He looked me in the eye. “You still are a child. You realize that, right? And this isn’t an Agatha Christie novel.”

“I know, Dad,” I said, annoyed now. “But this is a real murder investigation. And Callum’s my . . . friend.” Sort of. We’d cross that bridge once I finished saving him from his own terrible decision-making skills. “Friends don’t let friends take the fall for murders they didn’t commit.”

Dad sighed again. “Look, sweetheart, I wanted to tell you what happened before someone else did, or worse, before it hit the news. But Tabatha, please don’t do anything stupid.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.” I rubbed my eyes. “Just what’s necessary.” My head was swimming, but another part of my brain—the part that had survived nearly four years of apprenticeship under the most famous sorcerer-prophet on the American East Coast—had already begun coldly, carefully calculating the options available to me. The steps in what came next. I didn’t have many paths forward. But there was one viable solution I could still see.

I just had to hope like hell that he would see things the same way I would.

THIRTEEN

Felix Solomon didn’t seem surprised to hear from me, but he also didn’t seem especially keen on staying on the phone longer than we had to. “Can you make it to the house?” he asked.

“If you don’t tell my parents, sure,” I said. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. Just months ago, I’d have put up way more of a fight going anywhere that Mom hadn’t explicitly approved. But then, just months ago, I’d never seen a dead body before, much less two.

“Tonight, then,” decided Felix. “We’ll talk. Can you make it by seven?”

I could.

I must have made the walk to Solomon Manor a hundred thousand times over the course of my apprenticeship. But even that night of the first canceled séance, when I’d stolen up to the grounds of the house under the yellowing light of the full moon, I hadn’t felt the way I felt now. And the night hadn’t looked the way it did now either. Instead of a full fat glow, the moon sat slivered against the pitch black of the sky, barely a wink of white in the darkness.

The pathway between my house and the Solomons’ seemed to stretch on for miles and miles. And the streets, usually boasting a few cars here and there, or little groups of pedestrians, were curiously empty. The dutiful orange lampposts cast their glow upon a seemingly deserted road toward the manor, and instead of warming me, they made me feel colder than ever.

I was almost there. Wasn’t I? The night pressing in all around me begged to differ. Or so it seemed. I paused a few times, shook my head, and tried to continue my walk, but I was no longer certain of where I was going. I hit the end of the block I was walking, stopped, and smacked myself on the cheeks a few times, trying to startle myself back into my bearings. “Come on, Zeng,” I muttered at myself. “Now isn’t the time for your shitty sense of direction to flare up.” Nor did it make sense why I’d be lost now—I knew the walk to Solomon Manor like the back of my hand.

I blinked up at the streetlight on the corner, as if it might offer some answers. Instead, it guttered, the bulb blinking rapidly in the dark. I shielded my eyes instinctively, casting them toward the sidewalk. My breath hitched.

My shadow was flickering in time with the blink of that failing streetlamp. But each time it blinked in and out of existence, the shape of it changed. As I stared, frozen, the shadow of my body grew longer and taller, the shape of my head extending, serpentine, from the increasingly unnatural length of my neck.

I tried to run, but my feet wouldn’t leave the ground. I tried to move—my toes, my fingers, literally anything at all—but my body wasn’t mine anymore. The more desperately I struggled, the more firmly my body pinned itself in place.

Until, abruptly, my feet went out from under me entirely. I barely remembered to tuck my chin—the way Callum’s mother had once taught me—to protect my head as my back slammed into the sidewalk. The impact blew the air right out of my lungs, but at least I could move now. I tried to scramble to my feet.

The darkness pooling around me had other ideas. I barely had time to blink before my own shadow slithered free of the sidewalk and snaked around my ankles. My scream only seemed to encourage it. With another yank, the shadow pulled me back down, pinning me flat on my back. With the wind knocked out of my lungs a second time, all I could do was watch, my breathing reduced to shallow spurts, as that awful, sticky darkness that had been my shadow grew and grew, stretching out over me, and blacking out that silver sliver of moonlight.

I should have done something. Thought of some defensive sigil that Sorcerer Solomon had taught me, or maybe some counter-curse to whatever the hell this thing was. But in that moment, pinned to my back by some eldritch piece of the occult that I didn’t understand, watching it darken the scant light around me, I couldn’t think of a single piece of sorcery that might save my life.

Soon, that darkness was mounted on top of me, pressing down-ward, until I could swear I was, somehow, horrifically, drowning on dry land, in the middle of a small-town sidewalk. I tried to breathe, but my chest compressed. I could feel the thing pulling at my arms, my legs, even my hands and feet, stretching me out even as it suffocated me. My limbs strained as my body struggled uselessly against those awful, shadowy bonds trying to tear me apart.

This, I was certain, was the part where I would die. I wasn’t sure how it would happen, exactly. Maybe, if I was lucky, I’d simply die of oxygen deprivation as my lungs collapsed. If I were less lucky, I’d be drawn and quartered by the darkness itself.

The fight went out of me. I closed my eyes to it all.

One moment, I was suffocating, preparing to be ripped apart. And the next, I was on my hands and knees, sucking in great gulps of air, with my body marvelously, gloriously intact. The light from that blinking streetlamp guttered down at me from above as I inhaled and exhaled, marveling at the miracle of air inflating my lungs again.

Standing before me was Felix Solomon, sigils blossoming between his hands, as he stood between the guttering light and growing hiss of coiled shadow. He spared one moment to glance over his shoulder at me. “Tabatha. Are you hurt?”

I took stock as efficiently as I could, under the circumstances. My palms were scraped up, and I was pretty sure I’d bruised my tailbone. But my limbs were in one piece, and I could breathe again. I clung to that. “I’ll live,” I said. “What the hell is that?”

“Something that shouldn’t exist,” said Felix, tight voiced. To my vast alarm, he strode toward the something that shouldn’t have existed, departing the flickering glow of the lamplight.

“What are you doing?” I cried.

“Just stay behind me,” he said without turning around, which wasn’t an answer at all. I caught the pale flash of his hands, fingers deft in the darkness, as they strung the sigils together. I recognized a few of them and swallowed, even as the ground beneath our feet began to rumble. I’d so often seen Felix in the context of workshop cleanup or fortune teller’s assistant that I sometimes forgot where his true and greatest power lay.

Kinetic sorcery. The magic of the physical.

The sidewalk roared to life. I scrambled back. The chipped, rocky pavement undulated, rising from the ground. A head, a torso, and snapping jaws emerged. The streetlamp smashed apart in its wake, casting us into temporary darkness.

Truly temporary. The broken pieces of glass skittered across the slithering surface of what had been the sidewalk until it found home in the makeshift head. As the pavement’s jaws grew great, gray teeth, those flinty pieces of what had once been the streetlamp grew round and wide, filled with unnatural, punishing white light, far brighter than any glow that tired old lamp had ever cast in its dying life span. Eyes, for the hulking, terrifying thing the sidewalk had become. Eyes, to stare down the pitch black of the night.

I backed up farther still, trying not to let my jaw hang agape. I’d never seen kinetic magic worked on this scale. Felix had created his own concrete monstrosity. And now, it was fending off the shadowy thing that had nearly killed me.

The darkness hissed at Felix’s creation but retreated backward, flinching from those fierce, glowing eyes that Felix had given his own monster. Felix took that opportunity to grab my hand. “Time to run!”

“But the sidewalk,” I babbled, even as I forced my feet into motion. “Are you going to, you know, put it back?”

“That’s a problem for tomorrow!” Felix shouted over the roar of his own monster. “Today’s problem is making sure that thing holds the dark at bay until we get back to the house!”

I risked one last glance at the crush of monster against monster, the glow of demon eyes versus those tentacles of shadow, and decided it would behoove me not to argue further. I ran after Felix, and trusted implicitly that he’d remember the route to his home that I’d forgotten.

I’m telling you all this now, because I need you to understand the state of mind I was in at the time. I’d just suffered a near-death experience, and although that was becoming a frighteningly common experience for me, this particular attempt on my life had come far closer to finishing the job than any of the other disasters Callum and his family had previously dragged me into. I wasn’t sure what was real and wasn’t, and I didn’t know which of my senses—what I saw, what I heard, what I touched—I could really trust.

But I could swear that out of the corner of my eye, retreating into the dark along with the shadows, was a telltale shock of thick golden hair and Callum Solomon’s bright, watchful blue eyes.

“It was a spell gone wrong.”

I stared at the cup of tea that Felix had set in front of me. It was objectively good tea, an aromatic green tea blend, brewed hot and strong just the way I liked it, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to take more than a few sips. I’d barely kept myself from throwing up as soon as Felix had dragged me safe behind Solomon Manor’s walls, and I didn’t particularly wish to tempt fate—or an anxiety-ridden digestive system. The living room, where Felix had ushered me onto one of the great plush couches, was warm. I knew this objectively. But I was, somehow, still unshakably cold.

I couldn’t have seen Callum at the site of the attack. My brain refused to compute the possibility, or the implications.

Instead of draining it, I folded my hands around my teacup and willed its warmth into me. “What was a spell gone wrong?”

“The thing that attacked you.”

That gave me pause. “I’ve dealt with spells gone wrong,” I said slowly. Reluctantly, I remembered my disastrous attempts at pyrokinetic magic, the night before Julian Solomon had died. “I sat through all the same cautionary stories from schoolmarms and elective sorcery teachers. I know how dangerous it is for sorcerers to lose control of a spell, but that thing was . . .” I trailed off, shivering. “I didn’t think even a spell gone wrong would create something like that.”

“Well, it can,” said Felix. His face was waxy pale—with exertion from spending his kinetic magic to protect us both, presumably. I hadn’t thought a boy that white could look whiter still, practically gray beneath that mop of red hair. He had a cut across one sharp cheekbone, the wound shallow and already clotting, but still stark against the pallor of his complexion. “Have you ever screwed up before? Magically, I mean? I know for a fact that Dad occasionally made you bite off more than you could chew. That’s not a criticism,” he added hurriedly when I began to open my mouth, hurt. “It’s just, he did the same to us all. His kids, I mean.” He shook his head ruefully. “I saw him do it to Hester too. So I just assumed.”

The assumption wasn’t all wrong. I remembered the singed ends of my bangs, the scent of smoke wafting through Sorcerer Solomon’s workshop, and winced. “I’ve messed up,” I admitted slowly. “But it’s never created a monster.”

“Of course not,” said Felix. “Dad was always sure to supervise you. But you know how it feels, right? To realize you’ve gotten lost somewhere between the threads of power. When you start unraveling the shape of the magic. You must have felt that before. The panic, the way the same power you summoned, the thing you thought you had full control over—how it becomes something . . . else. Something that’s no longer willing to bow to your will, because it’s grown one of its own. And it doesn’t agree with the same things you want.” He shook his head, gaze bright and distant. “You must have gotten a whiff of that panic.”

Well, yes, obviously. “A whiff, yeah,” I said. “But never more than that. Jesus, Felix, how badly does a sorcerer have to screw up to make something like . . . like that thing?”

The corners of Felix’s mouth twitched upward, but there was no mirth behind the smile. “My guess? Pretty damn badly. And the spell must have been pretty damn big.”

My hands clenched and unclenched as my heart rate climbed. My magical mishaps had only been brief flickers of small, poorly contained power, a half-dying ember that flamed temporarily out of control before being hastily snuffed out by the safeguard that was Sorcerer Solomon’s presence. Little fires, easily extinguished.

I shivered. Good god. How much worse could my little fires have grown? I had never seen anything like that writhing mass of shadow before, but worse than that, I’d never felt anything like those shadows before. It wasn’t just the way its darkness had swallowed the light. It was the way it had gotten under my skin and inside my head. I’d been lost. Worse than lost. I’d forgotten how to get to Solomon Manor. I’d forgotten where I even was.

How much more would I have forgotten before being consumed entirely by those shadows? I swallowed a bitter sip of tea before I could lose myself to renewed panic. “It wasn’t yours, was it?” I asked carefully, staring into the dark depths of the cup’s remaining contents. “The spell gone awry.”

Felix’s answer was immediate. “No.”

“Then whose?”

“Whoever killed Dad and Hester, presumably.”

My gaze jerked up from the teacup. “You don’t think it was Callum?”

Felix hesitated. “I don’t know.”

I set my teacup aside, swallowing. “Look, there’s something else you should know.”

Felix’s eyebrows climbed. “What’s up?”

“I saw one other person on that street where we were attacked.” I breathed out slowly. “I can’t be sure, maybe I was just too amped up on adrenaline, but I think—I think maybe I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure—”

“Spit it out, Tabatha.”

“I think I saw Callum there,” I blurted out all at once. I laughed, a high, wild sound. “Which is crazy, right? I can’t have seen Callum. For one thing, he’s probably in a jail cell somewhere.”

Felix didn’t say anything at all for a long moment. He set his own cup of tea aside and folded his hands. He opened his mouth, coughed, then closed it again, staring at his tea.

My stomach wrenched itself immediately into a knot. “Felix. He is in a jail cell somewhere, right?”

“That’s the thing I wanted to talk to you about originally, before that . . . thing got the jump on you.” Felix picked up his cup again and turned it around and around between his hands, as though the cooling tea sloshing around inside might hold answers he didn’t. “When Callum confessed to the murders, it wasn’t like they just took him to a normal jail for regular folks and locked him away. It was Detective Chang who took him into custody. Normally, she has measures for keeping sorcerers under control, but Callum is Callum.”

I closed my eyes. “He escaped, didn’t he?”

“Reportedly, he was left in a secured room after he asked for a lawyer. By the time they arrived with one, he was gone.”

I felt sick. “Why would he even bother confessing to the crime if he was just going to make a break for it anyway? Why not go on the lam immediately?”

Felix shook his head. “That’s why I can’t give you a straight answer to whether I think he really killed Dad and Hester. It doesn’t add up.”

I laughed grimly, a hysterical edge to the sound. “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe someone else took out Sorcerer Solomon and Hester O’Riley. Maybe Callum only tried to kill me. Or created something that wanted to. Maybe whatever magic he witched up to escape from Detective Chang’s interrogation chamber got all screwed up along the way, and decided that the price of his escape would be this one interloping apprentice’s death.”

“I don’t think so,” said Felix. His gaze was distant. “I think the thing that just tried to kill you had to be the same thing that killed the others.”

“How do you figure?”

“Think about the way they died.” Felix leaned slightly forward, a desperate—almost hungry—gleam in his gaze. “Torn limb from limb, and yet there were no signs of a break-in, and barely any signs of a struggle.”

I leaned away from him instinctively. Felix had always been so mild mannered, so buttoned up and practical and kind. This feral boy detective—somehow so much sharper around the edges than even Callum—felt incongruous to me.

Also, hashing out the crimes like this reminded me of all the hours spent in the car with Callum, and I really didn’t want to think about Callum at that moment. For so many reasons.

If Felix noticed my uncharacteristic discomfort with him, he gave no sign. “The death may have been sorcerous in nature, but I doubt the sorcerer responsible was present at the time.”

Sense memory whipped through me, cruel and brutal in its recency. My compressed chest. The way my arms and legs, ankles and wrists had all stretched and strained and twisted until I thought for sure that darkness itself would see me drawn and quartered. Was that how Sorcerer Solomon had died? How Hester O’Riley had died?

I didn’t realize I was shaking until Felix covered my hands with his. I looked up, startled, and was relieved to find that strange, feral edge gone from him. He was himself again, kind and concerned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this is becoming . . . way more personal than any of us expected when Dad first passed.”

Passed. Like he’d died peacefully from a heart attack in his sleep, instead of being torn to pieces. Possibly by an eldritch shadow Frankenstein created by someone’s sorcerous screwup.

“But,” said Felix.

I winced. I couldn’t help it. I hated sentences that opened with But.

“We have to consider the nature of who’s being targeted. Dad. Hester. You. Think, just for a minute, about what the three of you have in common.”

“Fortune-telling.” The term was a blunt-edged weapon. “The one skill Sorcerer Solomon kept hunting for in a protégé. Not just illusory or kinetic sorcery. The power of prophecy.”

Felix’s answering expression was grim. “That was my guess too.”

Callum had told me about the link he suspected just the last time I’d seen him. Now I’d been attacked too, just like I’d been afraid of. More evidence that the real killer running around this town was, in fact, deliberately targeting sorcerers who practiced fortune-telling. Bloody fantastic. How long before we were all picked off like flies?

“But why?” I hated how plaintive my own voice sounded. “What’s the point of killing fortune tellers or prophet-sorcerers or whatever you want to call us? What does that even accomplish for this creature or whoever’s controlling it?”

Why would someone—or something—I’d probably never even met want me dead, just for what I could do? I shivered, wondering if this was how those early occultists back in the dark days of Salem had felt. Helpless, confused, stuck at the mercy of people who simply wanted you gone. Poof. Wiped from existence, and damn how much blood they’d need to shed in the process of erasing you.

“I don’t know that that was the intent behind whoever cast the original spell,” said Felix. “Remember, that thing that attacked you, it’s magic warped way beyond its creator’s original purpose for it. But.”

Ah, my favorite, another but. “But?” I prompted, long suffering.

“Prophecies—or people who practice the art of prophecy—must have been at the core of whatever spell was originally cast,” said Felix. His brow furrowed. “Three violent attacks, two of them ending in murder, on three fortune tellers, when prophet-sorcerers are rare enough as it is. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I’d bet against it.”

I buried my head in my hands. It was all too much to process. An attempt on my life. Callum, a confessed murderer, escaped and presumably out on the lam, for unknown reasons. And now the possibility of a serial killer who wanted me dead for what I could do with magic. The same thing I’d once been so proud of. The thing that had fueled my life’s ambitions since I was barely old enough to know what sorcery even was.

“You should stay here tonight,” said Felix abruptly. “It’ll be safer for you here than at your parents’ place.”

I gave an incredulous laugh. “Will it?” I knocked on the wall beside me. “The fine and mighty walls of Solomon Manor didn’t exactly keep its patriarch or his last apprentice safe when they wound up torn to shreds, literally inside those same walls.”

Felix winced. “I take your point.” He reddened slightly. “I only meant that I’d be here to keep you safe.” He spread his hands, a gesture of peace. “I know it’s not a foolproof measure, but a kinetic specialist isn’t a bad option to have on your side against a prophet killer, and I think I did a half-decent job fending it off tonight.”

I looked him up and down, assessing. “Okay, fair enough,” I decided. “But just tonight. I can’t just hunker down here forever, hoping that everything will blow over. This isn’t my home.”

“Tonight,” agreed Felix, affably enough. “But you’re wrong about one thing.”

I frowned. “Oh? And what’s that?”

“This is your home.” An odd glint lurked behind those familiar, friendly eyes. “Dad willed it so. And at some point, you’re going to have to get used to that, same as the rest of this family.”

FOURTEEN

I’ve been to my fair share of spooky sleepovers, but I’ve got to say that crashing at Solomon Manor itself hot on the heels of my second near-death experience in as many months takes the cake. Leaving aside the extremely weird energy from Felix, the house itself is huge and creaky as hell, and if the family ever gave up sorcery as a legitimate practice to run their home as a haunted house attraction during the autumn months in this town, they’d probably make bank.

The energy from Felix had been weird, though, there was no denying that. I hadn’t known how to expect him to feel about his father’s ghost naming me their family’s inheritor. Certainly, I hadn’t expected him to be pleased, even if he was far from the most spitting mad of the Solomons on the fateful night of that absolutely unhinged séance. But I’d known I had no right to expect him to be happy for me. Not when he’d been Sorcerer Solomon’s eldest, as well as the family’s most dedicated sorcerer—if not a prophet himself—but otherwise the golden boy in seemingly every aspect of life he’d ever touched. Not when his frankly terrifying harpy of a mother had so obviously and desperately expected him to inherit.

I’d been ready for the possibility that he’d be stiffly polite, or awkwardly kind, or any number of things. But I had no idea how to read the almost sharp-edged sense of resignation in his mannerisms when he told me to simply get used to being master and inheritor of his childhood home. I was cautiously convinced he’d meant it politely, but he’d only succeeded in making me feel more like a usurper than ever.

Not that we didn’t have bigger problems to worry about in this particular moment.

In this particular moment, I was lying flat on my back on the overly stiff mattress in a guest bedroom at this ancient, probably haunted-as-hell sorcerers’ mansion that, apparently, belonged to me now, by will of magic, if not legality. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I rolled over, I discovered a new way that the stupid, expensive, satin-cased pillow left a weird, fresh crick in my neck. And if I simply avoided rolling over at all, it made my back hurt in weird places.

I was used to Mom and Dad complaining about your body falling apart as you aged, but I’d assumed they meant turning like forty, not seventeen.

I know what you’re thinking, whoever you are. “Come on, Tabatha Zeng,” you’re probably muttering to yourself as you read this account, “you know it’s nothing to do with age, or weird mattresses, or overpriced pillowcases. The reason you can’t sleep has nothing to do with any of these things and everything to do with your deep and abiding fear that some nameless eldritch abomination is going to tear you limb from limb in your sleep. In the hierarchy of human needs, that’s the only sensible thing to be worrying about at this specific point in time.”

Well, you wouldn’t be lying.

It wasn’t just fear, though. It was also distraction. And I don’t just mean racing thoughts—though those were running aplenty through my head too, thank you very much. You see, for at least the past half hour, I could swear I’d been hearing someone crying on the floor above me.

I didn’t know who it was. The sobs were too muffled for me to guess male or female, old or young. It might have been poor Rowena Solomon, saved from the scrutiny of the law by the sacrifice of her own son—though whether he’d protected her with a lie or a truth remained to be seen, which was probably reason enough for a mother’s misery. It could have been Felix as easily as Circe. It might even have been their mother, though the idea of Angelique Reed—regal, terrifying, every inch the matriarch of the Solomon family that should have been—crying alone in an abandoned bedroom was far too incongruous for my poor little brain to fully process. Still, I suppose every Solomon in this house technically had something worth crying over, so none of those options would have been surprising.

The sobbing intensified. I contemplated throwing my terrible pillow at the ceiling. Probably not worth it. I didn’t have a great pitching arm, and I doubted I’d be heard over the sound of whoever it was having themselves a howl upstairs.

Abruptly, said howl cut off. I frowned, listening now for a continuation of the misery.

Silence. Which, in the suddenness after all the sobbing, was actually more unnerving.

“Hey,” I ventured calling toward the ceiling, my voice carefully pitched. “Everything okay up there?”

In response, a bloodcurdling shriek rang through the darkness.

I sat bolt upright, propelled by pure adrenaline. “Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, what’s going on?”

As if anyone would answer me. As if someone screaming at the top of their lungs would be paying the slightest bit of attention to the wayward guest downstairs. So naturally, I went sprinting out into the hallway and toward the stairs.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d heard the screams. Already halfway up the stairs was Rowena Solomon, blue eyes blazing with intent. “Mrs. Solomon!” I called. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” she called back, her voice grim, “but I intend to find out. And put a stop to whatever it is. Go back to sleep, Tabatha.”

“Like hell!” I bounded up the stairs after her, incredulous. “One, I wasn’t asleep in the first place. Secondly, like I even could while someone reenacts The Exorcist under your roof.”

“Your roof, technically.”

“I really wish people would quit making jabs about that,” I griped. We reached the top of the stairs. The fourth floor of Solomon Manor was also the house’s sparsest. There were only a couple of bedrooms up here—one for each of the twins, and of course, a third room: their father’s infamous workshop.

The door to the workshop had been left slightly ajar. I took a moment to notice that, but that wasn’t where the screams were coming from. I hesitated.

Rowena didn’t. Before I could say a word, she’d already kicked down the door to Felix’s bedroom.

Felix sat up in bed, blinking sleep from his eyes. “Rowena?” He squinted past Callum’s mother, toward me. “Tabatha? What on earth is going on?”

“You didn’t hear any of that?” I demanded.

“Hear any of what?” Felix switched the bedside lamp on. It only served to illuminate how rumpled and alarmed he looked, even sleepy-eyed as he was.

It made me feel abruptly, incredibly silly for barging into his room in the middle of the night. “Someone was crying up here, and then—” I began, hesitant.

Callum’s mother cut to the chase far more efficiently: “And then someone was screaming. We came to investigate.”

Felix rubbed his eyes. “Well, I didn’t hear anything. And when did you get here anyway, Tabatha?”

I frowned, confused. “Uh, ever since you rescued me from that eldritch shadow monster down the street and insisted that I spend the night at the manor?”

Felix was looking both more and more awake, and more and more alarmed. “Tabatha.” He repeated my name slowly and cautiously. “I haven’t left the house all day.”

My heart began to hammer again. “That’s impossible.” I crossed the threshold into his room. “I almost died. I would have died, if not for you. You literally saved my life. We had a whole conversation in the living room about why something would be trying to kill me in the first place, and where it would have come from—” I broke off, and swallowed. “Seriously. None of this rings a bell?”

“Maybe it’s a spell. Someone might have concocted a casting to tinker with your memory, and some pieces went missing,” suggested Rowena. She lingered near the doorway, arms folded and eyes narrow. “It’s not unheard of. Hell, maybe you did it to yourself.”

“I don’t play around with the kind of magic that messes with people’s brains, much less my own.” Felix got out of bed, possibly out of a desire to look less ridiculous, though the fact that he was in fluffy polka-dot pajamas didn’t really help his case. “Mother was always afraid it would increase the risk of magically induced brain damage.”

“And you’ve always done as told by Angelique, have you?”

A muscle jumped in Felix’s jaw. “No. But in this case, she’s right. Besides, why on earth would I cast a spell to create gaps in my own memory?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Rowena. Her voice was cool. “Perhaps if you did something . . . say, incriminating, and lacked confidence in your ability to tell an effective lie to a family of sorcerers. Simply forgetting might be the path of least resistance.”

“Okay, this is becoming ridiculous.” Felix’s hands spread—that familiar gesture of peace he used whenever he was trying to defuse tensions in a room crackling with unspoken resentment—as he walked toward us. “Rowena, I may not be your child by blood, but I’ve always respected you as a member of this family. I don’t want to make an enemy of you, but I’m not sure that you feel the same anymore, and I’d rather sort this all out reasonably, before—”

“Wait,” I blurted out. “Stop walking.”

Felix stopped—more out of surprise than obedience, probably. “What?”

In all the time I’d known him, I’d always been shy about Felix’s personal bubble. Maybe it was the fact that he was older, or handsome, or nice to me. Most likely, it was all three. But I’d always felt nervous and awkward about touching him or standing too close.

Now I marched right up to him and stared directly at his face. “Felix,” I said slowly, “what happened to the cut on your cheek?”

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Which I was increasingly convinced I had, but there was no time to backpedal now. “What cut?”

“You had a cut on your cheek, from protecting me.” I couldn’t quit staring at that smooth, unblemished skin. No blood. No scab or scrapes. “A spell cast to screw around with your memories—even a really good one—wouldn’t have gotten rid of that.”

“Well, shit,” said a new voice. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, gooseflesh rippling across my skin with the dread of recognition. “I guess the devil really is in the details, Nancy Drew.”

From the corner behind me, I heard Rowena Solomon’s breath hitch.

I turned. It couldn’t have taken more than half a second, but for me, it felt like everything had slowed down, the world going to molasses all around me, as I faced what stood behind me.

When I met his eyes, Callum Solomon—murder confessor, suspect, and fresh prison escapee—offered only a smile and a shrug, right hand in his pocket. Silhouetted by the yellow of the hallway light, he stood on the threshold of his brother’s room, golden hair bright as a halo. Fresh-faced and clean-cut as the day I’d first seen him in the hallways of our local high school.

Except, of course, that fisted in his left hand was the long, pale hair of the corpse he’d dragged along behind him. A corpse whose wide, vacant eyes identified her unmistakably as Circe Solomon.

“Hi, Tabatha,” said Callum, and with an exaggeratedly casual air, he dropped his sister’s body at the edge of her twin’s room. It slumped to the floor like a marionette with its strings cut. “Surprise.”

I’m going to have to pause here. I’m sorry. I’m sure that at this point in my macabre little story, you’re probably like, “What in actual hell, Tabatha?” Well, rest assured that that was pretty much what was going through my head at the time too. Forgive me, but I don’t love recalling the moment, even though it’s a part of our unfolding narrative that can’t exactly be left out.

What, precisely, is the appropriate reaction to the discovery that the boy you made out with in your bedroom three nights ago is also, in all probability, a literal serial killer?

Mine, apparently, was to stand rooted to the spot, unable to react, even to speak or scream or—and here’s what the really sensible option probably would have been—run. Which, of course, gave Callum time to tilt his head at me and say, “Circe—god rest her soul—isn’t the only member of this family who’s got a decent hand for illusions, you know. She taught me a lot, growing up. I really didn’t want to have to get rid of her.” He glanced at his sister’s corpse, looking sorry, but in the way that you’re sorry for spilling red wine on a stranger’s carpet. Not, you know, for murdering your own sibling.

Callum’s mother recovered before I did. “So, the screaming and crying,” she began hoarsely. “That was . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to finish, hands clapping tight over her mouth.

Callum bowed his head. “It’s difficult to cast a full auditory illusion—but much less difficult to simply . . . redirect the noise. Circe figured out who killed our father. I had to make a split-second choice. I couldn’t risk anyone saving her when I did what had to be done.”

Rowena started toward him. She barely got a step in before he held up a hand, his fingers already busy tracing a sigil through the space between them, traitorous little streaks of flashing silver magic. “I’m sorry, Mom. But I can’t let you do that either.”

Power rippled through the air. Rowena’s eyes rolled into the back of her head before she collapsed. For one horrifying moment, I thought she was dead too, before I caught the rise and fall of her breath.

“Sleep,” said Callum softly. Again, that passing look of dissonant sorrow flickered across his features before he turned his attention next to Felix, who was still rooted to the spot, same as me, staring at the dead body of his twin. “Perfecting your face was surprisingly tricky, you know,” he said, his tone light and conversational. As he came closer, I glimpsed the cut on his cheek: a slash of bright, accusatory red. Seeing it on Callum’s face now, when it had been on Felix’s earlier in the night, made my head spin unpleasantly. “We really don’t give the real illusionists of the sorcery world enough credit. Or prestige.”

“Callum, this is insane.” Felix started toward his brother, glanced toward Rowena’s crumpled form, and seemed to think better of it. Instead, he raised his hands. His voice trembled when he spoke, but I have to say, in my opinion, he deserved credit for speaking at all, under the circumstances. “I don’t know why you’ve done what you’ve done, but we can still work this out. Just talk to me.”

“Work this out?” Callum’s laugh was high and incredulous. “Work this out, when I’ve killed our sister, our father, and at least one of his apprentices? Work this out, when you just saw me drag Circe’s body into your bedroom? Your own twin?”

“Callum,” said Felix again, then again, like a mantra, “Callum.” His voice caught on his brother’s name the second time, half sobbing. “I just don’t want to lose anyone else. Not even you.”

Callum’s full mouth pursed and went thin. “Sorry, Felix. You should have thought of that earlier.”

This time, I didn’t even catch the flash of his fingers forming the sigil before Felix collapsed, same as Rowena.

And then there was one. Slowly, Callum turned toward me, his face unreadable. I don’t think I’d moved that entire time. All my joints were going stiff, while my head and ears continued to ring. But if I didn’t force some kind of action, it was perfectly clear to me what would happen. I tried not to look at the crumpled bodies around me.

“I never wanted to reveal myself this way, you know,” said Callum. “Not like this.” His voice almost broke, then steadied. “It may sound ridiculous to you now, but I never actually wanted to hurt anyone.”

“But you sure did,” I said at last. My voice sounded tinny, even to my own ears. Distant, like my body wasn’t my own anymore. “Let’s count it off, why don’t we? You killed your father. You killed Hester. You impersonated Felix when the monster you created out of your own murder magic came after me, and then you killed Circe when she found out. But it’s really been you, this whole time. Callum. It’s all been you.”

Callum had an odd look on his face. “Look at that,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically flat. “You really are the Nancy Drew between the two of us.”

I took a breath. Steadied myself. “Then you won’t be surprised,” I said, “when I call bullshit.”

Time had slowed until now. Time had been moving like molasses as Callum made all my worst nightmares about him come true before my eyes. The parts of the macabre puzzle of Sorcerer Solomon’s death marching piece by piece into a slow and dreadful picture. And still, some tiny corner of my brain seized on to the part that didn’t fit.

“If you were the Felix who saved me,” I said, “then who was the Callum I saw the night we were attacked?”

Callum pursed his mouth, dismissive. “You were traumatized. Seeing things.”

“I don’t think so, Callum.” I took a step closer. “And I think I have a decent idea of who you really are, under that face. My question is, did you really think you were going to get away with stealing other people’s faces?”

And there it was. The flash of true uncertainty—and naked fear—across his features. “You’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I?”

He didn’t answer. But then, I wasn’t watching his mouth. I was watching his hands. My heart was practically ready to explode out of my chest, but when I saw the telltale twitch of his fingers to form a sigil, I was ready.

As his fingers curled, I closed the scant, remaining distance between us. He shouted, but I was already crouching low and wrapping my arms tight around his center, trapping the sigil hand against his side. I stood, the top of my skull colliding with his chin, as I wrapped one leg behind his and drove my knee forward. With a yelp, he toppled over.

I landed on top of him, one knee on either side of his torso. “Well, now I definitely know you’re not Callum,” I panted. “I’ve never once been able to hit that move on him in those stupid self-defense classes he made me take. Some cover story that turned out to be.”

“Get off me!” shrieked Callum—or, as I was increasingly convinced, the person pretending to be Callum—bucking aimlessly beneath me. I tightened my knees the way Rowena had once taught me.

I simply slid upward until my knees were pinning his biceps, which freed my hands to start shaping sigils of my own. “I may not be a great illusionist,” I said, “but I do know how to lift one once I see it.”

My sigils snapped into place. Callum gave a great howl. Artificial lightning crackled through the air once, twice, and then the room went dark. I held my breath.

Slowly, the lights came back on, one by one. They illuminated the room piecemeal. First, Rowena and Felix, slowly starting to stir, their eyes blinking away the sleep that had been cast upon them. Next, a plush bear on the floor, its button eyes staring up at me where Circe’s corpse once had.

And finally, between my knees, in place of Callum: a veil of flaxen hair half covering the face of a howling, miserable girl. In a moment of odd tenderness, I brushed her hair aside. “Hi, Circe,” I said.

“I didn’t want this!” she screamed at me. She made no move to escape my pin. I wasn’t sure she was even cognizant of her surroundings. “I wanted to be seen! All I wanted was to be seen!”

“By wearing the faces of your brothers? By pinning your crimes on them? By killing anyone who knew your secret?” The period of tenderness was over. I got off her and gave her shoulders a shake. “Cry me a goddamn river, Circe. You don’t have a monopoly on daddy issues. Though there is one thing that still doesn’t make sense. Outside, when the monster was attacking, you saved me with some pretty advanced kinetic magic. It made me think that really was Felix. I’d love to know how an illusionist mimicked not just the face but also the magical abilities of her . . . differently gifted brother.”

Circe’s mouth curled into a smirk. Quick as a snake, her skinny shoulders slipped free of my grip. “Differently gifted? Seriously? Just say what you mean, Zeng. You mean my more gifted brothers,” she spat. “My more powerful brothers. My worthier brothers.”

“None of those were our words, Circe.” That was Felix, sitting up on his haunches beside his bed. His voice was hoarse and quiet. “We never wanted you to feel—”

“Well, none of what we’ve wanted has ever particularly mattered, has it?” demanded Circe. “What did Dad care about anything except who had the most impressive magic? Who came closest to being the best sorcerer, the best prophet, the best possible inheritor of the stupid, godforsaken Solomon legacy?” She laughed, high and strained. “Well, I figured out how to be the best.” Her face flickered briefly into Callum’s features, then Felix’s. The cut on her cheek remained stark and red, eerie in its stillness, even when her own features returned. “I’ve known how to look like anyone I wanted since I was younger than sorcerous wonder girl Tabatha Zeng here, not that Dad gave a shit about anything that wasn’t a fortune-telling skill, or at least some kind of kinetic wizardry. Illusions are just fanciful tricks and vanity, right? Never mind that I worked harder than you or Callum. Never mind that no one in this family ever mastered illusory magic the way I did. The one thing I was better at than either of you, and our parents called it frivolous.”

“So you just kept getting better and better at it,” said Rowena. She pulled herself gingerly into a sitting position by the bedroom door. “You grew stronger and smarter, and no one in the family noticed.”

“You did,” said Circe quietly. She hadn’t paid much mind to her own twin, but her attention snapped toward Callum’s mother as soon as the other spoke. “Then again, you’ve always been the one under this roof who pays attention, right?”

“Part and parcel of being the only non-sorcerer.” Rowena continued to stare guilelessly up at the girl who’d tried to make her son out to be a murderer. “I knew you were experimenting on something. Something beyond what normal illusionists were capable of. I just didn’t know what.”

Circe snorted. “You should have Detective Chang’s salary, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Is that why you attacked me in the foyer?” Mrs. Solomon asked in even-keeled tones.

The illusory creature. Of course. I stared at Circe. Now that all had been revealed, more and more pieces of the past few days began to click together in my head, like the momentum you gained when you figured out one corner of a frustrating jigsaw puzzle.

“I wasn’t trying to start a damn fight—I’m not that stupid!” protested Circe. “I’d just discovered Hester’s body. When I heard your footsteps, I panicked and ran. I only cast that illusion to distract the rest of you.”

“One, you’ve got a very narrow definition of stupid,” I interrupted. “And two, what do you mean ‘discovered’? I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that you’re the one who’s been killing prophets willy-nilly.”

Circe’s pale features twisted in distress. “No—I’m not. Honestly, I’m not. I’m the one who’s trying to stop the killings.”

I shut up for a second, not because I actually believed her, but because it was a preposterous thing to say. “That makes no sense at all.”

“It’s true!”

“Then what about when you decided to let me take the fall for Julian’s murder?” Rowena balanced her chin on the tops of her hands, pulling her knees in to her chest. “To cast me as the jilted second wife, married to a man who never truly fell out of love with the first?” She shook her head, more wondering than angry. “It’s a story we’ve seen play out a million times in families like this one. Why would mine look any different to a seasoned detective, right? And me, catapulting to the top of the suspect list, would make it so much easier for you to get away with everything scot-free.”

A pause—and the first inkling of hesitation—from Circe. “I didn’t want to get you in trouble with the police. I never meant for that to happen.” Did she sound guilty? An odd, vulnerable air had settled into her mannerisms. “I know we’re all supposed to hate our stepmothers, according to classic fairy-tale tradition, but I always liked you.” She made a disbelieving sound. “Hell, I think I liked you better than my real mom, though that’s setting the bar pretty low.”

Rowena just looked at her stepdaughter, quiet and observant. “Then why didn’t you say something?”

“Because I was scared!” snapped Circe. She was trembling. “So sue me! I’m still scared! I’ve been so goddamn scared this entire time. Everyone’s been so busy clawing for a share of Dad’s legacy, no one’s noticed that I’ve been terrified out of my mind, ever since . . . ever since—”

“Ever since Julian died,” said Rowena.

“I didn’t have a plan at all, originally,” said Circe. “When I first found that stupid security footage, with that ridiculous note attached, I started watching all the videos because I wanted to understand him.” She lifted her chin with a stubborn sort of defiance I’d probably admire on someone who wasn’t also a murderer at least twice over. “And yeah, at first, what I saw—the stuff he’d say about me, and even about Felix and Callum, it pissed me off. The way he obsessed over his legacy as this great modern sorcerer-prophet and dismissed anything that didn’t directly contribute to that legacy, including his own sad, sorry kids.”

She shook her head. “Then, after I got sick of being pissed off, I started trying to figure out what might change the way he saw things. The way he saw his kids. The way he saw me. That’s when I decided I needed a plan. But to make my plan work, I needed to become a stronger sorcerer. Not that he’d notice even that. I’d need to do something extraordinary if I wanted the notice of the great Julian Solomon. Still, I always thought . . . Well, none of it matters anymore now, does it?” Circe paused, trembled for a moment, then said, all at once, “After Dad died, I just . . . I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know what to do.”

I frowned. “If you were really that broken up about your old man biting the dust, maybe you shouldn’t have, you know, murdered him in the first place?”

Circe’s flinch was a full-body movement. She looked, bizarrely, like one of the heavy bags in Rowena’s self-defense classes that had been kicked slightly too hard. “Don’t you understand? I never meant to kill him,” she rasped at me. She buried her face in her hands. “I told you already. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of it. I wish I could just undo it all now. I wish I’d never opened that stupid, godforsaken chest. I wish I’d smashed that security system to pieces when I found it.”

“Well, too bad there’s no easy way to undo leaving someone’s dismembered body on the floor of his home!” I informed her, temper flaring, before getting ahold of myself. “It didn’t look much like an accident. It looked like . . . well, like murder. Like you wanted him dead.”

“Of course I didn’t!” Circe snapped wetly. “He was my father! All I wanted was . . .” She broke off, her voice hitching on a sob.

“Acknowledgment.” Rowena’s blue eyes, so like Callum’s—so unlike the Callum that Circe had pretended to be—were tired and knowing. “You tried to show off the magics that your illusory experimentation had allowed you to mimic, didn’t you? And that’s where it all went so awfully wrong. Let me take a guess at the sequence of events that led to the night Julian died, if you’ll allow me that much.” Mrs. Solomon’s voice was firm but not unkind. “You were even younger than Callum and Miss Zeng here are now when you and I had our chat about your father. Do you remember that?”

Circe gave a harsh little laugh. “You mean when I kept trying to develop fortune-telling skills, and you told me that I should try impressing my dad with something other than my shitty prophecies?”

“When I saw a lonely child desperate for her father’s approval of her sorcerous résumé,” said Rowena, “and suggested that perhaps you might cultivate joys and talents outside of prophecy work, or the occult entirely, for that matter.” She shook her head. “So, being a teenager, of course you doubled down. I’d noticed you sneaking in and out of Julian’s workshop. I’m not a sorcerer, but I’m not stupid, either. What I never figured out, after the fact, was how you got past the wards he placed on the cabinet where he locked away the computer system storing all that security tape.”

“Oh.” Circe offered a smile, small and hesitant, but for perhaps the first time I’d ever seen it, truly self-satisfied. “I picked the lock with those fancy hairpins that you gave me for my thirteenth birthday.”

An awkward pause descended upon the room.

“What?” She looked around at us. “Don’t get me wrong, they were a really nice set of hairpins. But they also make really, really good lock picks, if you watch the right YouTube video instructions.” The side of her mouth pulled itself wryly upward. “We sorcerers are always so fixated on magical this and magical that. Not everything has to have a solution rooted in the occult, you know. Dad may have been a sorcerous genius, but if you only design your wards with other sorcerers in mind, you leave gaps in your defenses. Any attempt to breach that chest magically would have blown right up in my face, but a twelve-year-old who watched too many heist movies could have picked that lock. And as for that security camera footage itself, one word: encryption.” She shook her head. “If he’d used two-factor authentication—or hell, a basic password manager—I might never have seen those videos. But Dad always felt untouchable by anything that wasn’t strictly magical.” She snorted. “And now look where that’s gotten him.”

I sat there, awkwardly quiet, processing this rant. For a few moments, no one else said anything at all either. I wondered—and maybe this makes me a terrible person—I really wondered if anyone else thought Circe had raised a solid point with the whole online security basics thing. Because sorcerer though I was, I was also the daughter of a lawyer and an engineer, and well, I couldn’t not agree with her.

Even if she was, technically, kind of a serial killer, ish. Possibly an accidental one, but still.

Remarkably, it was Rowena who barked out the first laugh. It was faint, and edged in mild disbelief, but she laughed all the same. “Touché,” she said softly. “So you got into the files. You watched those recordings, over and over again, and then you studied. You studied, and sweated, and perfected your own gifts. If Tabatha’s description of tonight’s attack is accurate, you perfected your gifts until you could not just take on your brothers’ faces but also show off their powers. And then you threw it in Julian’s face: the fact that you, the child who’d always been left out and overlooked, the child who’d always been underestimated—you could do it all now, thanks to your illusory abilities. Felix’s kinetic abilities. Perhaps even Callum’s prophecies.”

“I could re-create the kinetic spell-craft just fine,” said Circe. “Dad said it was a marvel, how perfectly I mimicked Felix.” She stopped, her voice shrinking. “But when I tried to do the same with Callum, I—”

The floorboards beneath us creaked as the walls rumbled.

Circe went sheet white. “It’s back.”

My heart plummeted into my belly. “You could mimic Callum’s face,” I said. “But you couldn’t mimic his fortune-telling gifts. And when you tried—”

The floorboards interrupted me with another creak, louder this time. The windows of Felix’s bedroom began to rattle.

All the earlier, grim self-satisfaction had fled Circe’s face. She uttered a single sob. “I really, really didn’t see it coming. I swear I didn’t. One moment, my illusions were under my control. And the next—the next, I had made—”

She didn’t get a chance to finish, because in that precise moment, the thing that Circe had made—ink black, spreading in every direction as it howled its hunger—came crashing through the bedroom window.

FIFTEEN

Felix sprang into action first. As inky shadow poured through the window toward us, his hands moved through the air, tracing sigils almost faster than I could follow, fingers pianist-quick. The temperature in the room dropped by several degrees, then several more. Ice crackled along the floor from Felix’s feet toward the roaring shadow-thing, and encased it in place.

“That won’t hold,” said Circe, terror turning her voice shrill. “It’s going to break through and kill us. It’s broken through every spell I’ve tried to bind with. Even banishing it didn’t work for long.”

“What, you wear my face and mimic my magic, so now you think you know my sorcery better than I do?” Felix shot back dryly. “I’m buying time.”

For all the casual, black-humored calm in his voice, I could see the sweat beading his brow, the pallor of his face. Without entirely processing the choice, I walked toward the ice-encased shadows, ignoring the way my teeth clacked together violently at the unnatural cold. I drew a sigil in the air. Right as Felix’s ice began to buckle, another layer grew anew.

I risked a glance at him out of the corner of my eye. “This is a lot harder for me than it is for you,” I said, which was true. My fingers were already shaking with a combination of cold and the effort of holding my sigil. “I always hated practicing kinetic sorcery for a reason, you know.”

“You also hated practicing self-defense, but you managed to retain my lessons on that front just fine tonight,” called Rowena from her corner.

I twisted my head, fingers still curled into the sigil. “Was that supposed to be a pep talk?”

“Just facts.” She smiled. It broke off abruptly as the new layer of ice began to crack. “Shit.”

I looked at Felix. “Any other bright ideas?”

“We’ve got to find a way to banish it permanently.”

“Awesome!” I said. “How do we do that?”

The look of exhausted resignation on Felix’s face made my already sinking heart plummet right into my belly. “We can’t keep up a kinetic defense forever.”

“I know, I know!” Another crack in the ice. Felix grunted as he hung on to his anchor sigil. “I’m thinking.”

The shadow-thing did not want to give Felix time to think. The ice shattered all at once as it came roaring free from its confines. With a shout, Felix pulled me to the floor before it could swallow me. I yelped and rolled, trying to shield my skin from shards of flying ice, glass-edge sharp. The shadow-thing roared its frustration, swirling around the room.

“Circe!” I screamed. “Circe, you were its originator—you need to do something!”

Circe was curled up under the doorway in the crook of Rowena’s arm as Callum’s mother tried to give them both cover from the monster’s fury. “I can’t,” sobbed Circe. “I don’t know how. I’ve been trying to get rid of it ever since it killed Dad, but it just grows and grows.”

“Then it’s time to try something different,” rasped a new voice.

I looked up from where I lay cowering on the floor. Standing in the doorway was Callum. He looked nothing like the version of Callum that Circe had worn, the ill-fitting coat of him that had never entirely added up to the boy I knew. His hair was filthy and he was sporting a truly impressive black eye, his stupid preppy clothes torn up beyond repair, but he was alive.

And he was, perhaps more importantly, not dragging any freshly murdered bodies around or actively trying to kill any of us.

His hand flickered in a sigil I didn’t recognize. The shadow-thing howled once, but miraculously began to shrink in on itself, growing quieter and quieter as Callum’s sigil contained it. “This won’t hold,” Callum said. Presumably, he’d meant to address us all, but his attention was fixed on Circe. “You need to clean up your mess.”

Circe buried her head in her hands. “Callum, I’m so sorry, I never wanted you to take the fall for any of this. I only—”

“You panicked,” said Callum. “And one day, maybe I’ll forgive you for that. But before I can even think of forgiveness as anything other than a joke, you’re going to need to put a stop to all this.”

As if to punctuate his insistence, the shadow-thing spasmed against its invisible restraints, hissing at the room.

“I told you, I don’t know—”

“I think you do,” said Callum, stepping forward. “I’ve been listening to you all tonight. I think that when your illusions stopped being able to mimic my fortune-telling skills, they created something you didn’t mean to. And yeah, that thing killed Dad, not you. But when it kept killing other fortune tellers, you should have come clean. You could have said something after it killed Hester.”

“It was too late by then,” said Circe, her voice broken. “What would have happened to me? When the detective blamed it on your mom, I wanted to say something. I did. I thought that would be my chance to set the record straight. I wasn’t expecting you to take the fall, but even if I confessed, I knew it wasn’t going to stop killing fortune tellers. And now it’s going to kill us all.”

Callum didn’t say anything. Instead, he tossed something her way, small and bright, buoyed by a puff of kinetic magic. Circe frowned as she caught it. “This is a flash drive.” Then she blanched. “You don’t mean to tell me that you downloaded all of Dad’s—”

“All his security footage? Yeah,” said Callum, merciless. “That flash drive contains all the recordings that have been fueling this whole grisly mess. Including the ones of our parents that you sent to the police to throw them off your scent. And the one you tampered with to hide evidence of the night you created your Frankenstein,” said Callum grimly. “I can’t re-create footage you destroyed, or retrieve what you leaked. But you can. You were always the best illusionist of the family, right? That means that you can do what I can’t. Re-create what you destroyed. Show us what was on the tape. It’s the only shot we’ve got at undoing everything else you’ve made.”

“I can’t—”

“You can, though, Circe.” Callum had never sounded so tired. “You always could. And you can start now.”

A defiant gleam of flinty suspicion entered Circe’s gaze. “How do you know I won’t lie?” she demanded. “I’m an illusionist. I could show you anything. I could make up a story. None of you might ever know what really happened if I don’t want to show you, and you’d never know if what I showed you was real or fake.” In a smaller voice, she added, “How can you still trust me? After everything?”

“Do you think we don’t realize that you could just make up some total bullshit?” snapped Callum. “Yeah. You could lie. You could mess with us.” He held her gaze with his, brother to sister, Solomon to Solomon. “But a lie won’t make the monster you made disappear.”

Circe opened her mouth, then closed it slowly. Silently, she turned the drive over and over between her hands. Then, carefully, she held it before herself, like a cross against evil. Swallowing, she faced the restrained mass of shadows. “Okay,” she said softly. “Okay, I’ll try.”

And then we all plummeted into Circe’s world.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Sorcerer Solomon was saying.

I blinked. The lights of his study burned bright all around us, a torch against the inky black of the skies outside. Before him stood Felix, tossing a fireball from hand to hand. “I can do more, Dad,” said Felix, and he transformed into Callum before my eyes.

Callum—no, Circe, Circe wearing the faces of her brothers—smiled. “I can mimic the ability to cast prophecies too.”

Sorcerer Solomon’s eyebrows climbed. “That’s not possible.”

“It wasn’t,” said Circe. “Until now.” Quick as a snake, her hand sketched a series of sigils through the air. She frowned, eyes still aglow as the silvery wisps of the spell hovered briefly in the air before disappearing. “I don’t understand.”

“I told you.” Her father sat back in his chair with a sigh. “It’s not possible. Not for anyone. Certainly not for—”

“A simple illusionist?” Circe grit her teeth—Callum’s teeth—and drew the sigils again.

The lights in the study flickered.

Sorcerer Solomon sat up, frowning. “Circe. Stop that.”

“No, I can do it!”

“Circe—”

“Let me do this!” Circe was practically in tears now, her borrowed Callum’s face contorted with effort as she tried the sigils, again and again. “Just let me prove to you that I can—”

The lights went out all at once. And then the screaming began.

We all fell out of the memory, like being shaken from a dream. At the center of Felix’s bedroom, Callum stood grasping Circe’s elbows, her head bent. “Circe,” he said. “It happened like that? After you tried to make a prophecy?”

She nodded morosely, and Callum frowned, clearly deep in thought. “I think—you need to give up the magic you mimicked,” he said slowly. “That’s what’s making it hungrier. The more power you feed it, the more it’ll want. You need to stop using our sorcery and wearing our faces. Circe, you—you need to go back to being you.”

“I hated being me,” screamed Circe. She sobbed again. “Even now, this is the only way I can get any of you to so much as give me the time of day. The only time anyone sees me is when I’m someone else.”

“Then be someone else,” snapped Callum. “Be another version of you. Be a you that you actually like, Circe. But don’t try to be us. Until you do that, none of us can help you.”

With a howl, the shadow-thing burst free from the last of its restraints. With a shout, Callum pulled his sister aside, trying to tug her to safety, but this time, Circe was the one who pushed him away. Facing her creation with blazing eyes, she screamed her rage at it. “It should have been enough,” she howled. “My illusions. My magic being what it was. I’m a good illusionist. Why didn’t that matter? Why am I not good enough?”

The creature she’d created had no answer for her. Instead, it advanced on her, hissing defiance in the face of its maker’s fury.

Circe trembled hard. For a moment, I thought she’d falter. The illusionist, the recluse, the unfavorite child of a great man. The forgotten daughter of the Solomon clan, left to wither upstairs in her bedroom, playing with her pitiable little illusions.

Her gifts for illusion were neither pitiable nor little, though. And in the end, it wasn’t her illusions that had birthed a monster into reality. It was the poison behind them. Poison, which had trickled unwittingly off the tongues of the people she loved most: teasing remarks and wistful comments. A million offhand, venomously loving little criticisms had lodged themselves like barbs beneath her skin, reminding her of all the things she could have done, the things she could have been, the hundred different ways she’d be smarter, prettier, better, if only she were something other than what she was.

I could see everything so clearly in that moment. Shame trickled through my veins. I could have strangled my past self for being as willfully blind as the rest of the Solomons. Some prophet I was: able to cast spells that would foretell futures, but unable to see what was right under my nose.

Circe lifted her chin and stared down that writhing, ugly black mass that all her hurt had created. “I’ve worn so many faces,” she told it in dull tones. “Tried to be so many other people. I tried to make myself disappear and replace her with something better, but all that did was create you.”

The shadow creature hissed and snapped at her. Circe didn’t flinch. “I know that you want to keep hurting people,” she continued. She stared into the darkness of her snarling, furious monster, her expression almost fascinated, as its shadows painted long, craggy planes along her paper-pale features. “It’s not your fault. You do it because when I cast the spell that created you, deep down, I think that’s what I wanted to do too. If magic is fueled by willpower, then I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by what you eventually became.”

Every muscle in my body had wound itself so tight, I didn’t think I could move if I tried. Surely, the monster would attack now. Surely, it was tired of being lectured by its maker.

It didn’t, though. The thing sputtered and hissed and snarled, but it continued to hover before Circe, occasionally snapping a pair of shadowy jaws just inches from her face—trying to scare her, trying to make her cower away—but Circe Solomon, it seemed, was done with fear.

And with fear gone, all that was left inside her was exhaustion. Exhaustion, and an obvious, bone-deep rage.

“Well, it’s over now,” said Circe. “I’m done with trying to replace myself if all I’m getting instead is you.” She lifted her hands toward her monster. “So, go ahead, you awful, ugly thing. Take all the faces I stole. Take every magic I’ve ever mimicked. Take it all, and leave my family alone.”

The shadows began to howl, a crescendo that twined with their creator’s. Felix and Rowena clapped their hands over their ears, but Callum and I stood there, watching Circe face her monster, watching the battle of wills between them.

For a bloodcurdling moment, the creature’s shadowy limbs reached for Circe. It was done trying to scare her now. It was done snapping and snarling and hissing its warnings at her without actually hurting her. The thing was ready to fight.

And still, Circe didn’t flinch. Instead, her raised hands began to form sigils.

“We should help her,” said Felix. “She’s our sister—we can’t just let her face that thing alone.” He rose to his feet.

Callum tugged him back down. “She’s our sister,” he repeated, stony voiced. “And look at everything our family’s done to her for being our sister.”

Felix followed his brother’s gaze, helplessly, toward Circe, who stood at the center of a whirling mass of shadow. “We screwed up. I know we screwed up. But we can’t just abandon her now.”

“We’re not,” said Callum. “We’re doing what we should have all along.”

“What, letting our sister fight monsters alone?” hissed Felix, yanking his wrist free from Callum’s grip.

Callum didn’t fight to grab his brother’s hand back. Just smiled, weary faced, at Felix. The golden boy. The one everyone had always considered the favorite of the Solomon children. Everyone, that is, except Felix himself.

“We’re not letting our sister fight monsters alone,” said Callum. “We’re trusting her to do something only she can. We’re letting our sister destroy the demons this family gave her. And yeah.” He lifted his chin toward Felix, a curious imitation of Circe facing that monster. “It’s something she deserves to do on her own. Something she can make her own, for once.”

Felix’s mouth snapped shut. Helplessly, he looked on at Circe. “And if she can’t?”

“She can,” said Callum with a confidence I’m pretty sure not a single one of us in that room felt in that moment. He must have picked up on it, because he added, just a little wryly, “But if she can’t, then we’d better all be ready to go out in a blaze of glory.”

If Circe heard any of the exchange between her brothers, she gave no sign, occupied as she was with her current opponent. Her expression twisted with concentration as her fingers flew through the sigils. Her hands were moving too quickly for me to make out precisely what magic she was signing into existence, half blocked by that howling mass of shadows. Still, I recognized a few basic anchor signs for illusory magic. The backbone of what Circe had always been good at. What she had always loved, in defiance of her family’s expectations.

The spell came together with a snap. My fingers flew to my eyes, shielding my gaze against the abrupt burst of white light that sprang forth from between Circe’s trembling hands.

The shadows shrieked, shrinking away from the encroachment of light. Circe followed, merciless.

“Here’s the thing we learn in Illusion Magic 101, which no one ever bothers to remember except for actual illusionists,” said Circe. She bore down on her shadows, brightness glittering around her wrists, her arms, even her face. “If the power of illusion primarily results in the creation of images, then logically, we’ve got to have a handle on controlling light. And controlling light, unfortunately for you, you awful creature, means dictating when and where the darkness goes. I made you. Which means that at the end of the day, as much as you may mimic the destructive power of the best kinetic sorcerers, you’re still just the absence of light. Still just an illusion.”

Circe drew herself up, spine straightening as far as it would go. For a moment, wreathed in that self-created illusory glow, she looked every inch as regal a sorceress as Angelique Reed. With a coldness I’d only ever heard echoed in her mother’s voice, she addressed the writhing darkness: “I believe I told you to leave my family alone.”

Circe’s fingers twitched, sealing off her illusion. Light exploded across the room. With a shout, I fell backward, hands over my eyes. Someone’s arm wrapped over my shoulders, protective even now, wool-clad and strong. I could smell a faint whiff of clean, pine-scented soap. Callum. Callum, trying to pull me to safety amidst all this chaos.

My chin rested on that sweater-clad shoulder. I nearly buried my face in the fabric. Instead, something I still don’t entirely understand compelled me to look just past him, toward what was unfolding before us.

I couldn’t see any of it particularly well. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to hear that the combination of explosively flashing lights and whirling pitch-black shadow limbs is not particularly easy on the eyes. But I could make out this much: the silhouette of a sorcerer—of Circe—glowing against the backdrop of howling darkness, doing its best to consume her. Shadows warped and shifted, raging against the light.

Then, with one final shriek, those same shadowy limbs—the pieces of a monster that a frightened, lonely girl had once built from scraps of illusory magic—shattered out of existence. As if the monster had never existed at all.

I blinked a few times, exhaling slowly, as light—ordinary, non-magicked-up light—returned to the room. I glanced around frantically, but no pitch-black limb, uncannily dark, slithered out from the perfectly normal, unthreatening shadows shifting around a suddenly very normal-looking room.

Circe had been right. At the end of the day, no matter what destructive power it mimicked, whatever real damage a spell gone wrong wrought, an illusion was still an illusion.

For a few more minutes, the room seemed almost frozen in place. All I could hear was the sound of our collective breathing, hastily gulped inhalations of oxygen, greedy with the anxiety of the past hour and almost comedically out of sync. None of us wanted to say anything. Hell, none of us wanted to move. I’m not sure we could have even if we’d tried, in that first harrowing moment in the aftermath of the monster’s disappearance.

No, not its disappearance. Its destruction.

One by one, we all found ourselves staring at Circe. She still stood rooted to that same spot, both hands half crooked into sigil shapes to cast her illusions. I wondered if her fingers hurt, bending them that way for so long. I doubted she cared.

She’d very nearly killed us, after all. And then, when we'd least expected it, she’d saved us too.

From her place at the center of our attention, Circe looked around at us all, her eyes red-rimmed—with grief, or rage, or exhaustion, I no longer knew. “I’m sorry,” she told us. Her voice was as small as a child’s, but it seemed to fill that entire room. None of us breathed a word of interruption.

“I’m so sorry about all of this,” she continued. She swayed, briefly, from one foot to the other, then back again, a stumble in slow motion. “I never meant to hurt any of you. I never meant to hurt anyone. Not even Dad. Especially not Dad.” She took a deep, shaky breath as she found her balance. Her fingers had unbent at last, the sigils dismissed from the sorcerer’s needs. “It was always so stupid,” she mused, her voice dreamy. Her gaze had gone glassy, unfocused. She seemed to be speaking more to herself than us when she said, “Even in the end, I really did just want him to tell me, for once, that he was pleased with me.”

Then those red-rimmed eyes shut, and she crumpled to the ground.

This isn’t the end of the story, you know. I expect that you think it is. And on the surface, it was all a pretty simple story, wasn’t it? Girl tries to get negligent, famous father’s attention. Girl accidentally creates shadowy, homicidal monster in the process. Girl tries to set up everyone except herself to take the fall for said monster. Monster’s reign of terror ends only when girl gets backed into a corner and gives up the power it granted her in the first place. End scene. Roll credits.

This is real life, though, not a story, and real life is rarely ever that simple.

I didn’t see Callum Solomon again until nearly a month after Detective Chang took his sister into custody. When I did, it wasn’t planned—not even in that “accidental” way you plan to be at your locker by a particular classroom when your crush gets out of AP Bio, or mysteriously get home late on nights when your parents have you scheduled for dishwashing duty.

I didn’t see Callum Solomon at a sorcerers’ séance or some kind of prestigious, mystical gathering. I didn’t even see him in AP Bio.

Instead, I saw him on my way to sign up for another round of Rowena Solomon’s self-defense class at that ratty old gymnasium. I’d just finished talking to the crotchety old lady who ran the front desk, and finished scrawling my name in ballpoint pen on the wrinkled sign-up sheet, when I looked up.

And there he was, in a ridiculously soft-looking, cable-knit white sweater, with his hands tucked into his pockets, just watching me. He grinned a little bashfully when he saw me watching back. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” I dropped the pen. “What are you doing here?”

He shrugged, hands still in his pockets. “Helping Mom out, mostly. I try to do what I can to make life easier for her. Attracting students has been tough, with all the hullaballoo around . . .” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely. “You know.”

I winced. “Of course. How’s Circe?”

“In therapy,” said Callum promptly. “Like, a lot of therapy. I’m not sure how exactly they’re going to figure out community service, aka glorified punishment chores, for a depressed sorcerer, but I feel like using her skills for something productive might help with the stuff she’s figuring out while she rehabilitates, you know?”

“And what about you?” I was pushing things, and I knew it, but I couldn’t quite help myself. “Are you in therapy?”

“Actually, yes.” He gave me a tired little smile. “Frankly, I think we all should be. You included.”

“You sound like my dad.”

“Your dad’s a smart man.” He scratched the back of his head. One of his hands was still bandaged. I wondered if it was from shattered ice on the floor or from the scrape of solidified spikes of shadow against the walls of the manor. I tried not to flinch away from the wound. “Look, in lieu of therapy, how about a walk? I’ll even spring for crab cakes.”

I hesitated. “I don’t know about—”

“Oh for god’s sake,” said the woman running the gymnasium desk. She grabbed the plastic ballpoint pen and the sign-up sheet for Rowena’s class, and tossed both of them back into one of the drawers. “Would the two of you take this teen drama reenactment somewhere else, please?”

My cheeks burned. Across from me, I was relieved to see Callum flush too. At least we could be identically mortified tomatoes together. You’d think we’d be over color commentary from unimpressed old ladies running admin services after our multiple shared near-death experiences. You’d be wrong.

“Okay,” I said at last. I smiled despite my embarrassment. “But only because of the crab cakes.”

“I still don’t know who my father’s best beloved really was, you know,” said Callum conversationally.

I finished chewing my mouthful of crab cake and set the fork down. “What do you mean? You think it wasn’t an eldritch Frankenstein shadow monster created by your emotionally abused and mentally ill sister?”

Callum rolled his eyes. “At first, I assumed it was Circe. Like, it would make sense for it to be Circe, right? She figured out how to do all this cool shit at, like, the eleventh hour. My dad has always loved progeny who can do cool shit.” His mouth twisted. “And she was indirectly responsible for his death, which would fulfill the terms of the prophecy.”

“But?”

“But.” He steepled his fingers over the micro-greens on his otherwise empty plate, frowning. “She also wore Felix’s face right before she created that thing. And then, when Dad died . . .” He closed his eyes. “Do you think it means something, that Circe was wearing my face when Dad died?”

My heart twisted for him. “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

“I’ve been asking myself circles and circles of questions ever since Circe confessed to everything and went into therapy,” said Callum. “He said he’d be killed by his best beloved. But was it Circe? Was it Felix? Was it . . . was it me?” He laughed sheepishly at himself, a dark edge to the sound. “Hell, does that prophecy even hold weight, when I was the one writing it on his behalf? Maybe there’s a bias there. Maybe fortune tellers are all full of bullshit after all.”

I was quiet for a long moment. “It could have been Angelique,” I said. “I’ve heard the way she talks to Circe. There’s an argument to be made that she drove Circe to do what she did. So does that make her your dad’s real killer?” I twirled a french fry between my fingers, back and forth, back and forth. “And it could have been your mom. She was the one who gave Circe the hairpins she used to pick the lock on the cabinet where that security system was stored. Watching the footage on all those videos, listening to the kind of toxic, narrow-minded stuff your dad used to spew about prophecy magic—that’s what made Circe hate herself and get so obsessed with mimicking everyone else’s magic. So does that make it Rowena’s fault, for giving Circe the hairpins?” I set the fry down with a sigh. “And then there was Felix’s theory, way back when. The idea that Sorcerer Solomon’s best beloved, all along, was just magic itself. Maybe that’s the best explanation. The simplest one, as Felix would say.”

Callum gave a dry laugh. “You know I hate agreeing with my brother, but hell, maybe he’s right this time. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Callum. Personally, at the end of the day? I’m not sure how much it ultimately matters. I think what does matter is what you do with your own fate.”

“Why, Tabatha Zeng.” Callum rested his chin on his hands, elbows on the table. “Are you telling me that you of all people, who’s wanted to be a prophet-sorcerer since you were knee-high, are calling bullshit on fortune tellers everywhere?”

“I’m telling you,” I said, leaning forward, “that being able to write a prophecy doesn’t matter if you can’t live it out the way you intend to.” I looked him in the eye. The table the server had seated us at wasn’t large. With both of us leaning our elbows on the surface, we were practically nose to nose. “I don’t know if we can rewrite destinies or whatever. I don’t know if you can change your fate. But I do know that there’s an awful lot of room for interpretation. So you might as well live out your best possible reading. You deserve to—”

I didn’t get to finish my grandstanding lecture about taking your fate into your own hands, because quite abruptly, his mouth was on mine. My eyes fluttered shut. For a long moment, I stopped thinking about fate, or death, or sorcery. I stopped thinking about anything at all except Callum, Callum, Callum.

“I wrote a prophecy once,” he breathed. “It was about you. It said that you’d find your way into my life. It said that we’d save each other, one way or another. Do you think we’ve fulfilled it?”

Stay by his side. Sorcerer Solomon’s words echoed across lifetimes and worlds in the privacy of my own mind. Whatever you do, stay by Callum’s side.

“I think,” I said, “that we get to decide what fulfilling it means.” And kissed him again.

Remember when I told you that the best prophecies begin with love stories and end with tragedies?

I don’t know if you could call what happened to me—and to Callum—a love story. I certainly don’t think I’d classify it as a tragedy, though perhaps some would. But it did make me think hard about fate. It made me think about the kind of prophet I really wanted to be. The kind of fortunes I’d write.

The last time I’d tried to tell a fortune, I’d asked for closure to a death. And sure enough, my power had conjured a face—a beloved face—but not for any of the reasons I’d have guessed. That’s magic for you, I suppose. It always seems to deliver what you least expect, yet precisely what, in some way, you’ve been looking for all along.

When I write my next fortune, I’ll be wise to all that.

So here’s what I’ll tell you: I’ve left you with this account because it’s the story of something that has happened to me that’s true. Or perhaps a story of something that will happen. As I’ve said, fortune tellers aren’t great with the proper order of time. But I’ve written it all down so that the truth of what’s been mine, and Callum’s, and even Circe’s, will now be yours for a little while.

Once a prophecy is made, it belongs to the world. I ask only that you handle our fates—and yours—with care. So shall it be.

acknowledgments

What a delightful ride my very first whodunit has been! These Deadly Prophecies is a first for me in many ways: my first foray from the familiar waters of science fiction into true fantasy, as well as my first attempt to plot a proper murder mystery. (Easier said than done, as it turns out!)

In that vein of “firsts,” I must open these acknowledgments by pointing out that it’s no easy task for a new editor to take over a relationship with an author who’s previously worked under another editor’s care. To both my wonderful new editor, Gretchen Durning, and my acquiring editor, Julie Rosenberg, thank you for passing the torch so gracefully. Gretchen, I’m so, so impressed with how generously and tirelessly you rose to the occasion to champion me and my magical little murder mystery, and I hope to partner with you for many books to come!

On that note, I also remain humbly grateful to my entire superstar team here at Penguin Teen: my good friend Maggie Brennan, as well as Laurel Robinson, Lana Barnes, Misha Kydd, Jayne Ziemba, Theresa Evangelista, Alex Campbell, Christina Colangelo, Bri Lockhart, Felicity Vallence, Shannon Spann, and James Akinaka. I couldn’t do any of this without you, and I feel so deeply privileged getting to work with such a hardworking and talented crew of publishing professionals.

To my longtime agent, Thao: thank you for providing with me with the initial inspiration for this book that fateful day in our Twitter DMs! Thank you, also, for remaining my oldest, truest advocate in this industry. I am grateful every day for the decision I made to sign with you all those years ago.

To the industry friends and colleagues who have rooted for me from the very start of my publishing journey: Grace Li, Becca Mix, Amélie Wen Zhao, Victoria Lee, Axie Oh, Francesca Flores, Amanda Quain, Anna Bright, June Hur, Gina Chen, Em Liu, Katie Zhao, Cameron Thomson, Alex Darwin, Janella Angeles, Allison Senecal, and so, so many others—thank you for continuing to inspire, support, and amaze me. I love getting to do this job alongside all of you.

And finally, to all my amazing non-publishing friends and family who have gotten a peek behind the curtain of this wild industry, and continue, miraculously, to stay by my side: to every single one of you, thank you for bearing with me, and for supporting me in the most wonderful of ways. I’m so, so grateful to have you at my side.

About the Author

Andrea Tang grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and currently lives, writes, and works in the Washington, D.C. area. She loves martial arts in general and Brazilian jiu-jitsu in particular, and in her spare time, enjoys learning new sports and checking out live theater. Andrea is the author of Rebelwing and its companion novel, Renegade Flight.

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