The familiar, tattered chairs in the library felt like plush, fraying thrones. I curled up in one, plucking at the little bits of foam sticking out from the ancient tweed. Jasika sat on a matching chair. Dom lounged in a beanbag—the school’s admittedly feeble attempt at feeling relevant and relaxed. When I was sure that nobody was watching, not even the hawkish librarians, I told them everything. About Gooding and the book, about Mab and the steel mill. And Gwen’s warning.
Dom rubbed his hands together with a frown.
“Gwen’s done well by us this far,” he pointed out. “Maybe she knows what she’s talking about. Maybe we can practice some more spells. I’ve been trying to get a spell for good luck working. I think I’ve almost got it.”
Jasika remained notably quiet, drumming her fingers on the chair’s armrest and sending little bits of frayed tweed dust floating up in the air, but there was just a shadow of a smile tugging at the edges of her lips.
“What about the wild Fae?” Dom pressed. “And the courtiers. Sooner or later there’ll be some other ruler and all the trouble will start over.”
Jasika’s smile faded. My heart thumped, and I shifted in my seat. “You remember when I told you about them taking my mum?” I took a breath. “Mab said that she owned us. Some ancestor made a deal with her.”
Dom struggled with the beanbag a moment to sit up, his eyes wide. “Did she say who?”
The woman in the gray dress. The mystery banners that led to a lot of Medieval Times logos. My gut clenched. Someone had so much lasting impact on my whole life and I didn’t even know who she was. But now that Mab was gone, maybe that snake in my dreams would go away, too.
“All Gwen would tell me is that she was probably powerful and untrustworthy,” I muttered. “She wasn’t exactly eager to draw pictures of the family tree if she knows for sure. But maybe we can figure it out and see if there’s any other threat we didn’t know about.”
“You know me. Big research guy.” Dom spread out the side of his brown paper lunch bag and pulled a pen from his backpack. “Shoot.”
“Whoever it is, she’s pale with dark hair.”
Dom scribbled “Looks like Bryn” on the side of the bag. Well, he wasn’t wrong.
I cleared my throat. “But I think the key’s in the banners. She keeps showing up with red flags that have golden dragons on them.”
“Red flag with a golden dragon,” Dom mused, his pen tap-tap-tapping against the table. “That sounds kind of familiar.”
“Still, it sounds like the primary threat is gone,” Jasika pointed out. “All we need to do is keep things stable until after Samhain.”
“But we still don’t know what caused all of this to pick up,” Dom insisted. “Why did Mab strike now? I think there’s more that we aren’t seeing.” He jabbed his pen at the notes on the sack. “If you could kill Mab in your dream like that, don’t you think she’d have taken precautions?”
“Maybe.” I picked at a bit of fluff and frowned. “But even if she did survive, she’ll be weaker from last night, probably for a while. We’ve got a chance to start putting the whole puzzle together.”
“So, even if she is still out there, she’s been weakened enough that she can’t get to us for a bit,” Jasika pressed. “You think she won’t notice anything we do.”
“We should go talk to Gwen about all of this,” Dom said, pushing himself to his feet.
“I already did.”
“And?” He arched a brow.
I picked at the chair fluff a bit more. And she absolutely wouldn’t approve of us going and looking into the mystery woman. “And I think we should only talk to her once we have a little more information of our own.”
The bell rang to mark the end of lunch. Dom hesitated, then shrugged. “All right. If you say so.” He grabbed his backpack and made his way out.
Jasika hadn’t moved. She just stared forward at the reference section like it had insulted her GPA or something. The second the door closed behind Dom, she sat straight up and turned to face me, her dark eyes wide and bright.
“So, using the spell from the book, you were able to pull together enough power to knock her down.”
“Um…” I hesitated, glancing at the clock and back at her. “I think so. I mean, yeah. Pretty sure.”
My stomach clenched, though I wasn’t totally sure why. Because this was Jasika. She was going to suggest I help her tutor or that we should volunteer at cleaning up the church or whatever it was that Type-A choir girls did.
“I need you to help me with something.” Jasika grabbed my wrist and squeezed it like a lifesaver. “A spell.”
“I … You’re better at that sort of thing than I am,” I said uncertainly.
“Not one of my spells. One of yours.” Jasika picked at the hem of her blouse. “My cousin. William. He’s always been sick but this summer he just … He slipped into a coma. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
My heart skipped, and in an unintentional burst of sympathy, I couldn’t help imagining Dad or Ash or Jake in a hospital bed.
“Wait. Is that why you started volunteering at the hospital this summer? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
Jasika snatched back her hand. “I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me like … like some kind of charity case.” The words fell like a hammer between us. Jasika’s eyes widened. “Wait. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s fine,” I sighed. Of course, even Jasika saw me that way. I grabbed my bag and rose. “I don’t know. I could have gotten killed last night.”
“But you didn’t. You stood up to Mab and you survived. And you were alone. Imagine the two of us working it together. Mab can go on the back burner for one night. You just proved that!”
“Why not invite Dom, too?”
Jasika crossed her arms, glancing away. “Come on. Don’t make me say it.”
“That’s something people tend to say before they say something assholish. And I thought there was only room for one asshole in this group.”
Jasika’s expression hardened. “Because he’d tell us to listen to Gwen and not do it. And because he doesn’t have the knack for it. This isn’t some good luck spell. This is my cousin’s life.”
Something buzzed in my veins. I couldn’t quite push the rush of the memory aside, sinking into the dream. The overwhelming surge of victory when Mab disappeared. I could still taste the iron on my tongue if I thought hard enough about it.
“We have magic at our fingertips,” Jasika insisted. “What good is it if we can’t help anyone?”
I thought of Dad, brows furrowed, the days when it took everything he had to focus. I thought of the pill bottles and the days he’d had to miss dinner for some late-night appointment. How much better would his life be if I could ease this burden for him?
It was Mum’s book. What would she have wanted for him?
“Just this once,” I allowed. “But next time, I need more forewarning. And we bring Dom and Gwen into it.”
Jasika brightened like a star and nodded. “Of course. I’ll pick you up around seven.”