looked at me like I had a plan. I wished I had a plan. Instead, I looked toward the window, with the name “West Side Sandwiches” backwards and silhouetted across the glass, and for a moment, I saw my grandmother standing there.
Not literally—the only ghost was the ghost in my own mind—but real, the way that some memories are so strong they feel like a presence.
She had just closed up shop for the night, and she took a last look out the window, a survey of the sidewalk and the street and the buildings that stretched the length of them. A queen looking out from the ramparts of her castle. How funny that she reigned over this normal, real-world place, while living a secret life. Balancing ordinary and the fantastic. Magic and the mundane.
Spells and sandwiches.
Ah, Grandma. How did you do it?
I dragged my gaze from the window, folded my hands on the table, and leaned in. “All right. Everything we know.” I recounted the red magic I’d found in the Forest of Emeralds.
“Prospero, obviously,” James said.
“Thank you for your input, James. I wasn’t finished.” I described where the Mirror had sent us the second time through, for the benefit of James and Daniel, who hadn’t been there.
James smirked. “Prospero.”
“What we don’t know,” I went on, “is why.”
“Given enough time, you tick everyone off, don’t you?” James said.
“Do you want to keep your job?”
He raised his hands.
I gave him a long stare before I continued. “While we were inside, the Mirror ended up at Prospero’s.”
James, unable to stop himself, crowed with triumph. “I told you!”
“Prospero stole the Mirror while we were inside,” Poppy added.
That only made James look more smug. “He was trying to get rid of you.”
It had been easy to avoid thinking about it, in the heat of the moment. Easy to concentrate on the problem at hand—getting out—and not the cold truth. If we hadn’t escaped, if we’d been stuck in that silent, black-and-white world…
Nope.
Wasn’t going to think about it.
I shook it off. “Why would Prospero want rid of us? I mean, I know he hates me, personally. I know he wanted to seal the Gentry inside the Mirror. But let’s pretend we’re him. Why are we so important? What is he trying to do that he thinks we would stop?”
Poppy sat up taller. Her eyes lit, and her face, always so bright to begin with, nearly glowed from the sharp joy of solving a puzzle. She began ticking her fingers one by one. “First and foremost, he wants the Gentry out of the way, and you showed him that you weren’t going to be on his side. If you’re not with him, you’re against him. Right?” She waited for my nod before she continued. “Right. Secondly, he stole the Mirror. Thirdly, there are traces of red magic in the Gentry’s field of flowers. Correct?”
“Correct,” Berron said. He tipped his cup upside down in search of one more drop of cream-swirled espresso.
“But you’re missing something,” Poppy continued. “You’re not putting all of those things together. I mean, not you, personally, but all of us. So far.”
Daniel leaned back and crossed his arms.
Poppy picked up her fork, gestured with it. “Think about it. If he really wanted to trap the Gentry, why didn’t he just smash the Mirror?”
The rest of us looked at each other. I hoped they felt as stupid as I did for missing the obvious.
“What’s the point of trying to get you to lock it? Why steal it? One blow”—she swung the fork through the air—“and smash! Problem solved. But it isn’t,” she said, with obvious satisfaction. “Because, yes, he wants the Gentry out of the way. But he still needs the Mirror.”
“For what?” Daniel said.
Poppy raised the fork. “Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere.” She leaned in. “It’s traveling. All of it. Through the Mirror. Through the flowers. He wants out. He wants to escape.”
“Escape,” James breathed.
“Precisely,” Poppy said, with a final fork flourish. “Prospero thinks the Mirror is how the Blessed will finally escape from the island of Manhattan.” Speech finished, she dug into the apple tart with its rapidly melting pool of ice cream.
“Um, where did you say the Mirror was now?” James said, looking at me.
“Poppy’s. We stole it back.”
“I hope you have good security.”
Poppy swallowed her bite. “The best. The League of Women’s Welfare—the Ladies Who Witch—installed it. It’s never been activated, of course. But I’m told it would create quite an impressive display.”
“You think the Mirror could actually be used to leave Manhattan?” Daniel asked.
“I don’t know,” Poppy said. “But it’s a theory.”
Daniel had always been good at looking calm when he wasn’t—but I had the feeling that if he thought he could get away with it, he would have bolted for the door and run all the way to Poppy’s townhouse.
As always, Berron took all of it in, a great prince who collected other people’s weaknesses like a squirrel collected nuts.
“And there’s the other thing,” I said, not looking at James. “Well, not thing. Person.” I cleared my throat. “We took Jessica.”
“You what?” James said.
“She was at Prospero’s. With the Mirror. So we made her come with us.”
James—instead of shouting at me—sat there with his mouth open.
I would have preferred the shouting.
“You—”
I still didn’t look at him.
“You took. Jessica. From Prospero’s.” He paused. “Are you insane?”
“It was for the best,” I said. I wasn’t ready to share about Jessica’s power fading. Not yet.
“‘For the best,’ she says!” James stood up, spun the chair away, began pacing. “I wasn’t important to him. I didn’t want to be there. He’d still end me if he had the chance! And you took Jessica.” He threw his hands up.
“She say she needs our help—”
James laughed. “You’re more of a simpleton than I thought.”
I pushed back from the table and stood up, feeling the low tide of the magic in my veins suddenly rise as if pulled by a full moon. “Maybe I am a simpleton, James. But maybe you weren’t there, today, when I saw a child asleep under the roots of a dying apple tree. A child who will never wake up if we don’t figure out what’s going on and how to stop it. That’s all I want. I don’t care who I have to pull in—the Naked Cowboy, or Yoko Ono, or the Blessed who used Daniel as an afternoon snack. I will fix this if it kills me. I will go through whoever I have to.” I met Daniel’s gaze then.
He was unfazed. A slight nod, even, as if he understood.
What to make of that?
Poppy reached out, placed her hand over mine, where I had been gripping the table without realizing it, and gave it a gentle squeeze. She looked around the table, and then to James. “We all will,” she said.
James stopped pacing. Looked sheepish, and retook his seat. “Well, yeah. I mean, I don’t have it in for some poor kid under an apple tree.”
Berron steepled his fingers on the table. Whatever amusement had been on his features before had disappeared. “What next?” he said, quietly.
I sat. “We need whatever we can get out of Jessica. James, you should be there.”
He nodded.
“And then…” I paused, gathering my thoughts. “I’m going back to Prospero.”
James and Daniel immediately protested.
Berron, for once, was silent. Watching.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I am going back to Prospero. But not—” I stopped, considered who I trusted. Could I be sure not a single person at the table would betray me? It was a risk.
I decided to follow my instinct, the same instinct that told me when a roast beef was done. “But not as me,” I finished. “As Jessica.”
James looked impressed.
“Won’t Prospero wonder why she disappeared?” Daniel asked.
“That’s the only part of this that makes some sense,” James said. “Jessica took off when she wanted. Within reason. She shouldn’t be gone for too long, though.”
Daniel looked me up and down. “You’re going to need a new costume.”
“I can handle that,” I said, waving the worry away.
“No,” Daniel said. “I mean, for the ball.” Everyone looked at him. “The Royal Ball? The one Prospero’s hosting at the next Vespers Club?”
“How did you hear about it?” I asked.
“Victorine. I’m—” He paused, cleared his throat. “I was going to tell you. I’m invited.”
Poppy gasped.
Berron finally smiled. “And there it is.”
“Quiet, you,” I said to Berron, before returning to Daniel. “Why would you go to Prospero’s party?”
“Why did you go to the Vespers Club?” he countered.
“For information...”
Daniel shrugged, like it had been obvious all along. “I thought I could help. So I got in touch with Jessica and got an invite so I could meet with Prospero.”
“And neither of you thought this might be a good thing to mention to me? In case you—I don’t know—got killed again?”
“I didn’t know if it would work. I didn’t want to get your hopes up.” He took a long swig from his mug, started to wipe his reddened lips, then appeared to think better of it. Instead he cut a bite of bread from the open-faced pot roast sandwich and discreetly dabbed his lips before eating the bread.
He hadn’t been about to betray me. He had been trying to help. And he didn’t want to disappoint.
Furious love roared through me.
There are all kinds of love in the world, but the love that comes from trust restored is stronger than espresso, sweeter than ice cream, and more comforting than a boat of pot roast gravy.