Back in their house in Ithaca, the book’s hiding place used to be under her grandmother’s pillow. But now, sliding her hand under the thin, jasmine-scented pillow, Sami found only prayer beads. Luckily, Teta didn’t have a lot of furniture or possessions, so the hiding places were limited. Sami moved quickly and carefully, trying not to leave any trace of her hunt. She looked behind the painting of the Virgin Mary—which Teta sometimes called “Fatima” and sometimes “The Goddess”—hanging over the bed. She rummaged through colored jars of myrrh and sandalwood oil and other murky potions on Teta’s dresser, green and amber and sea-colored glass jars labeled in smudged Arabic. A single clear vial said MAGICK WATER. In the closet that Teta liked to call her “memory cabinet,” there were olive oil soaps, Teta’s fortune-telling cards, ointments from the Dead Sea, a whittled caravan of camels linked by silver chains. But no spell book.

Bookshelves? Check. Bed stand? Check. Under her rocker, her floor lamp, her jewelry box? Check, check, and check. Sami stood in the middle of the room, frowning, hands on her hips. She hadn’t seen the old book in a long time—certainly not since they’d moved. Yet Teta had to still have it. The book was as prized as the mirror, possibly more so. That was, she supposed, why her grandmother hid it so well. Too darn well.

She looked at Teta’s little table clock with the Indian numbers and the bent hands that seemed to move backward. Teta and her mother had been gone for over an hour and could be back at any time.

Under the bed, she was startled to discover a half-filled suitcase. Perhaps this was just extra storage, she tried to reassure herself. Perhaps Teta had packed it herself, planning a trip? Not likely. These were all of Teta’s clothes, folded in her mother’s neat piles. They were already getting her ready to go, Sami thought darkly. Maybe Alia was even planning to move Teta this week.

Never.

Sami couldn’t accept that. She would not. Her father used to tell her, Don’t you ever give up on anything important, Sami. It hardly even mattered how things turned out—just as long as you tried your hardest and never quit. It was a feeling she’d sensed inside herself for nearly all her life—especially when her teta told her stories of the ancient beings, the Ifrit, and the Flickers who stood up against demons. She felt it when she heard about the ruined castles and giantess princesses, women generals and warriors her grandmother was descended from.

Sami folded her arms tightly, which had always been her best thinking position. It felt like she could pull the energy from her heart right into her mind that way. She took a couple of deep breaths, looked back at Teta’s pillow—the place the spell book should have been—and tried to clear her mind.

A glimmer started to tickle the back of her thoughts. She blinked at the door and the hallway beyond. Slowly, Sami went out and walked back to her own room. She looked in her closet—almost as orderly as Teta’s. Sami kept things so neat, it was hard to imagine anything stashed in her room that she wouldn’t notice immediately. Still, a little premonition, like an itch between the shoulder blades, kept her looking. She poked through her desk and dresser, all around her bed, under the mattress. She pushed aside stacks of textbooks for school, the unstarted project for social studies class, pre-algebra homework—then she looked under the bed. Their new Florida house had so few closets, Alia stored odds and ends down there—Christmas decorations, some cleaning supplies, a stack of her old Law Review journals, and a small rolled-up carpet. Sami was about to stand, then thought better of it, and reached over and pulled out the carpet. It was the kind that Muslims knelt on to say their prayers. When Teta and her daughter immigrated to the States, Teta had brought one small suitcase and the prayer rug on the plane. She said she liked to “pick and choose” her beliefs, and frequently mentioned that she had her own private faith. Even so, the rug was a rare and beautiful memento of her Bedouin childhood—an item, like the mirror, that had been handed down through her tribe. As a little girl, Sami had liked to run her hands over its silk threads, vibrant whorls of blue and red, and pretend she was on a flying carpet.

The rolled carpet was held in place with a piece of twine. She unknotted it and opened the carpet, and the scent of lemon, sand, and sunlight filled the air.

Lying in the center of the carpet was the spell book.

Sami sat back on her heels, breathless.

She admired her grandmother’s forethought. Teta had probably guessed her daughter was planning to do something drastic—maybe even send her away—and decided to hide the book here for safekeeping. It was slightly curved from being rolled up, and its leather cover was battered and worn, but it was in surprisingly good shape, Sami thought, for something that looked about a zillion years old.

She ran her fingers over the book’s nubbly surface, then carefully turned the gleaming, gilt-edged pages. The paper was so thin, it barely made a wisp of a sound as she leafed through. There were diagrams and drawings of things that looked like mysterious inventions, with arrows and circles and dotted lines, but whenever she tried to look closely at an illustration, it seemed to shift slightly out of focus. A light herbal scent of flowers, lilacs and geraniums—and different sorts of unidentifiable fruits and spices—seemed to waft up as she turned the pages, then vanish just as quickly. Everything was written in thin black pen strokes, a flowing, perfect penmanship. Again, Sami ran her finger along the pen’s faint indentations—nothing like her grandmother’s handwriting—and tried to read, but almost none of it was written in English. She thought she could recognize bits of French and Arabic. At least she thought it might be, as these letters, too, seemed to slightly bounce and jiggle whenever she tried to look directly at them.

It was almost like the book was trying to avoid her. Like the book itself was under a spell.

She smirked and rolled her eyes at herself, but kept turning the slippery pages. Twice, wisps of things—tiny feathers or petals—tumbled from the book, but when Sami bent to retrieve them, they winked out before she could touch them. The book was so old and delicate, she felt like a clumsy oaf trying to thumb through a fairy’s storybook. She paged faster, aware of precious minutes slipping by, her frustration building. Finally, she was about to give up on the book when she came to a page where the writing stood precisely still.

The words looked like some sort of incantation, written partially in gibberish. Directly underneath the first line of garbled words, in small faint letters, it said:

Thee Opfening of thee Silverskinn’d

Beside this was an ink drawing of a mirror. The same mirror, to be exact, that stood in Sami’s room. There were the same waves and swirls that framed the long rectangle—even the dented glass in the middle. She realized then she could make out in the drawing the faint image of a face in the mirror…which looked oddly like Sami’s—it had the same round black eyes and curling black hair. She shivered a bit, then tried to laugh at herself. It was just a drawing!

There was something about the scrambled language that looked familiar as well—kkeeff karaaaab yyallu: ahtttah li rraaad il raamsim.

Sami climbed back on her bed and looked up at her reflection in the mirror again. The words reminded her of Teta’s jumbled language. It was just as if the book itself had taken her to this page. Her breath sped up and her eyes grew wide: it seemed almost possible she was holding the key to her grandmother’s cure right there in her hands. But did she dare to try a spell? Her grandmother always emphasized the powerful—and unpredictable—nature of enchantments. For some reason, one of her mother’s favorite expressions popped into her head: The only way out is through. It was something Alia would say when she was tackling a tough case or a mountain of briefs and paperwork.

Just outside came the sound of a car door closing.

Sami jumped and almost dropped the book. There was no time to waste. She didn’t know exactly what this spell was supposed to do, only that the book itself had nearly placed these words in her lap. Sami stood and held the old thing up carefully before her. She was just a few feet from her mirror and could see all of herself reflected in it. Her reflection looked frightened and unsure, but also maybe even a little bit brave. Yes. Determined. She hoped her own secret strength was there too, like her grandmother’s Ashrafieh, trying to unfold.

“Mother! What’s the matter now?” Alia’s voice came through the window from their driveway. “Easy, easy. Please, calm yourself. I’ll have you back upstairs in just a minute.”

There was a long, agitated string of Teta’s strange words.

“Why are you being like this? Shoo, habibti? Just take it easy, I’m coming around to your side now—I’ll let you right out….”

She knows I have the book, Sami thought in a panic. Somehow, Teta knows!

The tiny words ran under the unknown lines like a kind of translation. Squinting, heart hammering in her chest, Sami began to read aloud: “Beautifull Silverskinn’d, greatest door to Worldes beside Worldes beside Worldes, please to hear mine enjoindre. I heare the Friende and I Respond. O, Silverskinn’d, parte your Gaetes and admit me….”

There was the sound of a second car door closing. She read faster:

“I atteste that I am Capable and Authorize’d, and that I am One of the Treu Silverwalkers, read’eed to pass threuw the Gaetes. For this Favore I grant You mine Favore, which is Luve and Obeisance. Threuw the Gaetes I go Willinglee and Joyeouslee, knowing once threuw, nevermore I may retourn Un-change’ed.”

Sami lowered the book then. Her face in the mirror looked ashen, her heart was pounding, and for some reason she was completely out of breath, panting like she’d run a mile, but nothing else was happening. For a moment, she felt a kind of terrified uncertainty: this had to work! It would be unbearable to step back from whatever brink this was. It would not only fail Teta, but also prove her grandmother was wrong—about many things—especially and worst of all about the magical worlds.

Through her anxiety, Sami realized her head seemed to be swimming with a dense murk: she heard and felt things as if they were coming to her from a great distance. She turned toward the front door. It was opening, but the sound itself seemed to come from far away. Was she dreaming?

She closed the book, and was sliding it under her blankets when she noticed a soft blue light cast over her bed. She blinked. All along its edges, in each corner, the mirror had started to glow.

She blinked several more times, bit the inside of her cheek, pinched her arm and felt it sharply.

This was not a dream.

At the center of the mirror a dot expanded into a white beam: it grew and cut through her room, sweeping across Sami’s body. She felt shimmering under her skin. It was a wondrous, silky, free-flying sensation. It felt like being born and swimming in a warm pool and climbing the highest tree and eating chocolate ice cream, and having her mother and father and grandparents and brother wrap their arms around her all at the same time.

No matter what happens, Sami thought, whether Teta gets well or gets sent away or I get into a million years of trouble or I’m grounded forever, no matter what—this feeling, right now, makes everything worth it.

She closed her eyes and took a deep, sweet breath, wishing she could have this feeling forever, and that’s when she felt the floor disappear from under her feet.