Lying in one of the pools was an old notebook with its pages splayed open.
No.
Heart pounding, Greta ran over to her desk and picked it up. Her grimoire! She flipped through it frantically. Some of the pages had been scratched and ripped and streaked with thin spiderwebs of… was that blood? Or was it one of her potions that she’d made out of beets and berries?
“Gofflesby!”
He ignored her and lapped at the scrying-bowl water on the floor.
Greta clasped the grimoire to her chest. “Reparati,” she murmured.
The pages made a shuffling noise and quickly restored themselves. Greta sighed, relieved. She put the grimoire in a desk drawer, locked it, and hurried back to Gofflesby.
“What’s wrong, my love? Why are you doing these things?”
Gofflesby continued lapping at the water.
“Gofflesby! It’s me!” She scooped him up in her arms and curled herself over him. He hissed and thrashed; she held him tighter, as if her embrace might lull him back to sanity. “Why are you acting like this? Why are you trying to destroy my things? What’s wrong?”
Iris stood next to Greta. She reached out and laid a tentative hand on Gofflesby’s soft orange head… and flinched.
“What is it?” Greta demanded.
“You can’t feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“He’s so hot!”
“No, he’s normal. You must be sensing something I can’t.”
Iris touched him again, more tentatively, and closed her eyes. “What’s the matter, Mr. Gofflesby? Is something upsetting you?”
Greta felt Gofflesby’s body relax ever so slightly.
Iris stroked Gofflesby’s head with her fingertips and nodded to herself.
“It’s working! I’m having a vision!” she told Greta excitedly. “All righty, so… I’m seeing a man… no, a woman. She’s standing outside a window—wait, that looks like your house. She’s talking to Gofflesby through the window… and he goes to her. Now she’s taking him somewhere…”
“Who is she? What does she look like?” Greta asked.
Iris continued stroking Goffleby’s head.
“I don’t know. She’s wearing a cape, and the hood is covering her face.”
“Where is she taking him?”
“She’s taking him to a house. A little gray house. But now I’m seeing another house… it’s that Seabreeze-y house that’s still not finished yet, the one where we found…” Iris paused and whooshed out a deep breath. “I’m getting dizzy, I think I need to stop.”
“Hang on. Did she take him to a little gray house or the Seabreeze house? Or both?”
“Both? Or maybe one is in the past and the other is in the future? I don’t know.”
“Why is she taking him there? Why is she taking my familiar anywhere?”
“I’m not sure. Wait. I think they have some kind of—”
Gofflesby growled suddenly. In the same instant, his body glowed and crackled… and a bolt of electricity shot out of him and through the two witches.
The girls screamed and stumbled backward, falling to the floor. Gofflesby landed gracefully on all four paws and circled back toward Greta.
“What… was… that?” Iris panted.
Gofflesby climbed onto Greta’s lap and rubbed his head against her arm, purring.
Acting perfectly normal, as though nothing had happened.
24 SECRETS
Secrets cannot be kept securely where Magic has a presence.
Withhold, or lie, at your own risk.
(FROM THE GOOD BOOK OF MAGIC AND MENTALISM BY CALLIXTA CROWE)
“And… send!” Binx said as she hit the return button on her encrypted e-mail to Div.
Satisfied, she leaned back in her desk chair and hugged one of her stuffed Pikachus. (She had a small one, a medium one, and a large one. This was the small one, which was her favorite; she’d found her at a garage sale, missing one arm, and repaired her with a sana spell—Binx knew it was a her because of the heart-shaped tail tip.) After school, Binx had come home to do some research—magically hacking into the server at Mira’s dad’s campaign headquarters, scoring their guest list for tomorrow night’s party at the Jessups’, and cross-referencing it against various Antima sites to see if there might be any overlap.
Of course, there was no obvious reason to think that there would be Antima members at the event, since it was a political fund-raiser for Mr. Jahani and not a New Order meeting. But Binx had figured it wouldn’t hurt to check, especially given what Ms. O’Shea had told her this morning.
And she’d struck gold. Or a few little nuggets of it, anyway. Orion Wong and his parents were on the guest list. So were Brandon Fiske and Axel Ngata and their parents. Were the moms and dads Antima sympathizers, too? (So heartwarming… families doing Antima activities together!) She’d also found three people on the guest list who’d posted to a new video sharing site, Whatznow, that seemed to be popular with the Antima; their names were Sarabeth Lash, Keemo Malifa, and Essie Tranh. (They didn’t go to Sorrow Point High, though.)
Her phone buzzed. Div had texted her.
I didn’t realize you were working on this. Thanks, great job!
Binx grinned and typed:
You’re welcome!
Div replied:
I’ve been following the Antima on social media, but I didn’t know about Whatznow. Thanks for that, too. No wonder Greta values you so much.
“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Binx whispered to her stuffed Pikachu.
She wrote:
The videos on Whatznow will make you barf. Or scream. Or smash your device against the wall. Or all of the above.
Worth it, though, to know everything we can about those losers.
You mean those ignorant, hateful, bottom-feeding, dumpster-fire, if-one-of-them-was-drowning-I’d-throw-the-life-preserver-in-the-other-direction losers.
Exactly!
After saying goodbye, and with a promise to send along cyber-research updates if there were any, Binx set her stuffed Pikachu down, then got up and walked over to the window. She felt lighter than she had all day… all weekend. It was nice to be appreciated by someone, even if that someone was Div.
Maybe Div wasn’t as bad as she’d thought? Maybe she’d let Greta’s negativity about the girl cloud her own impressions and opinions?
At the window, Binx parted her curtains, which were pink with dangly bead trim. The beads made a swishy, plinky waterfall sound that she
