Iris lifted the rose to her face to kiss it—she wasn’t sure why, but it seemed like a nice gesture—before setting it down on the casket along with the other roses. Its fragrance was sweet—too sweet, like those bubblegum-flavored cupcakes that had made her throw up at Ephrem’s birthday party last year. Her brain zapped and spun. Nausea rippled and ripped through her insides.
Gasping, she dropped the rose onto the casket. Blood from her thumb dripped onto the white wood; alarmed, she reached down to rub it off with the heel of her palm.
As her hand touched the casket, her brain seemed to short-circuit entirely.
The terrible image hit her like a wave.
She could see Penelope—right here, right now. Lying inside the forever darkness of her casket, alone. Her eyes closed as though in sleep, her flesh cold and hard. Wearing a pale pink dress with gold buttons, her hands folded over her chest…
… over her heart. Which wasn’t there.
Her heart wasn’t there.
Iris cried out and stumbled backward. Arms caught her. Greta’s.
“Iris, what is it?”
Iris could envision the inside of Penelope’s chest cavity… the bones, the dammed-up veins, the atrophied muscles. And, in the cavity that should be housing her heart, a void. Emptiness.
People were buzzing and whispering. Iris blinked and gazed around wildly. Everyone was staring at her—the minister, Penelope’s parents, their friends and relatives, people from school, Div, Mira, Colter…
… and Hunter, who was moving swiftly in Iris’s direction.
“Does your friend need medical help? I’m trained as an EMT,” Hunter called out to Greta.
Greta stepped between Hunter and Iris. “Thanks, but—”
“I’m fine!” Iris cut in. “Sorry, everybody! I’m just”—she raised her voice—“I’m just having an anxiety attack! I just need some space and fresh air and…”
She took Greta’s hand and pulled her away from the crowd.
“Iris? What’s wrong?”
Iris led Greta all the way to the tomb, mausoleum, whatever, where Binx and Ridley were still huddling.
“Whoa, girl. You look like you just saw a ghost,” Binx said to Iris.
“I… I did.” Iris sank down on the cool, mossy ground and leaned against the old stone wall. But more visions flashed through her brain—bones, many bones, under the ground beneath her—so she jumped to her feet and scrambled away from the wall. What the hex was happening to her?
“Guys. Penelope… I saw her and… she’s missing… she’s missing her heart.”
Binx’s jaw dropped. “She’s… what?”
“I don’t understand. How could you have seen that?” Ridley demanded.
Greta touched her arm. “Was it another one of your visions?” she asked gently.
“Yup, uh-huh.” Iris grasped her smiley-face moonstone necklace, to calm herself, but she was beyond calming (the tea-spell had stopped working, obviously). “I saw all her organs inside her body, except for her heart.”
“Soooo… maybe they did an autopsy?” Ridley suggested queasily. “Or maybe she was an organ donor, and they gave her heart to a patient who needed one?”
Binx held up both hands. “Guys? Guys! What if someone stole it? For her heart-fire?”
“Um… what’s heart-fire?” Iris asked, although she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Ridley glanced at Binx, then turned to Greta and Iris. “You guys might want to sit down for this.”
After the funeral, everyone gathered at Penelope’s house. The dining room table was covered with an array of fancy party foods. People stood around in small groups, eating and drinking and talking; soft classical music played on an invisible sound system.
Iris, Greta, Ridley, and Binx skipped the socializing and sequestered themselves immediately in the family room. Iris sank back in the big, comfy sofa (which bore strands of white dog fur) and hugged a pillow to her chest, hard. The room was a sad place because it was full of Penelope. Dozens of framed photos of her covered the walls—from age zero to the present, from braces to retainer to no braces, from first tennis trophy to junior champion.
Iris was still in a state of shock—not just from the horrific image of Penelope without her heart, which would be burned into her brain forever, but from what Binx and Ridley had told her and Greta at the cemetery. That a witch-hunter—no, not just a witch-hunter, but the most murderous, monstrous witch-hunter in history—may have kept himself alive all this time by killing Callixta Crowe’s descendants and stealing some kind of immortality-potion essence from their hearts.
Including, it seemed, Penelope’s.
“I’ve been thinking, too, about that murder board thing that Div saw at the Jessups’ house,” Binx was saying. “She said it was about some witch-hunter, right? Well, what if that witch-hunter was Maximus Hobbes? Maybe they know he’s still alive, too. And by they, I mean the Jessups, the Antima, the New Order group, whatever.”
Iris sat up, still clutching the pillow; the pressure of it made her brain feel a little less spinny. “So really, this murder board isn’t about hunting down a murderer to throw him in jail or level-jump in Witchworld? But it’s about finding a murderer who’s actually your hero because of your shared hatred of, plus world-domination supervillain plan to kill, witches?”
“Yeah, basically.” Binx turned to Greta. “Is Div here? I should show her a photo of Hobbes and see if it’s the same guy she saw on the board. Or I could just text it to her and—”
Greta held up her hand. “No, wait! I’m not sure if she’s here yet or if she’s even coming… but she and Mira might still be with Colter and Hunter, and we don’t want to take any chances.”
“Are we in calumnia mode?” Ridley asked nervously. “Calumnia again, just in case. Can we get hold of Ms. O’Shea somehow? I
