“Gofflesby is my familiar! He would never help someone like you!”
“He gave us the final proof that you are a scion. Your birthmark. Here, above your heart.” Mrs. Feathers touched her own sternum. “All of Callixta’s scions possess this.”
Greta looked down. She’d always had the heart-shaped birthmark above her breastbone. It was tiny and light brown and barely noticeable.
“This is a dream,” she whispered to herself. “This is just a dream. I need to wake up.”
“It’s not a dream, my dear.”
Mrs. Feathers tipped the pot over the cup, releasing a thin ribbon of steaming tea. She added a generous dollop of honey and stirred. The silver spoon made a soothing tinkling noise against the porcelain.
The tinkling noise stopped, and she lifted the cup and touched it to Greta’s lips.
Greta froze.
Angel’s trumpet.
White baneberry.
They were highly toxic plants.
“No!” Greta cried out, wrenching away.
Mrs. Feathers sighed. “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice, Greta. And I must insist you cooperate. There is a specific procedure with the harvesting, and we must follow the steps precisely.”
Greta screamed and struggled, twisting her body this way and that. The knots were like cement.
Don’t panic. Stay calm. Greta couldn’t touch her raw amethyst pendant, but she could imagine it there, connect to its power.
Goddess, please help me.
Solvo. The untying spell. Yes! She shuttered her eyes, took a deep, cleansing breath, and began to channel her spiritual energy. “Solvo,” she whispered.
“Solvo won’t work here, my dear. There’s no use fighting it.”
“You’re a witch. How can you hurt other witches?”
“We’re not hurting you, not really. We’re allowing you to serve a higher purpose, which is to keep him alive. Maximus Hobbes, the greatest witch and witch-hunter in history. Now, drink up.”
A witch and witch-hunter? How was that possible?
Mrs. Feathers lifted the teacup to Greta’s lips again. The tea trickled into her mouth. It had a warm, green, slightly bittersweet taste that was masked only slightly by the lavender honey.
“Good girl.”
“Gofflesby,” Greta whispered. She was becoming woozy.
Gofflesby had resumed licking the doll’s blood. But it wasn’t a doll anymore. It was a bird. A crow.
“Iris… Binx… Ridley…”
“I’m sure they’ll all come to your funeral. Now, drink up, my dear.”
“Love and light.”
“Yes, yes. Love and light. Keep drinking.”
Greta felt wetness on her cheeks. Tea? Tears?
Iris. Binx. Ridley. And Div. And Teo and Mama and Papa.
And Gofflesby.
A footstep, light as a feather.
A man was standing in front of her.
No, not a man. A teenager. He had long brown hair that fell to his chin, and the shadow of a mustache and beard.
“Hello, Greta.”
“W-who are you?”
“I’m Maximus Hobbes.”
“You’re… Maximus?”
“Yes. And you’re Greta Ysabel Navarro. The leader of your own coven. Great-granddaughter of Adelita, whom I had the pleasure of… anyway, I know a great deal about you. I’m also a friend of your friend Binx.”
“Binx?”
Greta’s eyelids felt heavy, so heavy. She was wrong; Maximus wasn’t a teenager. He was a man. An old man. He had long silver hair and a bushy mustache and beard. He had thick, brooding eyebrows over kind eyes.
No, not kind. Sad.
Maximus turned to Mrs. Feathers. “Get it done.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Maximus left the room. Greta needed to stay awake, but she couldn’t stay awake. Her mind was already returning to a dream state. Or was this a dream within a dream?
Gofflesby had stopped licking the dead crow.
Good boy.
Sitting very still, Gofflesby eyed Mrs. Feathers, who was searching for something. A wand? A knife? When she wasn’t looking, he reached out a paw and batted at something, knocking it soundlessly against a silk drape.
The dream was sinking deeper, to a darker place. The end was almost near. Greta could feel it. If only she could hold her familiar one last time, tell him how much she loved him.
But he wasn’t Greta’s familiar. He was her familiar.…
Gofflesby continued batting, knocking, moving soundlessly.
The smell of smoke. Greta blinked through the wooziness and tried to see what was burning.
“No!” Mrs. Feathers shouted. She pointed her wand, or her knife, at Gofflesby.
Hissing, he disappeared into the fire.
No! Greta screamed.
Everything was swirling. The dream was collapsing into the other dream.
She closed her eyes.
And then there was no more.
31 THE FATE OF ALL CROWS
Reality and Dreams can sometimes be one and the same.
Or in great contradiction to each other. Or both.
(FROM THE GOOD BOOK OF MAGIC AND MENTALISM BY CALLIXTA CROWE)
“I think I’ve got it!”
Binx, Iris, and Ridley had slipped out of Penelope’s house and were standing next to a row of parked cars. Binx slanted her phone toward the other two girls and jabbed her finger at the screen.
Iris squinted at a tiny blue dot; was that the gray house where Greta was being held prisoner? She reached over and touched the dot and closed her eyes, waiting for confirmation. Nothing.
Come on, stupid vision, she thought angrily, because she had no other words, no official spell, to make her brain generate the faraway information she needed. Still nothing. Obviously, they were going to have to rely on Binx’s cybermagic to get them to Greta.
“What’s the address?” Ridley demanded.
“It’s One Hundred Fifty-Eight Spring Street. I’m texting it to Aysha and telling her to communicate with Div and Mira somehow without alerting Colter and Hunter, and for all of them to get their butts over there ASAP. So I had Uxie search through a bunch of real-estate sale records and county deeds looking for gray houses. Once I had those, I hacked into this high-tech global satellite system to zero in on their yards in search of bird fountains and big oak trees. Which was not easy. This is the one, though. I’m a hundred percent. Well, ninety-nine.”
“Spring Street… that’s near my house. Like, a block or two away, on the other side of the Seabreeze development.” Ridley pointed. “Come on!”
Ridley and Binx took off running, and Iris ran after them. Her head was throbbing, and she felt like throwing up; her anxiety was off the charts,
