Silvy and I sat on the floor in the dark. With my eyes closed, I listened to the sounds of an abandoned building. Creaks in the walls. The sounds of a much larger room than I was used to.

I opened my eyes and, with what little light there was, took in the main stage of Sulis. Seats had been haphazardly tossed into a pile off in a corner. The main floor was completely empty and barren. The walls were dark wood, and the movie screen was ripped to shreds, long white strips of the fabric hanging down into the main area. There was spray paint everywhere: the walls, the screen, and even the ceiling somehow.

I smiled at Silvy.

She shook her head. “The place looks like a dump.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but it's my dump.”

It could all be fixed. Everything wrong with Sulis could be fixed with the proper application of time. And based on what Lebec had said, I would have plenty of time while the Austerium completed their inquiry.

For the first time in a long time, I felt whole. I felt as if a part of me that had wilted so long ago, as a little girl, had sprung back to life.

“I’m going to fix you,” I said in a quiet voice to Sulis. “You’re mine now.”

Silvy stretched and headed out towards the lobby. “I'm getting a read on some lume.”

Frowning, I stood. “Lume? Here?”

I'd already gone through the secret entrance to Blackhart and seen that the inside of it was completely intact. The door which previously led to the Night Market had completely vanished, but everything else was the same.

Well, not everything.

Geist had been so kind as to arrange all his witchstones in color order in little boxes. I guess he’d planned on moving in, on working out of Blackhart, but all he'd really done was set everything up for me.

I followed Silvy into the lobby and she passed right by the door to Blackhart. She went up the stairs and led me to a back room in the projection booth. She scratched at one of the corners there.

Frowning, I bent down and looked at the corner.

It was made up of panels that were crisscrossed with shiny trails of something. It looked almost as though a slug had crawled across it multiple times.

Silvy stared at it and looked back at me. “I think if I…”

She pressed her paw against one of the panels and a small section of the wall, no larger than a cookie jar, slid open.

Sitting in this strange miniature closet was a tiny wooden box.

“It’s not cursed,” Silvy said as she hopped up to my shoulder.

I picked up the box.

Mounted on the front and set into the wood were three wheels that clicked when moved up or down. A three-digit combination lock.

As I clicked through the different combinations, I frowned. The entire alphabet was there as well as numbers, symbols, shapes, and there were even spots of color. Based on the size of the digits, there was probably only enough room for three other numbers or letters on each of the dials, otherwise the dials would've extended well past the back of the box.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“It's a magickal lock,” Silvy whispered beside me. “The only way you can open it is if you have the combination.”

I didn't know how many different options there were, but as I considered all the permutations a sense of hopelessness filled me.

I didn't know what to enter.

The box was light. It weighed barely anything.

Silvy hopped to my other shoulder, her upper lip curling back at a slug that was slowly crawling towards us.

Surely this wasn't the same slug I’d seen so many times in the past few days, right?

Not too long ago you believed magick to be a thing that was only real in books and movies.

As I stared at the slug, I thought back over the different letters I’d seen in slug mucus.

Might as well start there…

I dialed in a combination.

Someone’s favorite month?

M.

A.

Y.

When I tried to open the box, nothing happened.

I tried another combination.

Someone’s favorite root vegetable?

Y.

A.

M.

Nothing happened when I tried to open the box. The slug had made it to the floor and stopped.

Maybe it was looking at me. I wasn’t sure.

I tried another combination.

Someone’s favorite name?

A.

M.

Y.

As soon as I spun the last wheel to Y, the entire dial melted, dripping down the front of the box and hitting the ground with a sizzle. The slug was motionless.

I opened the lid of the box and looked in.

Inside the box was a small glass sculpture. A hollow skull with a golden chain attached to the top of it.

Frowning, I pulled it out by the chain and set it down on the floor next to the box. It felt weightless. There were holes between the skull’s teeth, just like regular teeth. Besides that, there didn’t appear to be any way to fill the hollow space, if that’s even what you were supposed to do.

There had to be something else in the box. Something I was missing.

The slug started moving again, heading in the direction of the skull.

I put the box aside and watched the slug.

“We just gonna let this happen?” Silvy asked. Her disgust dripped with every word.

“We are,” I said.

The slug had been the one that had given me the combination after all. The combination to a magickal lock.

The slug compressed itself down and squeezed through one of the largest holes between the skull’s teeth. Once the slug was inside, the skull lit up with white light. The white glow of the light filled the projection booth. It was so bright I saw stars for several moments.

The skull gradually dimmed in brightness but continued to glow.

I heard a voice that wasn’t Silvy’s. A tiny, tiny voice.

I laughed at how silly I was about to look as I lifted the skull to my ear.

The tiny voice was louder, but only marginally. It sounded like the voice of a high-pitched little girl.

“OhmyGodthankyou!” the high-pitched voice squealed. “You can’t even know how long I've been waiting for someone to open that box! You don't know how long I've been waiting to go home!”

The voice spoke so quickly I had trouble understanding what it was saying. The words rolled over each other, crashing together and bursting through one another in a mash of sound.

“Slow down,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Amy. Obviously! I thought you would've gotten that by now. I thought you would've understood that. I thought—”

“Okay,” I said, interrupting the voice. “Okay. Hold on. Where’s home?”

“Oh my God you’re not even paying attention! The skull is my home. I’m home!” it squealed.

“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure where to go next. “So uhhh, what—”

“Shut up!” Amy’s tiny voice screamed at me, an octave higher. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“What a rude little creature,” Silvy hissed.

“Your mother’s rude!” Amy screamed back.

Silvy smiled. “I ate your mother last week.”

“You wish!”

I closed my eyes. I wanted to get started on the renovations to Sulis, not listen to these two fight it out.

“Stop it,” I said. “Both of you.”

Silvy vanished in a puff of smoke.

“Good riddance!” Amy screamed.

“Stop,” I said.

“You stop!”

I put the skull down on the ground, well away from my ear. A high-pitched whine filled the room, but it was quiet enough that I barely registered it. I waited until it died down before I picked the skull back up and brought it to my ear.

What Amy said next changed everything.

“Your father’s alive!” she screamed. “He's being held in Witherstone!”