I brushed my teeth that night with the words of death ringing in my ears—which, considering what we’d been talking about, was only a little less dramatic than it sounds.

Olivia, Jacky, and I had all gathered in his room to discuss what we’d learned and what we wanted to do next.

“There’s no ransom note.” Jacky had observed.

“So they didn’t take him for ransom,” Olivia said.

“But they haven’t killed him. Nor have they let him go. Doesn’t that seem to indicate that he’s somehow being useful to them?”

“You think he’s helping them? Ansel checked his background. She said there was nothing suspicious.”

“Then why—”

“Maybe they just don’t want to kill him!”

Olivia’s pacing never stopped and never slowed down, but Jacky paused and leaned back into his chair. His elbows went out to the side, and he interlaced his finger bones. “That’s interesting.”

“What is?” I asked.

“I’m trying to imagine what the perpetrator or perpetrators might be like. They’re criminals, obviously. They were willing to take someone away by force—choking him out, if we understand your vision correctly”—Jacky’s voice became slow and thoughtful—“but they don’t want to kill him.”

Olivia and I glanced at each other.

“Maybe they’re forcing him to help?” I suggested.

“Then why Kirby?” Jacky said. “What would they want from him?”

“The witches find him useful.”

“We find his plants useful,” Olivia corrected me. “Kirby doesn’t know any magic. He isn’t even supposed to be an initiate. He’s just a businessman who was smart enough to stock whatever his customers wanted. If the perpetrator was a witch, they would’ve taken his stock—not him.”

Jacky said, “So we return to the question—why kidnap Nolan Kirby?

That was the cryptic question bouncing around my head as I spat out my toothpaste and rinsed it down the sink.

The how wasn’t difficult. If I was understanding my vision right—as Jacky so cautiously put it—then Kirby was overpowered. There was still a question about how someone got into the shop without leaving any sign of having tampered with the lock, but I’d hung around with Count Darius Vasil, vampire FBI agent, long enough to know that question had a lot of answers, including ones that didn’t require magic.

So, then, why?

I tapped my toothbrush on the edge of the sink, gathered up my day clothes, and headed back to the…“guest bedroom.”

I could feel the mental quotation marks clanking around the awkward phrase.

It felt weird and sad to me that Mrs. Oliversen had changed her daughter’s room while she was gone. Olivia was only seventeen. She should’ve been coming home when she was eighteen! And there wasn’t some witch’s tradition that they had to move out once they became apprentices; Nylah still lived at home, and she was in her twenties.

But Olivia stubbornly insisted that she didn’t mind.

So I minded for her.

I slipped into the room without opening the door any wider than I had to, in case Olivia was changing, but she was already in the soft T-shirt and loose set of lounge pants that she wore as pajamas. They were, of course, black.

Olivia was sitting up in bed, reading a book. The lamp beside her was on.

“Studying?” I asked as I crossed the room.

“No,” Olivia said. “I was trying to get my mind off Kirby.”

I dropped my clothes in a heap next to my duffel bag. I’d put them away neatly tomorrow. Or never. Whichever came first.

After grabbing my charging cord, I walked over to the far nightstand.

“Are you okay sharing the bed?” I asked.

Mrs. Oliversen’s redecoration had included removing Olivia’s old twin-size bed and bringing in a queen.

“Do you snore?” Olivia asked.

I shrugged. “No one I’ve shared a room with has ever complained about it.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

For a brief moment, I considered mentioning that the nightmares were a bigger problem than snoring, but I decided against it for the following excellent reasons: I was exhausted, and I didn’t want to sleep on the floor. Besides, there was a chance, no matter how slim, that I wouldn’t have a nightmare that night.

I generously decided to give myself the benefit of the doubt.

Since Olivia hadn’t told me not to, after I finished plugging in my phone, I laid down on my half of the bed. I put my hands behind my head and stared at the ceiling.

A minute passed.

Then another.

Maybe the chance wasn’t as slim as I thought. I’d forgotten about my insomnia.

“Hey, Olivia,” I said, still staring at the ceiling, “what’s Kirby like?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Considering how exhausted I was, it took effort to hold back my temper, but I managed it. “Because it’d be nice to know something about the man I’m looking for,” I said, with maybe a hint of stiffness.

Olivia closed the book, but kept her finger in as a temporary bookmark. “Kirby’s smart, and kind, and funny. He likes people. He’ll talk with anyone willing to stop with him for a minute, and he has less ambition than a sloth.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It was something I liked about him. He has his little shop, and he loves it. That’s all he wants from life.”

I thought about his hand seeking Autumn’s arm. “Are you sure?”

Olivia shrugged. “That’s what he told me. His family owns a flower shop. He says he would’ve worked there, but everyone kept complaining that his bouquets looked awful, and he’d say, ‘It smells all right to me.’”

I smiled. “How did he wind up in Craftborough?”

“He worked at another plant store in a neighboring town. He noticed that a lot of young women kept coming in and asking for the same plants, over and over again. When he talked to them, he learned they all came from the same place.”

“Saufgrove,” I said.

“His boss carried some of what we needed, but he didn’t bother ordering in the rarer plants. Kirby decided he’d fill the niche in the market.”

“He is smart.” I thought back to the shop. There’d been a shelf by the door that had included non-plant items: overly large paper, journals, pens, beeswax candles, white candles, and chalk. “He stocks other things witches need, doesn’t he?”

“He carries ash.” Olivia smirked. “Some of the old witches complain that the new generation won’t even know how to make proper ash anymore.”

“How did you two become friends?”

Olivia picked up a bookmark from her nightstand, placed it in her book, and laid the book aside. Halfway through the process, she lifted one of her shoulders in an awkward shrug. “We got to talking. Isn’t that how anyone becomes friends?”

“You weren’t in there doing some plant-based school shopping?”

I wasn’t sure, but I thought I felt Olivia relax. It was nothing but a gentle shift in the bed, so I could have imagined it.

“I was,” she said. “I’d just started boarding at Saufgrove. It was the first time I had to do my own shopping.”

“How old were you?”

“Eleven.”

“I thought you’d been going there since you were six.”

“I had, but I only started boarding at the school a few months after I was admitted into the secondary program. A lot of witches in the secondary program come from out of state.”

I did some quick mental math. If I was running the numbers right, that meant that Olivia had spent four or five years going to Saufgrove while living at home.

“Did you have to board at the school?” I asked.

“It made things easier.”

The abruptness of her statement and the edge in her voice made me hesitate to ask what had made things hard. I decided to move back to a less hazardous topic.

“Did you like Kirby right away?”

Olivia thought for a second. “Maybe not right away, but it didn’t take long.” She put her head in her hand. “God, I was such a rude little idiot.”

I bit my lips together to keep from commenting.

She said, “I kept asking him all these questions about his blindness.”

“Did he mind?” I asked.

“No.”

“Was it really rude if he didn’t mind?”

Olivia shrugged again. “Sometimes I’d go in just to see him—like if I wanted a break.” She rushed to add, “I didn’t have a crush on him or anything.”

“You don’t have to explain, Olivia. Girls can be hard to get along with sometimes, can’t they?”

“Oh, my god. You have no idea.”

I was more amused than irritated by her contradiction. One might have thought my comment demonstrated that I had at least some idea, but Olivia was only seventeen—she was allowed to be stupid.

She went on, “I think what I liked most about him was that he had no idea who the hell the Oliversens were. To him, I was nothing but a nosy girl from Saufgrove.”

Maybe I knew less than I thought. I didn’t have a family, let alone a famous one.

I wonder if my teenage stupid-pass has expired. Does that end at twenty? Or twenty-one?

“You like Autumn, don’t you?” I kept my voice soft—always a good idea when you’re testing the conversational waters. I might be dipping my toe into ice water, or I might be dipping it into acid.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Olivia demanded.

“Did she know who the Oliversens were?”

“She learned really fast.” Olivia punched her pillow into shape and dropped herself back onto the bed. Her pillow let out a quiet whoof. “Shouldn’t we be trying to sleep?”

This was me trying to sleep, but I didn’t want to break that to my involuntary roommate.

“Can I ask you why your mom hates the other coven mistresses?” I asked.

“There’s a lot of jealousy and competitiveness. Covens go out of their way to keep every other coven at arm’s length. It’s about secrecy. You don’t share anything if you don’t have to, and you never trust another witch.”

“Why?”

“Supposedly, it protects our interests. Witches are paid for their work. If we gave away our secrets, why would anyone hire us?”

Olivia had put a suspicious amount of emphasis on the word “supposedly.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the real reason?”

“Tradition. It’s just like the candle from this morning, and it’s just as stupid.” Olivia turned off the lamp beside her.

A dim light bled through the curtains, giving the shadows in the room exaggerated shapes.

“Olivia,” I whispered.

“Emerra,” she groaned, “how much do I have to pay you to shut up and let me sleep?”

As an apprentice, there was no way she could afford my rates, so I continued.

“What are we going to do about the invitations?”

At the end of our discussion with Jacky, Olivia had mentioned the cocktail party and the formal dinner, but when Big Jacky had told her he was willing to attend them both, she’d ignored his comment.

I wondered if she would ignore mine.

After a few seconds, she rolled away from me. Her answer sounded distant and muffled. “If we don’t have something better to do, we’ll go.”

I lay in bed, letting my eyes draw the outline of the shadows as I thought about traditions, fashion standards, and Mr. Nolan Kirby until I finally faded off.