“Isn’t this lovely?” said Peter, his rosy cheeks bulging as he grinned and placed a floppy, wide rimmed hat on his head. “Lunch as a family for once!”

“Will you take that ridiculous thing off!” Holly snapped, snatching the hat and stuffing it into her handbag.

“But honey, my scalp!” Peter complained. “You know the sun aggravates my psoriasis!”

Holly thrust a bottle of factor 50 sun cream at him, and sat back in her seat with her arms folded.

Saffie just wanted them to be quiet. After she had gotten dressed that morning, her mum had told her that it was important for her to get some fresh air, and that they were going to be eating lunch outside. Saffie had been a bit confused as to why her mum was suddenly so concerned about her daughter’s lung health (especially when the air in Central London was about as fresh as a bingo hall) until she realised they were heading to Holly’s favourite French restaurant in Chelsea’s Duke of York Square; a place that offered a free glass of wine with any meal before 5pm on Saturdays. Dragging Saffie along was probably the easiest way for her mum to make sure she wasn’t getting up to any more mischief on her own.

When the waiter approached their outdoor table, Holly nodded at Saffie to speak.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

It was true. She hadn’t felt hungry all week, and with the sweltering heat now that the rainstorms had passed, all she wanted was a large glass of water.

“Saffie…” Holly hissed through gritted teeth, then gave the waiter her sweetest fake smile and said, “She’ll have the Tuna Niçoise Salad.”

Once Holly had ordered steak for herself and Peter, the waiter returned a moment later to pour their free wine, and Acorn, who had been sprawled across the table with heat exhaustion, scrambled out of the way so the glasses wouldn’t get plonked on his head.

When the meals arrived, Saffie absentmindedly moved hers around with her fork, wondering how she was ever going to be able to enjoy food again now that she was powerless in helping Dax get out of his coma, and she was vaguely aware of her parents bickering away.

“I don’t care how may boroughs your flying license covers, Pete. Nobody wants to get in that bleedin’ gyrocopter with you.”

“Quadcopter, dear! Quadcopter! A gyrocopter has one rotor, a quadcopter has four! It’s four times as impressive!”

Stolen story; please report.

“None of it is impressive in the slightest!”

As Saffie prodded six of her dish’s seven olives onto her fork in one go, a combination of words in the bustling background noise of the open square made her jolt out of her trance immediately.

“Ultra Sleep.”

An icy chill ran down her hot spine.

This time, she was certain it hadn’t been a mishearing of ‘Vulture’s Weep.’ She had very clearly heard an ‘L’ pronounced in the second word.

She spun around, and Acorn jumped onto her shoulder. At first, she couldn’t see a single Overworld player in sight, but then she spotted a pair of women sitting just a few tables away wearing what had to be Overworld robes, with two little creatures having a playful scuffle under their table. The one woman was stocky with frizzy ginger hair and several colourful rings on each of her fingers, and the other was petite and seemed to be wearing at least 3 belts that were packed to the brim with potions.

Saffie shot up haphazardly, knocking the table in doing so, resulting in Peter’s wine sloshing over his 21 days aged rump.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Saffie!” he scoffed, while Holly grabbed the back of Saffie’s shirt.

“Saffie! Sit down!” she hissed. “Stop staring at people like that!”

But Saffie was barely aware of her surroundings. She pulled away from her mum’s grip and approached the two ladies.

“You,” she said, pointing, and both women looked at her. “One of you just mentioned a spell called ‘Ultra Sleep.’”

“Excuse me?” the redhead replied, aghast.

“I heard it clearly. You said ‘Ultra Sleep,’ even thought it’s not listed in the Great Spellbook. I need to know more about that spell! Please, you have to tell me anything you know about it!”

The woman’s outraged expression morphed into a wry grin.

“First of all, honey,” she said, blinking slowly, “it’s very rude to interrupt a conversation so abruptly, and second of all, I may look like a witch, but I have no interest in magic.” She placed her heavily ringed forefinger on the left breast of her robe, where there was a crest of a mortar and pestle with various plants inside it. “I am a proud alchemist through and through.”

“But-” Saffie started, knowing she couldn’t have imagined what she had heard.

“Thirdly,” the woman cut in, enunciating her words, “I didn’t say ‘Ultra Sleep.’ I said ‘Bultras, leap.’”

Saffie frowned. The name Bultras sounded familiar to her, but she couldn’t quite place where she had heard it.

“A prominent member of the alchemist’s guild has a toad panion who refuses to jump. I was merely telling my friend here how funny it is to hear him repeat the words ‘Bultras, leap!’ over and over again while his toad simply sits there doing nothing.”

A gazillion thoughts were suddenly racing through Saffie’s mind, and all that came out of her mouth was:

“It wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t a spell!”

A vivid memory of Dax drinking his strawberry frappe in her bedroom came flooding back. Shortly before she had heard the muffled whisper on that fateful day, Dax had taken a long slurp of his frappe, which had previously been sitting on her windowsill; the perfect place for someone to have spiked it.

Things were finally beginning to make sense.

Ruben hadn’t been nervous around Saffie in the potions store because he had a crush on her. Nor had it been because he knew her as Saffie the Strange from Willow Grove.

It was because he had poisoned her uncle.