by Cate Martin
"And that," I said, “is me."
I watched him absorb this and waited for that question to come bubbling back. He seemed to fight it, but in the end he had to ask. "Amanda, this picture is from 1968.”
"Yes," I said. "And I was born in 1997. What happened in those few days which somehow jumped three decades is what we're working on now. That's our current mystery."
"Oh," he said. He looked from the photo in his hand to the one still in mine. "Oh, that one is Sophie's mother. And Brianna's there."
"Yes," I said.
"So it would help to dig up more on those names," he concluded.
I felt bad over how much I was taken by surprise that he wasn't just going to leave me with the folder and bow out of the rest of it.
"You can help? Really?" I said.
"Sure, no problem," he said. "I mean, I can't promise that I'll find anything."
"No, of course," I said, still feeling stunned.
"So I'll text you. Or should I call you? Maybe I should call if I find something big," he said.
"Whatever works for you," I said.
"You didn't block my number on your phone?" he asked.
"No! Why would I do that?" I asked. "Wait, were you trying to call me?"
"No," he admitted. "I'm sorry. That was a stupid question. You would never do that.“
"Well, thanks for this," I said, holding up the folder. "Really. It means a lot."
"No problem," he said, putting his hat back on then retrieving his gloves from his pockets. "Look, if you ever get a hankering for someone to open up a bunch of cans, mix it all together in a dish and are it for about an hour, I know my grandfather would love to see you again. And Finnegan too."
"Oh," I said, looking from the folder in my hand to the ceiling, beyond which lay my waiting computer. "I might be tied up a lot in the next few days."
"Okay."
"Or weeks."
"I mean, obviously I meant me too. Not just Finnegan."
"I'm not trying to save your feelings," I said. I immediately wished I had found a better way to say that I wasn’t looking to start maybe-dating again, as he flushed an even deeper crimson than before.
"Obviously."
"I mean, I'm not just trying to save your feelings," I said. “I’m not trying to avoid you without spelling it out. It’s just, it might get dangerous here. I don't know. It might not be safe for you."
"But it's safe for you?"
I gripped the folder in my hands, the folder containing the missing persons reports for all three of our mothers. The unsolved missing persons cases.
I didn't need to say it out loud. Nick got it.
"Okay," he said, reaching for the door. "But if you ever need me, call me. I mean that."
I thought about explaining to him the sort of power that just might come gunning for me, but I decided not to. It wouldn't be kind to make him worry.
"I will," I promised.
I shut the door behind him and ran up the stairs.
"Look what I've got!" I called, brandishing the folder as I walked up to the table, but Sophie was clutching a stack of photos and papers of her own.
"No, look what we've got!" she said. She flashed me photograph after photograph. They weren't particularly good photographs, inexpertly taken with 1920s equipment, but they were good enough.
Good enough to show the faces of Patricia, Linda and Debra in 1928, not looking more than a day older than they had in that school photo.
Chapter 15
I sat with my legs curled up under a blanket, forehead resting on the cold pane of the window, looking out at the moonlight on the snow. It was my favorite place in the library, the place I went to when I was feeling most overwhelmed by everything I didn't know about magic, everything I still had to learn.
Usually it lent me a sense of comfort and bolstered my courage. But at the moment it just didn't feel right. It was my safe space, and yet it wasn't. Because while it was the right place, the particular one of the row of window seats in the library that was my preferred spot, it wasn't the right time.
And the wand I held in my hands felt even more wrong.
"This is completely useless, you know," I said, looking down at my wand.
"Organizing what we know is never useless," Brianna said from where she was taping photos to the library chalkboard. The same chalkboard that held our working timelines back in the present.
"No, I meant my wand," I said, tucking it away under my sweater.
"We might need to protect ourselves," Brianna said.
"If I need to protect myself, the very worst thing I could do would be to try to rely on that," I said.
Brianna hung the last of the photos then looked at me sorrowfully. "I'm sorry, Amanda. I'm afraid you're right. I don't know what's wrong with your wand, but I believe you when you tell me that it's still wrong."
"I should've left it at home," I said. "I still feel like it's spying on me."
"I thought that was just when you were trying to use it?" Sophie asked.
"Yes," I admitted. "The rest is just paranoia. Maybe. I don't like it touching me."
"We might be glad we brought it with later," Brianna said.
I didn't want to argue with that. It sounded dangerously close to Brianna letting an intuition guide her, and that was too weird to dwell on.
"What time was Otto going to get here?" I asked, looking out the window again.
"Eight," Sophie said, glancing at the clock. It was a quarter past eight. "I don't think we should start worrying just yet. He has a lot more going on than just our stuff."
"How busy can the gangster life be on a Sunday night?" I asked.
"So we have thirteen witches," Brianna said, redirecting our attention to the photos she had hung up on the board. Four columns, three rows, plus Evanora all on her own taped to the top frame of the board. "These three we know," Brianna said, writing the names under Patricia, Linda and Brenda. "And of course Evanora." She wrote that name as well. "What else do we know?"
"Not much," I grumbled.
"This one is just a kid," Sophie said. "Can't be more than ten. I don't want to imply all kids know each other, but maybe it would be worth checking with Coco?"
"Not if we don't have to," I said. "And daylight hours if we do."
"Agreed," Brianna said. Then she went back to the board and changed the position of some of the photos. "These two look like sisters, don't they?"
"Maybe," Sophie said. "Are we sure he didn't take pictures of the same woman twice? These two might be twins, or they might be the same woman."
"We can ask when he's here," Brianna said. "But thirteen. It's hard to argue with that total."
"Two more sisters," Sophie said.
"You think those are sisters?" Brianna asked.
"The hair is different colors, but look at their faces," Sophie said.
"Maybe," Brianna said in a slow drawl.
"So what's left?" Sophie asked, stepping back from the board. I pushed myself out of the window seat to come look.
"This woman, who looks older than time," Brianna said. "And this one, about twenty. And this one looks a little older, maybe Cynthia's age. Fifty or so."
"Aside from the three who were in the 60s with our mothers, are we assuming the rest are all of this time?" I asked.
"We would know if they were crossing our time portal," Brianna said.
"Unless they were here before we got here," I said. "Or had something like linked wardrobes, or access to another time portal."
"There are no other time portals in the US," Brianna said.
"Really?" Sophie asked.
"Yes, it's well-documented," she said. "There are two in Europe, in Russia and Germany specifically. There used to be one in Wales, but that stopped working in the early 1800s. There are two in Asia and three in Africa. Nothing in Australia, and so far as we know the same is true of Antarctica."
"What if someone created one?" I asked. "Could they keep it secret?"
"Miss Zenobia has a reputation for being exceedingly secretive," Brianna said. "Most witches gather in groups, like in Boston or the old world. But she struck out here alone, and she's never kept a witch student past the age of twenty or so. She sends them east if they want to continue learning."
"She was secretive because she was protecting the time portal?" I asked.
"That might have been her intent, but it failed," Brianna said. "Every witch I know of knows this time portal is here. The power needed to create something like that is so massive, even the least sensitive of witches feel like something just happened, even if they don't know what."
"So that's a no," I said.
We all heard the sound of a car pulling up to the curb out front and went down the stairs to open the door before anyone in the 1928 school could get there first. Otto came up the steps alone.
"No driver?" I asked, trying to see past the darkened windows of his car.
"Not tonight," he said. "I'm not letting Benny get mixed up in this."
"Good," I said and closed the door behind him. "Let's talk in the library. We're working on something."
But the moment we stepped back into the library Brianna gasped and rushed to the board.
"What is it?" Sophie asked.
"Someone's been writing on here," she said.
“Besides you?” Otto asked.
"Do you see anyone else here?” I asked, not sarcastically.
"Just you three," he said, sounding unsure if I was pulling his leg.
"Have you ever seen anyone else here besides us?" I asked.
"Sure," he said. "All the time. There's a whole gaggle of young ladies living here. Don't you chase them off when you're here? I assumed that's what you were doing."
"No," I said. "No, they're always here."
"Help me," Brianna said. "I have to take these photos back down."
"Why?" Sophie asked.
"Look," Brianna said, pointing to the board. Otto and I also drew closer to see.
Someone had taken the chalk to add some markings to the board. The woman we guessed to be Cynthia's age had a name now, Minnie Jackson, and a note that she was a former student. The woman in her early twenties was Alice Severson, and the note that said she was a current student had several exclamation points after it.
"Oh, crap," I said. "Current student? Like, she could be here now?"
"That's why we have to take this down," Brianna said.
"Look, there's another note," Sophie said, pointing to something under Evanora's photograph. It read, "not to be trusted."
"That much we already knew," I said.
Brianna copied everything from the board to the back of the photos then thrust them into her shoulder bag before erasing the board. Finally we turned our attention to Otto.
"These photos help a lot," Sophie said.
"Hopefully I can help even more," Otto said. "I've put a lot more street kids on the job trailing all of these women, and they've been mapping where they go."
He pulled a map out of his pocket and unfolded it, spreading it out on the library table. We weighted down the ends with books. Otto traced a fingertip over a mass of pencil tracings that reminded me too much of the scrawl of the brain fog spell.
"They are all over this part of town," he said. "But it's like a hurricane, this pattern. There's nothing going on in the center. And none of my street kids, not even the craftiest, have seen where they're actually coming from. They just step around a corner and disappear, every time."
"There are spells for that," Sophie said. "Tell the kids it's not their fault, and that we appreciate their efforts. This is perfect."
"How does it help?" Otto asked. "There are several blocks in the center of this pattern. That's a lot of ground to search."
"But search it we must," Brianna said. "Neither you nor your street kids are going to be able to find their hiding place. It could be as tall as a skyscraper, and you'd never see it."
"It's invisible?" Otto asked.
"Not so much invisible as just really hard to notice," Brianna said. "You might see it, but your eyes would keep moving past it, and you'd forget in a fraction of a second it was even there."
"A spell like that could disguise an entire building?" I asked.
"Of course," Brianna said, blinking at me in surprise. "There was one over the school until Sophie and I took it down. Don't you remember?"
I did remember, now that she was mentioning it. I had had the devil's time finding the place when I'd first arrived. Even the GPS on my phone had seemed confused.
"But we can find it," Sophie said to Otto. "Can you give us a lift?"
"Not just yet," Otto said, folding up the map and stuffing it back in his pocket. "I want to recon one more time first. I'll find a place where I'm sure it's safe inside the eye of that storm, and then I'll take you there."
"You'll be in more danger than we'd ever be," I said. "We have protections that hide us from those witches, not to mention power of our own."
"I'm not helpless," Otto said, patting what I assumed was the outline of a gun under his coat.
"I have an idea," Brianna said. "But I need more time here in the library to try it out."
"Maybe-" I started to say, but Sophie cut me off.
"The three of us absolutely are not splitting up," she said. "Absolutely not."
"If those witches were looking to hurt me, they've had ample opportunity to try," Otto said. "They watch me, but they've never tried to stop me."
"They know you're here now," I said. "They know what that might mean."
"I'll be fine," he said. "I just want to set up a few basic defenses then I'll be right back here to move you in."
"I need the time," Brianna reminded me.
"Fine," I agreed, throwing up my hands. "But call off your street kids. All of them. I don't want kids getting hurt."
"I will," Otto promised.
I watched from the window seat as his car pulled away from the curb, heading back towards the riverfront. I expanded my awareness wider and wider, but if anyone besides me were watching him in that moment, I didn't sense it.
I wished that made me feel better.
Chapter 16
We didn't really know all the rules about how the magic worked that divided us from the students who were all around us in the charm school in 1928. At first I thought we had to leave the room to make things appear in 1928 like the letter for Otto or the photographs on the chalkboard.
But Brianna decided to test whether just not touching a thing, not looking at it, was enough. So she found a pad of paper in one of the library drawers and wrote out a question, leaving it next to her on the table as she sorted through the photographs and consulted her notebook.
"What are you asking them?" I asked.
"For more information on Minnie, Alice, and Evanora," Brianna said, handing some of the photographs to me and the other half to Sophie.
"What sort of information? A home address or something?" Sophie asked.
"No, what their powers are," Brianna said. "I want to know their specialties."
"What if the student talking to you isn't a witch?" I asked.
"They are noticing things appearing and disappearing and are helping us out rather than panicking," Sophie pointed out. "They're witches."
"Okay," I agreed.
"I've cataloged all of the spells used to hide the main one that was triggered by Miss Zenobia's box," Brianna said. "Some I know for sure. I mean, obviously one of them can affect memory, and another simply has to have some form of time magic."
"Time magic," I said, fighting a wave of panic. "I thought you said it was rare?"
"It is," Brianna said. "But one of these thirteen must have some ability. Too many of the spells had that element to them. Didn't you see?"
I closed my eyes and cast my mind back. "I did," I admitted. "Some of the spells were elegant, like braids made from the threads I can see. Most were scribbles, though."
"How complex were the braids?"
Sophie asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't have enough to compare it to."
"One of them has time magic," Brianna said again, "but not a lot of control, or not a lot of power, or both. Otherwise, they would have taken the time bridge from us by now."
"Or tried to," I said, curling a hand into a fist.
"It may yet come to that," Brianna said. "We need to figure out what it is they don't want us to know."
"So we have no clue which of them is a time witch," Sophie said, shuffling through her half of the photographs. "I don't think we'll know anything by looking at them. Not about their powers."
"Look," I said, pointing to Brianna's notepad. New writing, not her own spiky cursive but a more elegant script, was now covering the bottom part of the page.
"This feels like passing notes in class," Sophie said.
"Okay, the girl who is writing to me says her name is May," Brianna said. "She's a witch but is too young to train with Alice. She only knows that Alice borrows spells from others to work into talismans and amulets."
"Borrows?" I said.
"Eh, the girl might not grasp the concepts entirely," Brianna said. "Let's assume she can't do the spell herself, but she can fix it to things."
"Like, say, everything inside the walls of this house?" I said.
"Exactly," Brianna said, then continued reading down the page. "Minnie was a student here decades ago, but she used to come back to teach things to the younger girls. Apparently she can summon and control electricity."
"Wow," I said. "That's quite a power."
"Did we see anything like that in the spells we dismantled?" Sophie asked.
Brianna flipped through her notebook. "Not precisely," she said as she scanned pages. "But there were a few that involved certain… attractions? I can follow what she was doing, but I'm not sure how much you two know about electromagnetism. It's hard to explain if you don't get that."
"Can you try a metaphor?" Sophie asked.
"Well," Brianna said, then sat up straighter as a thought hit her. "You know in movies or TV shows about science nerds, how they sometimes do these really elaborate pranks? It's not science, no one would think it was, but if you got pranked if one of these elaborate tricks, you'd know it was the physics majors from the science hall, right?"
