“I see.” Theodolphus made a scritch on a paper, as if writing the boy off. “How about you, Miss Delfine? Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?”

Patricia lost a breath. Then she found it again and looked up, regarding Theodolphus with a steadiness that he couldn’t help admiring. Her thin lips pushed out.

“Well,” Patricia said. “A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn’t know it yet.”

With that, Theodolphus knew how he would finish this mission, and redeem his professional self-respect once and for all.

9

THE SNOWSTORM HIT a few weeks after Laurence more or less stopped talking to Patricia. She woke up with Berkley curled between her bent elbow and her shoulder, and looked out her window without getting all the way out of bed. The ground and the sky mirrored each other: two sheets of white.

Patricia shuddered and almost pulled the covers over her head. Instead, she took the hottest shower she could bear and put on her long johns for the first time this year. They no longer fit.

Patricia’s mother was already on-site and her father was multi-focusing with his laptop and a stack of folders, so at least Patricia didn’t have to talk to her parents. But Roberta came down halfway through breakfast and just stared at Patricia without talking, and that was creepy, and at last Roberta went off to Ellenburg High and Patricia was left hoping against hope that Canterbury Academy was having a snow day.

No such luck. Patricia got to school in her dad’s sedan, and almost broke her neck on the slushy steps. People threw snowballs with gravel in them at Patricia’s head, but she didn’t bother to turn and look—that would just be presenting a better target.

“Miss Delfine,” a smooth, deep voice said behind Patricia in the near-empty hallway. (A lot of kids had stayed home after all.) Patricia turned to see Mr. Rose, the guidance counselor with the knuckle face, looming in a pin-striped slate suit.

“Umm. Yes?”

Mr. Rose had never made much of an impression, though everybody said he was the only decent authority figure at this cruddy school. But today he seemed dark and towering, a foot taller than normal. Patricia shrugged this off as just snow-day nerves.

“I was hoping to discuss something with you,” Mr. Rose said in a deeper than usual voice. “Perhaps you could come by my office when you get a moment. I find that I have an unusually free schedule today.”

Patricia said “Sure,” and dashed off to first period. The school was half-empty, and the snow kept blinding her through the windows. It all felt like a weird dream. Her first class was Math, and Mr. Gluckman wasn’t even trying to teach—everybody just goofed off.

Her second period teacher hadn’t even made it to school, so it became a free period, after ten minutes of perfunctory waiting. Patricia drifted toward Mr. Rose’s office.