‘It was just Cleo dreaming.’ Kit sits back down as the adults spill from the big top and wend their way through the camp, the torches on their phones shining like little silver stars. Mum and Dad are walking together, Li Lin right behind them. She’s looking at the ground and sniffing. Once, I heard Li Lin crying really hard in her van. When you live in vans you learn to give people privacy. She wanted to cry alone. I get that.

I stand up and Kit pats my arm. ‘G’night, Tuls,’ he whispers.

‘Sleep tight,’ I say.

‘How was the meeting?’ I ask Mum as we walk hand in hand to our van.

She gives my hand a warm squeeze. ‘You and Kit mustn’t worry. We’ll save the circus. Everyone’s coming up with fabulous new acts to pull in big audiences.’

I may not have her super-human sense of smell but I can tell that she’s way more worried than she sounds, and my stomach takes a sickening tumble. I look up at the big-winged bats flapping silently over us and think that this could be any of the many summer evenings we’ve spent here over the years, except that tonight our circus – and my whole life – is on the brink of falling apart.

‘Let me help you with your new act. Please, Mum,’ I say. ‘I want to be part of saving our circus. If you teach me just a little bit of magic, I know I can help you.’

‘Stop, Tulsi.’ She sighs. ‘Just do your part in the sawing-in-half act, okay? And we’ve got you down to help Claudie with a new hula hoop act.’

I don’t reply. I hate hula hooping.

CHAPTER 4

My home is an old-time circus van with a curved roof and the door at one end. I found out only a few years ago that it used to belong to my long-lost grandmother – the one who is apparently partly responsible for the trouble the circus is now in, though I have no idea what she did.

What I do know is that years ago, before I was born, my grandmother was stripped of her magic – by her sisters, Thelma and Lola, and by my mum – for breaking a law of magic.

The laws are the one thing about magic that my mum is keen for me to learn. She has drilled into me:

Law # 1. Magic must never be used for greedy purposes. Mum once told me that this is the law my grandmother broke. Basically, it means you can’t use magic to get money. I’m not sure what my grandmother did but I like to picture her casting a spell and turning a pile of gravel into gold coins. Which would be particularly handy right now.