My face turns hot at her outburst and I look down at my hands.

She noisily collects dishes from the table and clatters them into the sink. When she turns back to face me, her voice is calmer. ‘I’m sorry, Tulsi, but you’re bringing back too many bad memories.’

I take a breath and turn to Pete. ‘Will you take me to the village? Please?’

‘Well …’ He glances at Meredith, who’s stepping out the glass doors into the backyard. He gives me an apologetic smile. ‘To be honest, it sounds like a bit of a wild goose chase.’

‘No, it’s not! There’s a very good chance she’s there. And anyway, my mum only did this trick and got stuck here because you want to close the circus back home.’

‘Technically, it’s not me, but I take your point.’ He rubs the back of his neck. ‘Okay. I’ll drive us there. But …’ He starts fiddling with his phone.

Outside, Meredith has turned her face up to the falling snow.

Peter looks up from his phone. ‘In this weather, I reckon we won’t be there until midnight, if not later. If the snow really sets in, we might not get there at all. And if we get there in the middle of the night, what will we do? Knock on doors till we find her?’

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘That’s exactly what we’ll do.’

Pete keeps his eyes on me as he takes a swig from his glass of water and stands. ‘All right. Let’s do this.’

CHAPTER 19

Pete’s black Range Rover is parked out the front. As I buckle up in the front passenger seat, he tosses blankets and pillows onto the back seat, and slides in a picnic basket packed with thermoses and food.

Meredith knocks on my window. ‘Good luck, Tulsi,’ she says. ‘But you should know …’ She pauses. ‘It’s possible your mother might not want to go back with you.’

‘What do you mean?!’ I exclaim. ‘Of course she will.’

Meredith shrugs. ‘So why did she leave for a parallel universe without another magician ready to come and get her? It’s a very basic rule. You have to wonder –’

I interrupt. ‘There’s no way she ran away from us!’ But Meredith has planted a tiny, poisonous seed of doubt in me. Is it possible that Mum wanted to leave us?

‘Fine,’ says Meredith. ‘Pete, if you can’t find Merry, you must make sure Tulsi gets back to where she landed, near my shop, by five o’clock tomorrow evening. She simply cannot miss that deadline.’

Pete gives her a salute. ‘Roger that, captain.’

She turns to me. ‘You know the spell to get home, don’t you?’

I nod.

She looks worried, and I wonder if her main concern is being stuck with me, her kind-of-but-not-really daughter.