He looked over at me when I didn’t answer.

“Maybe he should talk to Constance, then,” I answered moodily.

Gideon chuckled. “Just like your mother.”

Suddenly a distant voice came up through the floorboards. “Brynn? It’s time. You’ll be joining us, won’t you, darling?”

My uncle gave me a look that seemed to ask, Will you?

I put my hands on the armrests of my chair to push myself up. “I’ll join them, but I’m not—Gideon?”

My uncle had gone still, his eyes focused on something far away.

“Do you see something?”

That was Gideon’s gift and his curse. He could see both into the past and the future. Yes, Nora and Izzy could catch glimpses of things that were about to happen, but they could only see seconds ahead. Gideon could see years. Maybe longer. He didn’t like to talk about it. Unfortunately, my uncle didn’t have much control over the content of his visions, and worse yet, he couldn’t always change what he saw. He had learned that the hardest way possible.

“You’d better go down,” he said with a forced smile.

I got to my feet. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“Oh, and take this.” He reluctantly passed me a pillow from the sofa. “Put it in front of the small china buffet in the sunroom. It might help.”

“Okay.” I took the pillow and held it against my chest. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why?”

“And I don’t suppose you want to try to reach Constance’s ghost?”

“Wow,” I said, raising my eyebrows at him. “It’s like that, is it?”

He chuckled. “It’s like that.”

I smiled back at him and headed for the stairs. “Your haikus really are wonderful, Gideon.”

“It’s far too late for flattery now,” he answered, giving me a wink. “Next time, you’ll positively have to drown me in praise if you expect me to forgive you.”

“I promise I’ll—”

“Brynn!” a voice shouted from the floor below.

“I’m coming!” I yelled back far more testily than I should have.

I climbed down the spiral steps, leaving my uncle chuckling behind me.

• • •

I think it’s dark enough,” Izzy said, bustling around the parlor without really doing anything. “Now we just need to go in there and have a look.”

The there was the sunroom. I was initially going to put the toad in the kitchen, but Izzy was not at all fond of that idea, so I had to come up with another option. Luckily, I had been able to find an old hamster cage in the garage. Not that that was too much of a surprise. The garage had pretty much everything you might need. Most witches had a minor problem with collecting, but my aunts and I were pretty good at staying on top of it even if the garage did look like a secondhand store. Once I had found the cage, I lined it with dirt and grass, and I left it with the toad inside, on a shady table in the small glass-walled room. I had purposefully left the lights on.