“She doesn’t give a damn about stories,” he would complain about his caretaker, a dull girl who often fell asleep when she was supposed to be watching him. “She’s not like you.”

“Pretend she’s me and before you know it I’ll be back,” Maria said to soothe him.

Maria continued to search for Faith, and each time she came home, unsuccessful, she turned to the Grimoire, also to no effect. She had no idea what thwarted her, making it impossible to locate Faith. She’d begun to think she’d lost the sight. By now she was known in the neighborhood as the woman with the stolen child, for she’d gone door-to-door asking if anyone had seen her daughter. The other mothers pitied her when they saw her in the short black veil she wore when she was in public. She paid informants, but those who said they had seen a red-haired girl in the care of a tall, thin woman were either out of date or inventing sightings in order to collect some silver.

Keeper was always beside Maria as she searched farther northward, in the wild area beyond the wall built by the Dutch to keep out native people, and pirates, and the British. Wall Street, built in 1685, ran beside the ramparts and crossed the old Indian path now called Broadway. Maria trailed the river on the west side, taking the road called Love Lane, a nighttime trysting place, hiking into the highlands where there were still large Dutch farms, and making her way through the woods where some Lenape people remained, hidden in the old forest where the trees were so big it would take ten men to circle the trunk of a single one. People grew accustomed to seeing Maria and Keeper; some of those they passed called out a greeting to the purposeful black dog and the woman wearing a veil, but there were those, such as the old farmers who had been among those who settled New York more than sixty years earlier, who recognized the wolf for what he was. The Lenape people did as well, but they called him brother, for they knew that when the Dutch and the English claimed the land they’d treated Keeper’s kind as they had the original people, with the intent to own and destroy.

Nothing helped Maria Owens, not even the back pages of the Grimoire, which contained those spells from Agrippa and The Key of Solomon only to be used in the most dire of times. At last, she performed an act of desperation. She lay on her back, naked on the floor, inside a pentagram she had drawn with charcoal. She was surrounded by burning candles, a brass bowl of blood and fingernail clippings and strands of hair on fire. She had made a small wax figure of Martha that twisted in the heat. This was left-handed magic, dangerous to one and all.