“As you can see, Option A has serious shortcomings,” Verlaine said. “Mostly because Elizabeth is powerful enough to squash us all like bugs.” The next slide revealed a clip art cartoon she’d found of a smushed bug, complete with xs over its eyes and a tongue sticking out of its mouth. “Which means we need to look at Options B or C.”

Nadia raised her hand, then stared at it, like she couldn’t believe she’d just asked permission to talk. “Uh—I think Option C is a no-go.”

Verlaine shook her head. “No, think about it! We get her to believe there’s some other powerful witch just out of town, or—maybe a magical artifact she’d like to get her hands on. I don’t know what that would be, but you can come up with something, right?”

Still Nadia looked unenthused. “Whatever it is Elizabeth has planned for Halloween night—it’s big. It’s important to her. And she’s been setting this up for a long time. I don’t know whether we could think of anything capable of distracting her. I’m not even sure something like that exists.”

Well, so much for the next slide, which had all Verlaine’s ideas about Option C, her personal favorite. Her disappointment must have showed, because Mateo quickly said, “Hey, that leaves us with Option B. We concentrate on what we can do, not what we can’t. Right?”

“Right,” Nadia said. Mateo smiled at Verlaine, like she had been really smart to bring them to this point. Maybe he was okay after all.

Of course, she hadn’t come up with as many choices for Option B—

Then an idea came to her. “Hey, you said a Book of Shadows has its own power, right?”

“Right,” Nadia said, looking up at her. Mateo never glanced away from Nadia.

“And the stronger the witch, the stronger her book.”

“Eventually, yeah.”

Verlaine grinned. “So why don’t we steal Elizabeth’s Book of Shadows? I mean, she’s four hundred and something years old, so her book has to be, like, the most powerful ever.”

“No.” Nadia held out a hand, as though she were physically going to stop Verlaine from trying. “Don’t ever, ever suggest that again. Don’t even think about it.”

“Why not?” Mateo looked as startled as Verlaine felt. “It sounded like a good idea to me.”

But Nadia shook her head as she rose and paced across the room, Mateo’s little sketch still only half-finished on her shoe. “Both of you—you have to listen to me. Everything Verlaine said is true. Which means a Book of Shadows that old, that powerful—it probably has power beyond anything we can imagine. It might have … consciousness.”

Verlaine bit her lip. “You mean, it would know we were there?”

“Possibly. I can’t be sure.” Nadia raked a hand through her black hair, which gleamed in the afternoon light filtering in through the dusty Guardian windows. “Certainly Elizabeth will have protected it, and probably it protects itself. If we go after it, it could hurt us. Physically, mentally. Mateo, you should never even look directly at it. I don’t know what it might do. No matter what Elizabeth’s doing, going after her Book of Shadows isn’t worth the risk.”