“I thought it was just part of the spell you were casting then,” Mateo said. “I wouldn’t have known the difference then, or even now, if you hadn’t just explained.”

Nadia stepped closer to Verlaine and stared like she’d never really seen her before. “Verlaine … when did your hair go gray?”

“Since I was little. It’s almost always been this way.” She was the only gray-haired person in her first-grade class photo. “It was brown when I was a baby. Not after that. The only pictures where I have dark hair are the ones when I’m little bitty, with my—”

Verlaine couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. The possibility pushing into her mind didn’t leave room for anything else.

Mateo took her arm as if he was afraid she might fall over. “Verlaine? What’s wrong?”

“With my parents,” Verlaine whispered. “I had dark hair while my parents were alive.”

The Guardian was always quiet, but now the silence seemed like another presence in the room, something so enormous and ominous that it surrounded them all. Nadia and Mateo exchanged a look before Nadia said, “How did they die?”

Legs trembling, breath weak in her chest, Verlaine braced herself against the front desk. “They said it was viral pneumonia. Had to have been. We—we all went to Uncle Dave’s house one night, and apparently everything was fine. Then he didn’t hear from them for a couple of days and got worried. He came over and found them; they’d died in their bed. I was in my crib crying. They had been dead for at least a day. It was like they both got so sick so fast they couldn’t even call a doctor.”

“Oh, Verlaine.” Nadia put an arm around her, which was the first time anybody besides her dads had tried to comfort Verlaine in so, so long. But she couldn’t really remember her parents, couldn’t remember that weekend she’d been trapped in a house with dead people. The pain she felt was for their absence even from her memories—and now, for something else besides.

“It wasn’t viral pneumonia, was it?” Verlaine whispered. “Was it magic? Did Elizabeth do something to them? Did she do something to me?”

“I can’t say. Not without”—after hesitating, Nadia finished—“visiting the graves.”

Verlaine grabbed her books. “I have to go.”

“Hey, wait. Don’t run off like that. You’re upset.” Mateo put an arm out, but Verlaine roughly pushed him aside.

“I need to be alone. Okay?” Without waiting for an answer, Verlaine ran out into the chilly gray afternoon. She didn’t want to think about Nadia, or Elizabeth, or magic, or her parents. But the reminder blew around her in the whipping wind, silver and gray, a part of Verlaine forever.

“Nobody ever brought it up,” Mateo said a few minutes later as he and Nadia walked along the street that led to the heart of downtown … at least, as much downtown as Captive’s Sound had.

“How? Two healthy people, not old or anything, and they die of the flu overnight without even calling somebody? That didn’t strike people as bizarre?”