Nadia grinned despite herself. “There would be a—flare. A surge in the flame. And you’d start to feel it not long afterward.”

“Got it.” Verlaine straightened herself, clearly ready. Nadia hoped she was, too.

Looking straight into Verlaine’s hazel eyes, her fingers closing around the pure silver dangle on her bracelet, Nadia began to go through the ingredients of the fortune-telling spell:

The sight of something wondrous, never before seen.

The breaking of a bond that should never have been broken.

Cold beyond desolation.

Loyalty beyond life.

These were mostly very powerful ingredients; only at this point in her life, she realized, would she have had any chance of casting this. Nadia pulled the memories together and thought them, felt them, as deeply as she possibly could:

The first time she’d seen Cole—when he was still in Mom’s belly, the one time her parents let her come to the sonogram, and suddenly all the boring talk about this baby brother she didn’t really want turned into something real, someone real, her actual true brother practically waving to her before he was even born.

Mom standing at the door, a suitcase next to her, saying, “It’s better this way,” and the horrible sight of her father unable to speak for his tears.

Chicago that year they’d had the “thundersnow,” when the winds had been hurricane-strength and two feet of snow had fallen amid bolts of lightning, and she’d opened the door to the balcony just to feel the storm’s fury, and the wind had nearly torn her away—

Dad on the night of the wreck, crawling through twisted metal and broken glass to grab Cole, never hesitating even though his own ribs were cracked and he had to be in incredible pain—

The magic turned over inside her. Rippled around her. Nadia drew a line in the remaining bone dust and envisioned Captive’s Sound—every street she’d seen, every moment she’d spent here—recreating the place as best she could within her mind and demanding that fate show her what was in store.

Her eyes widened as the bone dust blackened, began to radiate an unearthly heat that seared her outstretched hand—

The attic door opened. “Nadia?”

Startled, Nadia turned to see Mateo poking his head up into her attic.

The violet flame flared—and vanished. Instantly the room’s light looked normal; the magic she’d felt had gone … someplace. The bone dust was just so much black gunk on the ground. Verlaine jerked back, clearly not sure what to do.

Mateo frowned. “Whoa. What was that?”

“What was what?” Nadia answered, too quickly. She tucked her hair behind one ear, glanced back at the pile of bone dust on the floor, and adjusted herself so maybe he wouldn’t see it. Did it look like she was acting weird? Probably.

“Sorry to barge in; your dad said it was okay.” But Mateo’s attention remained on what he’d seen. “I meant, what was that—purple light, and all the sparks?”

Verlaine was doing a much better job of acting natural. “What purple light?”