He managed a smile for her. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Elizabeth.” They parted at the door almost as friends.

Swiftly she walked home. Would Mateo come by again tonight? He demanded so much time and care, and right now—when the dreams were still so unfocused—she was learning little.

Soon it would all be worthwhile, though. Very soon.

She walked into her house. The afternoon sunlight glinted on the broken glass on her floor as she paused, staring at the center of the room. There her crow shuddered on the floor, its wings beating desperately against the boards, twitching in its final throes. It had come back here to die, though not of its wound. The magic had strangled the bird, of course; it always did, sooner or later.

When at last it went still, she touched one of her rings and went through the spell almost without thinking it; that one was familiar to her now. Instantly the crow disappeared in a flame that lasted hardly more than a second. Only the smallest scorch mark on the floor showed where it had been.

Elizabeth reached amid her jars and pulled out the one filled with grayish liquid, the one where all the other dozens of eyes from the earlier crows still floated. She’d need it soon. Then she went to the windowsill, lifted up her arm, and made all the crows believe she was singing, singing to them, and it was only a question of which one came to her first.

“Technically I’m an intern,” Verlaine said as they walked up the steps of the Captive’s Sound newspaper, the Guardian. “But there’s not that much to do here.”

“Really?” Nadia looked askance at the dusty front office. “This seems like a town with a whole lot going on.”

“Not anything normal people know about.” Verlaine took out the heavy key and unlocked the door; the musty smell was comforting to her by now. “The paper publishes once a week. They used to be more newsy back in the day, but the paper was bought by some out-of-town people who only care about putting advertising circulars in it. Not much actual reporting going on, and the editors never let me do any of it. That’s why all my work—and all the real news in town—goes to the Lightning Rod.”

“The Lightning Rod?” Nadia looked confused.

It was Mateo who answered. “The school’s news site. It was a paper until about six years ago. All the journalism students work on it.”

“My honors project is making the back issues digital. Well, what back issues they have, thanks to that weird fire back in 1999.” Verlaine dimly remembered that. What were the odds of lightning striking the chemistry lab twice? Well, Captive’s Sound had a way of beating the odds. Now she finally understood why.

This town really was as strange as Verlaine had always thought. It was incredible how vindicated she felt, how justified. Every creepy nook and cranny of Captive’s Sound was possessed by magic—the secret underlying the whole world, the element that proved wonderful, bizarre, impossible things could really happen.