And the way people were always so mean to her—well, all right, maybe that wasn’t magic, but it wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t the way her life would be forever. Only a couple of days into her senior year, and already it felt like her world had started to transform. She and Nadia … well, they weren’t quite friends exactly, but they told each other their secrets, which was as close as Verlaine had ever come to friendship. Through Nadia, Mateo had suddenly noticed her, didn’t seem crazy in the slightest, and seemed to like her just fine. After a life of near-total isolation, Verlaine found it almost dizzying to think of having not one but two people to spend time with.

Plus they had a mission! A real, true magical quest or investigation or whatever you wanted to call it, which was one hundred percent more interesting than anything else Verlaine had ever done in her life.

Of course, she’d probably have to give Nadia and Mateo some time alone occasionally. The way Nadia unconsciously bent toward him every time he talked—the light in his dark eyes whenever he looked at her—well, it was pretty obvious what was going on.

Verlaine didn’t resent it. Not exactly. Or only a little. While she’d never been in love herself—had never even kissed a guy yet—she’d had plenty of chances to observe romance from the sidelines. People got incredibly stupid right before and right after they hooked up with someone they really liked, and that was all there was to it. If Nadia and Mateo were going to be way more into each other than they were into her for a while, she figured she could deal. Yes, she wished the first friends she’d ever had were more focused on her, but at least their absorption in each other wasn’t a way of rejecting her. Verlaine had learned pretty much all the ways to get rejected by this point, and that wasn’t what was going on. This was just hormone overload.

Right now, though, all three of them were … questing. Or whatever you wanted to call it.

So they got to work in the front office, aka the only office; the Guardian was old-fashioned enough to still have its printing presses in the back room. The front room was already a mass of papers and old photographs, the kind that had been printed on thick, shiny paper. They couldn’t make it any more disorganized than it already was. Verlaine tugged out the bound back issues and let them all start searching through.

“What are we looking for?” Mateo asked, coughing as yet more dust drifted up in clouds from the back volumes.

“Anything that could point to witchcraft, or magic.” Nadia began thumbing open the pages of Volume XI: 1865–1870. “In other words, anything weird.”

“No shortage of that here,” Verlaine said.

But it quickly became clear she hadn’t understood the half of it.

The church fire in 1995? Not the first church fire in Captive’s Sound. Not the second, or third. It was the twenty-fifth. Verlaine knew more buildings used to burn down back in the days of dry timber and no fire departments, but twenty-five churches seemed … extreme, even over a span of more than three centuries.