“It’s important,” she insisted. “Something extremely strange is going on in this town—a magical artifact from way back in its history could tell us a lot.”

And if it is a Book of Shadows, it would teach me so much—maybe some of what my mother should’ve taught me and never will—

“No arguments here,” Mateo said. “You know this stuff; I don’t. It’s like … it makes you light up. It’s cute.”

He’d called her cute. Her cheeks felt warm. Nadia dropped her gaze from his face, bashful, but found herself staring at his hands instead. They were nice hands—square and solid, and she remembered how he had held them out to her on the terrifying night of the wreck—

“Um, guys?” Verlaine glanced up from her laptop, which was currently atop their dinner table and casting a greenish light on her face. Her eyes were wide, and her voice shook. “I think you might want to see this.”

“What is it?” Nadia said as Verlaine turned the laptop around so they could see.

“Okay, last year everybody who got detention had to help scan and catalog all the school annuals going back to the first one in 1892. So now there’s an online version alumni can look through, stuff like that.” With a nervous look at Mateo, she said, “I thought I’d run a search on Elizabeth. If she’s a witch, maybe some people she spent time with the past couple of years might be witches, too, right?”

Nadia nodded; given the signs she’d already seen of a long history of witchcraft in Captive’s Sound, it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would be the only one. Although Mateo frowned and crossed his arms in front of him, he didn’t protest.

Verlaine continued, “Look at the index.”

She turned the screen around for them to see. Elizabeth Pike was pictured in last year’s Rodman High School annual. And five years before that. And three years before that. And on and on—Nadia scrolled down to see that the list of images went back and back, never skipping more than seven years, all the way to 1892.

“It’s a family name, I guess,” Mateo said.

“But look.” Verlaine flipped the computer around and started pulling up images. “Here’s from last year—she didn’t get an official picture taken, but there’s this—” A photo showed Elizabeth on the quad, drinking a soda, just one of several students caught in a random shot. “And there’s this from 1963.”

The 1963 image popped up on screen, and Nadia gaped. The caption said it was “Liz Pike” standing in line for the new water fountain—but it looked exactly like Elizabeth. Her hair might have been in a little sprayed bubble and the clothes she wore might have looked like something out of a black-and-white movie, and maybe there was something about her face that made her look a bit older, but the resemblance was beyond uncanny.

Mateo shrugged. “So that’s her grandmother. What about it?”

Verlaine said, “And 1930.”