Nadia didn’t want any reminders of their life before. She wanted to seal her family into a place where nothing could hurt them—not memory, not her mother, not whatever weird magic was at work in this town. This house seemed to provide a chance, and she knew just enough of the Craft to help that along.

So she’d whispered the spells, encircled it with the best protection she knew. She’d slipped out in the night to bury moonstones next to the steps; she’d begun the work of painting the attic ceiling blue. To make it cute, she’d told her dad. The real power of that particular shade, what it meant for a home to be protected from above—those were things he never had to know.

Great, Nadia thought as she stared at her new high school, Isaac P. Rodman High. Just great.

Just the fact that it was a high school was bad enough. On top of that, it was a new school for her senior year. She’d accepted they needed the move, but that didn’t mean she was looking forward to navigating completely new people and teachers and cliques for the nine and a half months before she’d graduate and be free again. Her new school was far smaller than the one she’d attended in Chicago, but in some ways that was more intimidating, not less. Everyone here knew one another, and probably had for their whole lives. That made her the odd one out.

But beyond that, there was something else. Something shivering just beneath the surface—once again, something magical, though it was different from anything else she’d ever known. Precisely how it was different, she couldn’t say, but this energy was familiar and unfamiliar at once. Nadia could feel it coursing all around her, that static-electricity thing all over again.

This was … a complication.

What is going on here? It’s not like someone is using magic near me—even if I could feel that, I don’t think it would feel like this. It’s more like some source of magical energy is kept here. But shielded—encased—in a way I don’t understand.

Nadia clutched the straps of her backpack tighter as she hurried inside the registrar’s office. Don’t think about it now, she told herself. You can figure it out later. Besides, there’s nothing you can do about it without Mom around to help. For now? All you have to do is get through the day.

Even waiting for her class schedule was almost more than she could take.

“So, like, Jinnie’s just standing there, like nothing is going on, even though we both know what’s going on, so I’m like, hey, Jinnie, and she’s like, hey, Kendall, and I’m like, what’s up, and she’s like, nothing. I swear to God, she is so fake.” The girl in front of Nadia somehow managed to talk into her cell phone without pausing, even though she was chewing at least half a pack of gum at once. “And she’s all, did you have a good summer, and I just went, yeah, because I’m so not getting into that with her.”