He smelled a sharp, awful stench and the rat jammed to a stop, ejecting him off the chocolate roller coaster, over the rancid Blue Forest, through a wide-open window, and onto a hard stone floor, flat on his bottom.

Tedros didn’t move, panting on the floor. “I . . . want . . . Agatha’s . . . mission.”

Then he remembered where he was, the body he was in, and what he was supposed to be doing.

His eyes jerked open.

Hobbled and hurting, he lumbered onto his legs, still unused to his girl’s squishy form. He peered around the School Master’s deserted chamber, licking the last chocolate off his lips.

“Sophie?” he squeaked in his girly snoot, moving deeper into the room. “Sophie, it’s Essa! Essa from Bloodbrook. We met this morning? Sorry to barge in like this, but you’re in terrible danger.” He imagined Agatha at his side, her spirit egging him on. “We have to leave here now, Sophie,” he said, confidence growing. “Before the School Master comes back. So if you’ll just listen to me, girl to girl—”

A blast of pain exploded through his head, knocking him out, and he crashed face-first to the floor.

Far across the bay, inside the witch’s room, Anadil and Dot gaped in horror through binoculars at Sophie, who was looming over Essa’s fallen body, wielding a giant storybook like a club.

Anadil slowly turned to Dot.

“Never was much of a girl’s girl, was she?” Dot quipped.

As soon as the fog started turning to chocolate, Agatha saw her chance.

She’d been hiding at one end of Halfway Bridge, trapped in her boy body, ogling ten hulking, armed shadows atop the School for Old.

None of them looked human.

Agatha’s heart seized. She had no hope to get past one of the School Master’s guards, whoever they were, let alone a fleet of them—

That’s when the fog over the bay started detonating into iced chocolate.

Flabbergasted, she swiveled and saw Dot’s fingerglow pulsing from a dark window, high in the other school.

Shouts of shock and panic rang out from the shadowy guards over the Bridge, who flooded off the balconies into the castle, leaving the roof unattended.

Agatha smiled, hidden at the other end. Whatever Dot was doing in the School for New, it served as the perfect diversion in the School for Old.

Not a coincidence, Agatha thought.

Merlin and his spies had done everything they could to help her and Tedros finish their missions.

The rest was up to them.

As fast as she could, Agatha darted from her hiding place and sprinted across the dim, frigid Bridge, feeling the wind on her scrawny boy chest, hands held out in front of her, knowing the barrier was coming—

Bam! She slammed into it a quarter of the way down the span, leaving her palms stinging and her body fully exposed in the moonlight. The guards would spot her the second they returned.

“Let me through,” she begged, hands flat on the barrier.