A black void.

Either she backtracked to the last crossroads in the vent and risked losing the School Master . . . or she took a stupidly lethal chance.

Agatha slid her legs over the edge of the gap.

She let go.

Gravity blasted her into free fall—then her backside clamped onto a smooth stone slide, rocketing her through darkness. Without warning, the slide swerved left and Agatha was thrown onto her side with no idea where she was going. There were no more gratings, no more rays of light, just merciless black, with the odd green flicker of a dead fairy, caught in the sealed-off maze. Crossing her arms over her chest, Agatha let go like a swimmer in a riptide as she veered at the sharpest, scariest angles, convinced this would all end in a gruesome death, before she shot off the slide like shrapnel, skidded onto a smooth metal surface, and halted face-first over a steel grating.

Ow.

Agatha pried off the slats, rubbing the welts on her cheeks. Through the grate, she could see an empty room underneath her, lit by a weak green torch. No one inside it, nothing on the walls, nothing on the sooty black floor. And yet, something about the place seemed familiar. Bending closer to the grate, she squinted across the room, until she made out an ash-spattered door and its simmering red letters:

THE EXHIBITION OF EVIL

Evil’s museum.

Agatha bobbed to her knees. Given how quickly she crossed the castle, there was no way the School Master could have gotten here already, which meant . . .

I made it before him.

Sweating in the shadows, Agatha waited for him to come and lead her to the weapon that could kill him.

She waited.

And waited.

And waited.

A clock in the castle tolled once.

11:45.

Something stopped him on the way, she thought. But there was no more time to wait. In fifteen minutes, Merlin would be at the gates.

She grabbed hold of the steel grating, which dislodged easily from stone. She left her remaining clump behind and lowered down through the hole, hanging on to the sides of the shaft. Arms stretched, she kicked the air as if to dismount a swing and landed on her soles without a sound.

Agatha scanned the museum, once filled with relics of Evil’s scant victories and now wiped clean. True, she hadn’t expected Excalibur to be waiting on a table for her, but there was nowhere in this room that Tedros’ sword could possibly be hidden. The floor was a single slab of stone, every case and frame was gone, every wall bare—

Not every wall, Agatha realized, moving towards the corner.

For on the far wall, hidden in shadows, there was one painting left.

Agatha stalked closer, her eyes adjusting to the dark, until she realized it was a painting she knew well.

In a village square, raging children heaved storybooks into a bonfire and watched them burn. Behind the village, a dark forest went up in flames, blanketing the sky with red and black smoke.