I tie the cord around the contoured nape of the vial and put it around my neck. Hattie’s shrunken heart hangs like a pendulum next to my own, and suddenly it all hits me like a ton of bricks.

“Em,” I whisper, my voice hard and jagged, “if we can’t find the last fallen star, and fast, Hattie will be gone forever.” I pause. “And it will be all my fault.”

A gull squawks in the distance as it flies across the blood moon, and I look up at the sky, terrified.

What in the three realms have we gotten ourselves into?

10: The Dark Sun and Dark Moon

“WE HAVE TO TELL YOUR PARENTS,” Emmett says, gripping my shoulders tight. “This is officially too big for us to handle by ourselves. We need help.”

“No!”

He raises his eyebrows at my sudden outburst. “But why? Even you have to admit we’re out of our depth here.”

I look down at my hands. He doesn’t know I come from the cursed clan. If the adults found out Hattie had been carted off to another realm after illegally trying to summon Mago Halmi on my behalf, it would just prove everything the council has been saying about me. I have to show them I’m not a rebel. I’m the opposite—I want to fit in. If we can find the last fallen star, not only will we get Hattie back, I will be turned into a real Gom, too.

“We can solve this on our own. My parents have enough on their plates as it is. I got us into this mess, and I will get us out. I can do this. I will do this.”

He frowns, and I can tell there’s a lot more he wants to say.

“Just one more day,” he finally says. “One day, and then we get the adults involved.”

“Five.” My heart is racing.

“Two. And that’s my final offer.”

“Fine,” I say, relenting. “Two days.”

He squirms, but nods. “Then tell me, Sherlock. Where do we start?”

I think of Hattie. What would she do in this situation?

“When Hattie and I do jigsaw puzzles, she always starts with the edge pieces,” I say. “We need to do the same thing now—start with the edges, or what we know, and work our way in.”

Emmett rubs his temples. “Okay, Emmett Harrison, think. Think. You’ve conquered fifty planets on Battle Galactic—you’ve got this. What do you know about stars?”

He closes his eyes for a moment, and then turns to me. “For starters, I know there’s no such thing as a fallen star. There are falling stars, but they’re just streaks of light you can see from the Earth when meteoroids enter our atmosphere and burn up. They’re not really stars at all.”