It was the shop boy. I turned to face him, seeing now more clearly the pimples on his chin and the roundness of his eyes. “It’s okay,” I mumbled, the book lying limp in my lap.

“A witch, then, are you?” he asked, a sly grin at the edge of his lips.

I shook my head, embarrassed. “No, just curious, is all.”

Satisfied with this response, he nodded. “I’m Tom Pepper. Pleasure to have you in the shop.”

“Th-thank you,” I muttered. “I’m Eliza Fanning.” And though I wanted badly to open the book once again and continue my search, I found that Tom, up close, was not so unpleasant to my eyes.

He glanced down at the book. “I wasn’t lying, you know. That book was my mother’s.”

“So your mother is a witch, then?” I was only teasing, but he didn’t laugh as I’d hoped he would.

“She was not a witch, no. But she lost her babies—one after the other, nine of them before me—and in her desperation, she used the elixir on the page you just closed. May I?” He motioned to the book, waited for my nod and gingerly took it from my lap. He flipped to the page I had just been reading and pointed to it. “‘Elixir for Restoring Breath to the Deceased Infant’s Lungs,’” he read aloud. Then, looking up at me, he added, “According to my father, I was born dead, like all the others. This spell brought me back to life.” He tensed, as though the revelation pained him to share. “If my mother were still alive, she could tell you about it herself.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, our faces close.

Wetting his lips, he looked to the front of the shop. “This is my father’s shop. He opened it after my mother died. The front, where you came in—those baubles all belonged to her. Things she collected for the babies over the years. Most of it never touched or used.”

I could not help but ask, “When did your mother die?”

“Soon after I was born. Later that week, in fact.”

I covered my mouth with my hand. “So you were her first baby that lived, and then she did not...”

Tom picked at a fingernail. “Some say that is the curse of magick. Why books like the one you’re holding should be burned.” I frowned, not understanding what he meant, and Tom went on. “The curse of magick, they believe, is that for every reward, there is a great loss. For every spell that goes right, there is something else—in the real, natural world—that goes terribly wrong.”