“Hey!” June shouts. “Be careful with those.” She kneels, and I can see that pain follows her down as she touches Imogen’s possessions, pushing her lips together and keeping her face smooth by force.

“Do you want help?” Lelia asks.

“No,” June grits out.

Lelia steps back. From what I can tell, Lelia’s hardness is mostly bluster. June’s is not.

But I can’t stay away from Imogen’s ward makings. I’m drawn in by a clock with a broken face. A bundle of white sage. Red string and melted-down wax. Lots of tiny bottles, each one filled with water. “So how is this stuff different from what you already have?” I ask. “Or what Ora keeps in her magical barn?”

“Have you ever looked at something and had an affinity for it?” Hawthorn asks.

“Like, a pull that felt completely out of proportion?” Lelia translates.

My eyes dart to Rush before I can stop them.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

“Those things can be prepared for spellwork,” Hawthorn says. “But it takes time. Moon phases. And then whatever you put all of that energy into is primed.”

“So these have Imogen’s magic in them,” I say, touching the piles like I might be able to pick up on it. “And she used these to make wards?”

“Imogen has a big, bleeding heart,” Lelia says. “She mostly made wards for the same girls who stare at us in school like we have tentacles where our heads should be. They would hear that Imogen could get rid of a guy who was bothering them, and all of a sudden they’d always been friends.”

“Why water, though?” I ask. “I mean, I know Imogen has a connection to it, but what turns water into a ward?”

“Moving water can stop an enemy,” Hawthorn says. That word, enemy, simmers in the heat as Hawthorn stirs her fingers through the bottles. “Imogen collected these everywhere she went.”

“Which one do you think we should use, dowser girl?” Lelia asks.

I arrange the tiny mismatched bottles into a lineup and run my fingers over them, like playing scales. My interest spikes when I hit a diamond-shaped bottle. I look up at Hawthorn, eyebrows raised. “This one is powerful.”

Hawthorn works her lips into a frown. “Eel River water. It’s tied to Tempest, but it’s unpredictable. It might bring on calm, or it might be ferocious and unforgiving. Depends on the spell and the water sample. We need something deep. Dependable.”

I don’t like that I picked wrong the first time, but I go back to the bottles, quickly pulling down a few from the original lineup and creating a new one. I run my fingers over the four bottles in that group. Each is strong in its own way.

I pick up a round green glass bottle with a tiny cork stopper.