No one will whisper that when two witches came to Saint Ignatius Hospital to settle an old score and take the memories and the firstborn child of a woman named Annabelle Oaks, Annabelle Oaks saw them coming… and had just a flash of a moment to hide an infant away. There will be no one to reveal the fatal mistake of a sad and grasping witch confusing one baby for another (a quiet baby, as it turns out; a baby who knew how to keep to herself)… of one innocent baby doomed and another saved. Only one ghost knows of these things, and—for reasons of his own—he will not talk.

For now, the crickets in the grass listen in silence for a few moments longer, but then they go back to their chirping. The forest resumes its usual noises. A moment is swallowed into the past.

And a restless, angry spirit keeps his secrets. For a time.

Part 1

CHAPTER 1 Rosie

It’s on the night I burn my stories that the danger begins. Or maybe that a life begins that’s different from the one I knew before.

It starts with me and Germ, the way most things do. I am in the backyard reading Germ a story I wrote.

The story is about a woman asleep in a pile of white feathers. No matter how her daughter tries to wake her, the woman is so deeply asleep, she won’t stir. She sleeps for years and years and years.

Then one day the daughter finds a beautiful black iridescent feather buried deep amongst all the white ones. She plucks the black feather, and there is a shudder as all the feathers begin to move. And the girl sees that the pile was never a pile at all but instead that her mother has been sleeping on the back of a giant feathered beast who has been holding her captive and enchanted.

The girl’s mother stirs as the beast does. She tumbles off the back of the beast, and together they escape to a remote village at the edge of the earth. Safely hidden, they live happily ever after.

Germ listens in silence and stares out at the ocean as it crashes against the rocks far below my yard. She wraps her coat tighter around herself to ward off the early fall chill. She’s got a new look today—thick black eyeliner. It looks weird, and Germ is clearly aware of this, because she keeps swiping at it with her thumb to wipe it away. She’s trying to look older but not doing a very good job. I don’t know why she tries, because her eyes are pretty as they are.

When I finish and look up at Germ, she frowns out at the water, her brows lowering uncertainly. I can predict something like 1,021 of Germ’s moods, and I can tell she’s reluctant to say what she’s thinking.