And then I find the courage to ask what I most want to know. It causes that same prickling, heavy, sea-urchin-in-the-chest feeling that I’ve felt all night. And now I realize what it is. The painful, lopsided, unfamiliar feeling that has been rising in me for hours is a scary, risky, prickly kind of hope.

“Um, Homer, you talk about all these curses that witches cast by touching someone. Can a curse be broken?”

Homer blinks at me and leans back, his brow furrowing in concern.

“Rosie…”

He hesitates for a long time before he finally speaks again.

“I don’t know everything about witches, but I do know that the only way to kill a curse is to kill the witch who wields it. And only one person, by some fluke we can’t begin to guess at, has ever killed a witch. Even an adult twice your size would not be able to do it. Even a trained soldier. Even your mom couldn’t.”

“But if I could get my hands on a witch weapon like the kind you were talking about—”

“It’s not so easy to do that, I’m afraid. The witch hunters have secrets just like the witches do—and the biggest one is their weapons. We don’t know how they made them, or where any of them are. I doubt even the guide will give you much help there.”

“But…,” I say, and can’t find the words. I think of how Germ’s mom says the day Germ was born was like getting the deed to a Hawaiian island. If I broke the curse, would my mom feel that way about me? Would she look at me like Mrs. Bartley looks at Germ? The thought makes me dizzy.

An itchy, watched feeling makes me turn to Ebb. He’s staring at me intently with a strange look on his face—sorry and guilty and uncertain all at once. But before I can try to make sense of the look, Homer speaks again. “Rosie, once, your mother loved you with all her heart, and that counts for something, even if she’s forgotten it now. And her only wish was that you be safe. She would have never wanted you to be a witch hunter.”

“I don’t want to hunt witches. I just want to hunt one witch. I could just stay and kill the one witch.”

“You can’t stay. It’s out of the question.”

Beside me, I feel Germ studying me. She clearly wants me to run, like everyone else, but she also knows me better than anyone else. People assume that because I’m small and quiet, I’m also easy to go along with things. I am not. Germ shakes her head.

“Rosie won’t go,” she says.

Homer stares at us a moment, then scans the woods around the cemetery, nervous.