For now I crawl into bed and hope for a couple of hours’ sleep. I tap out on my fingers the four days till the dark moon. I have so much to find out before then. What secret saved me the night I was born? Is it the same secret my mom found out about fighting witches? What weapon can I use to defend myself?

I pull The Witch Hunter’s Guide into bed with me and flip slowly through the pages until I reach the section called “The Oakses and Their Weapons.”

As Homer warned, it’s a disappointment. There is only one simple paragraph about weapons, at the very beginning of the section. It reads: A weapon is as much a part of a witch hunter as her fingernails or her teeth. It is tied right to her heart, and that’s where she keeps it close. The secret of it is passed on from mother to daughter, a gift of magic and material combined: an embroidered dress for a shield, a sword made of song, a net knit from poetry.

It doesn’t make sense. How does anyone knit a net of poetry, or embroider a shield? It sounds simple and impossible at the same time. And one thing is for sure, my mother never passed on the secret to me.

Beyond this, there are old photos pasted onto the pages, from as far back as the days of blurry old black-and-whites of ladies in long dresses with bustles. My family—all the women. People I have never heard of, but whom I long for. A woman with a severe gray bun, Dorothy Oaks, cursed with madness—my grandmother? A woman with scraggly brown hair, holding a fine leather-bound dagger, Mary Lee Oaks, struck with babble and confusion. A woman in a beautiful dress stitched all over with pictures, Eugenia Oaks, cursed to forget. And my heart sinks seeing them, as I read the curses by their names.

Women who knew more than me, who never had their sight hidden from them, who grew up learning to fight, and were told the secrets of their family tree. They all met terrible ends. They were blotted out. Every single one.

Who am I—a girl who didn’t know even about the invisible fabric until this night—to think I can do what they couldn’t?

I look out the window, thinking about the Memory Thief. How she blotted my mom out—taking all the love out of her, and with it, all the fight. She is going to blot me out too, in four days, if I can’t figure out how to kill her first.

Maybe I should run.