I’ve seen the sign for Saint Ignatius Hospital many times. It’s just at the edge of town, in a patch of woods at the start of a long empty road through the trees, the sign rotting away so that now it only says SAINT IGNAT SPITA. I don’t even know if the hospital is still open, but I do know it’s been displaced by a new, shiny hospital downtown. The new one I know really well because every time Germ breaks a bone doing something daring, we go there.

I gaze at my birth certificate for a while, at the date, wishing I could read more into this simple piece of paper than a few meaningless facts. And then—just as I’m tucking it back amongst the postcards—I notice there is something. Because on the back of the certificate, in a loose scrawl that is still my mom’s, only messier than usual—are these words:

Swimming.

Swimming.

Swimming.

Waiting.

Where is he????

Where they hide from me.

As I stare at the words, my body prickles with chills.

Questions rise one after the other. Who is “he”? Does “where they hide” mean the witches?

Swimming, and the night I was born, and how I was saved, and where the witches hide—the great secret my mom supposedly discovered. They’re linked somehow; they have to be. But how?

Just as I move to put the birth certificate away, I hear my mom stirring in the attic, then creaking down the stairs. I hurry out right as she comes to the landing. She looks at me for a moment, as if suspicious, and then brushes past me into the room.

By the time I fix dinner, the day is dimming to dusk. My heart begins to thrum a little faster, to know the night is coming, and all the strange things it brings with it. I can barely eat, I’m so nervous. I try Germ again on the phone, but she doesn’t answer.

After I eat, I turn to The Witch Hunter’s Guide again. I fight off sleep as I flip through the chapters, glancing at the legends. (There are plenty about the Moon Goddess and her ladder, and just as Ebb said, one about a whale who can swim through time, and some about ancient ghosts who tried to mount a rebellion against the witch Hypocriffa and lost.) There’s a long description of the moon and gravity that I decide to come back to later.

Under “The Invisible World and Its Beings,” there’s a disclaimer that there are plenty of magical beings left to be discovered, followed by a list with drawings and descriptions of the ones that are known. The Moon Goddess. Ghosts. Witches. Witch familiars. Cloud shepherds. Curious, I zero in on this last one.