“That is what I want,” she said. She reached into her layers of clothing and pulled out another envelope. “That would help me very much.”

Wunder took the letter and tucked it into his pocket. Maybe he wasn’t ready to demand answers from the witch, but her words had given him something already. His mind was buzzing with these new ideas, new possibilities, new questions. And he could do this. He could deliver her letters. He could keep searching through the dark this way.

“Come back after you deliver this one,” she said. “If your hesitations are gone, if you are ready, I have more. I have many, many more. Yes, Faye?”

Faye pushed the teacups a little farther down the table. Then she put her hand and the hand-shaped amulet back in her pocket. “I suppose,” she said, “that we can do that.”

When they left the witch’s house, there was a flurry of movement, the same as last time. Except it wasn’t on the path ahead but in the bushes on the dirt trail. Davy ran his bike past the live oak, then pedaled off without looking behind him.

“Is he spying on us?” Faye asked. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I think he misses me,” Wunder said, watching as his friend disappeared from sight. “Davy is—well, he was one of my best friends.”

“He doesn’t seem as bad as the other one—what’s his name?” She flipped her hair, but in slow motion.

“Tomás,” Wunder said.

Faye nodded. “That’s the one,” she said. “Davy doesn’t seem as bad as him. Maybe you should let him deliver letters with us. Isn’t he a paperboy? I bet he knows where everyone lives.”

Wunder didn’t answer. Davy seemed like part of another life, the best friend of another boy. A boy whose father had been home in time for dinner every night. A boy whose mother always had a smile and a hug and a new book to share. A life where everything was connected and bright. He wasn’t sure where Davy would fit into his new life, where everything seemed separate and strange.

He hardly knew how he fit into it himself.

That night, he took out the envelope. It was the same as the first—cream-colored, timeworn, sealed with the spread-out tree.

And scrawled in that same black handwriting was a name that made him shake his head in disbelief.

He knew exactly where to deliver this letter.

Then he got out The Miraculous. He flipped through it until he found what he was looking for.

When he was ready to sleep, he set them both—the letter and the book—on his nightstand.

Chapter 25

He found Faye on Monday before school started. “You’re not going to like our next letter delivery,” he said.

“Because the first one was so fun?”

“This one will be worse … for you, at least,” Wunder said.

“Who is it?” Faye asked.

“Eugenia Simone,” Wunder said. “Also known as Eugenia the Pink Priss.”

Faye pulled her cloak hood over her face. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said from inside the velvet and satin.