“What did she say?” I ask.

“She said no visitors were allowed today and I told her we weren’t visitors, that we were seeing family.”

“Family” may be an overly generous term for my father.

I don’t bother knocking on his office door. He doesn’t deserve the deference.

We find him sitting at his desk, looking a little disheveled, hunched over a stack of papers with a coffee mug in his hand. There’s another mug balanced on the edge of the desk and another discarded on the shelf behind him.

“Oh!” He jumps a little as we walk in. “Did we have an appointment?”

I frown. “Do I need an appointment to see my father?”

He opens his mouth like he means to say “yes,” but shuts it before his bad sense wins. “I do apologize, I’m a little distracted this morning. It’s not a good time.”

Maxine muscles her way to the front. “It’s going to have to be a good time.”

“Who are you?” he asks her.

“I’m Maxine.”

He looks a little afraid of her. He should be.

He glances between the pile of newspapers on his desk and the three of us. It’s then that I realize he’s got the pages open to the same story I read this morning about the murdered boy in the church.

He says, clearly distracted, “I have five minutes before I need to leave to meet a few colleagues.”

“Meet them where?” I prod.

He leans down to shove the newspaper into his open briefcase. “No need to worry yourself.” He dismisses me.

“But I am worried, so you might as well tell me.”

He looks up, exhausted. “There was a murder.”

“Are you a detective as well as a teacher?” Lena asks. My father doesn’t know her well enough to hear the mocking in her voice, but under the panicked rushing of blood in my ears, I do.

“In some ways, I suppose. Frances, do you remember what I told you about New York and the veil? We fear the problem may have just arrived on our shores.”

“Why are the events happening here instead of in New York?” I ask.

My father taps his desk with a pen. “No one can be sure. Are you familiar with the concept of referred pain? You injure yourself in the shoulder but it hurts down your leg? Magic is energy and it works very much the same. A rupture in power in New York could very well manifest abnormalities in Paris. Magical energies run across the globe in an interconnected web. What happens in Seoul echoes in Cairo, et cetera, et cetera. There’s no such thing as a truly isolated event.”

I nod curtly but fear my knees might collapse from under me. No coincidences.