With the door secure, I put my hands on my hips and surveyed the room. The furniture had changed from what I’d seen in my dream, so this wasn’t going to be easy. Currently there was a twin bed directly over the spot where Christian had pulled up the boards, and beneath that, carpet. Thanks to me and my extreme dislike of hardwood floors at the age of six (they were cold when you woke up in the morning and weren’t exactly comfortable to lie down on during slumber parties), my parents had installed wall-to-wall shag.
With a sigh, I began to push and pull the furniture until it was situated on the opposite side of the room. I’d already broken a sweat, and wished I could’ve let at least one other person know what I was doing just so I could have gotten a little help with the heavy lifting. But it was too late to do anything about that now.
Snatching a pair of scissors off the desk, I knelt down around where I’d seen Christian the night before and stabbed the blades into the crack near the wall. Jimmying around the edge of the carpet, I managed to get up under it after I pried my fingers in there too, and I started to pull it away from the floor. Using the wall as leverage, I planted my feet and pulled back with all my strength until I heard a ripping sound. One foot, two feet—when I’d loosened three feet of carpeting from the floor, I began to saw at the carpet, attempting to cut a hole big enough to get into the hiding space.
Five minutes later, I’d reached the wood underneath and was practically vibrating with excitement over what I was about to see. I tested out the wobbly boards, hoping they’d come up easily. I didn’t really want to ruin my nail job and I’d done about as much manual labor as I could handle for the day. But all it took was a twist of my wrist, and I was moving the planks out of the way and tossing them on the carpet behind me.
When I looked into the hole, my heart sank.
It was empty.
The hiding place wasn’t all that deep—less than six inches, I’d say—and after all that work I found myself sitting there staring at empty space. What had been the point of having the dream if I wasn’t supposed to find anything? Just another stupid waste of time, dreaming about another crazy, long-lost relative.
I was about to put the floorboards back into place when I had a thought. Sure, it was a last-ditch effort, but it was hard to believe I could’ve done all this work for nothing. Crouching back over the hole, I carefully leaned down and reached my hand into the dark parts of the chasm.
Even though I was hoping to find something, another part of me was scared that my hand would touch something I didn’t want it to—like something furry or slimy. As I thought about what might be hiding under the floorboards, my brain started to scream at me to retract my hand. But I forced myself to keep feeling around.
Finally, my fingers grazed something cold and hard. I pulled my arm back reflexively. As I willed my heartbeat to slow down and the pounding in my ears to go away, I realized that if there was any chance that Christian’s stuff was hiding under this roof, I had to do whatever I could to find it. It would be worth touching something icky in the process.
Taking a deep breath, I reached back down and began to feel around again. It didn’t take long—what I felt was small, hard, round, and cool to the touch. Based on my dream from the night before, I was pretty sure it was the ring that had glowed when Christian had put it on. Wrapping my hand around the jewelry, I pulled it out and looked at it triumphantly.
The ring itself was stunning. With a thin band of gold encrusted with tiny diamonds, the ring glittered under the lights in the room. All these details led up to the traffic stopper: the enormous ruby sitting right in the middle. It was at least six carats, in the shape of a soft square with more diamonds surrounding it like a little army protecting its queen.
It was the kind of ring I’d dreamed of owning one day. Preferably given to me by my incredibly wealthy and attractive boyfriend, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. This was pretty cool too.
I wanted to sit and stare at the ring all day long, but I hadn’t forgotten that in my dream, Christian had also been hiding a book. With the ring firmly in one hand, I reached back down into the darkness with the other.
My fingers searched the space, at first coming up with nothing. Finally, I touched something long, thin, and soft, like a string, and I had to force myself to grab hold of it, even though I was scared of what it might be. It was dragging something along behind it that made the tiniest scratching sound as I pulled it out.
Please don’t be attached to a rat, please don’t be attached to a rat, please…
But as my hand came back into view, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw that what I was holding on to was a silk ribbon being used as a page marker for a book. The book that Christian had been writing in.
Crawling back across the floor, I sat down cross-legged against the bed, mimicking the position of Bridget’s daughter. Slipping the ring onto my middle finger—no way was I wearing it on my ring finger, since it’s totally bad luck—I waited for something spectacular to happen.
But nothing came. No heat. No tingling sensation. No magical surge of power. No glowing red light. Just a gorgeously expensive ring that would’ve been the envy of my friends. With a shrug, I turned my attention to the book.
The worn, leather-bound book was heavy in my hands. The pages weren’t numbered, and there were too many to count. A quick flip through showed that not all of them were written on. Some were blank, but most were filled up with scribbles. At first glance, I thought maybe it was poetry because of the way the words were positioned on the page, all gathered in the middle with lots of white space on the sides. But a closer look proved it to be something much different.
What I was holding in my hands wasn’t a diary or a compilation of poetry.
It was a spell book.
“Holy magic, Glinda,” I mumbled.
There was page after page of spells. Each was labeled at the top; some pages held multiple incantations. We’d been taught only around fifty spells through magic school, but there were hundreds in here. More than we could ever learn in a lifetime, probably. And it appeared like more than one person had contributed to it. At first glance, I could see that some of the spells were seriously outdated, reflecting the time that Christian would have been growing up. Some, however, could span generations… and did.
Turning to a page that had been dog-eared, I read carefully through the words. As I began to understand what I had here, my adrenaline started pumping.
A Charm for Forgetfulness
Wicked. I’d never heard these spells before, and although they were a bit old and the wording was outdated, I was psyched to try them—I definitely didn’t doubt their potency.
In other words, I couldn’t wait to see how well they worked.
Bustling around to put everything back in its place, I was already working out what I was going to do with this newfound knowledge. Should I bring it to the entire group and try to have everyone learn as much as they could before the Parrishables found us? Or would I be better off keeping this news to myself, considering the traitor in the house?
Wait. Maybe there was something in the book that could help me with that.
I had my hunches of who was planning to betray us, but I still didn’t feel comfortable shunning him without seeing the proof for myself. And though my mom hadn’t been much help in telling me who the culprit was, it didn’t mean that Bridget and Christian wouldn’t be.