The trapdoor snapped down above my head. Torch-lit marble walls surrounded me as I descended spiral stairways reminding me of the Council's HQ. But the Cunning Folk Academy's underground tower was different. Instead of hiding eldritch horrors, the doors had harmless labels like "mathematics", or "divination".

I skimmed my Semester Electives parchment. A surprising number of subjects (Mathematics, History, Mundane Studies) were optional for apprentices schooled among mundanes. The only obligatory courses were Introduction to General Magical Theory, Combat Magic, and one of the four big disciplines (Potions and Transfiguration, Sympathetic Magic, Divination, Elemental Magic).

I wasn't the only one walking down the stairways. This Mark from before walked right behind me, along with a Latina girl named Crista and a white, black-haired all-American boy named Nick.

"So, what are you gonna choose?" Nick asked, his voice loud and proud enough that it echoed through the dungeons. "I'm gonna go with fireball elemental spells!"

It took me a while to realize he was talking to me. "Hm," I murmured. "Transfiguration, I guess. I've got better shaping than range, apparently. You guys?"

"Sympathetic magic," Crista said. "Other disciplines are based on it and incorporate its key principles. It's to other disciplines what physics is to biology and chemistry."

"I'll just go broad and take as much as I can," Mark said. "Where are you from, by the way?"

"New York," I said. "The state, not the city. Well, I was in the city, too, but now I'm in a town that's more rural and all."

"So, you grew up among mundanes," this dark-haired boy, Nick, said.

"Is this unusual?"

"Nah," he said. "I grew up in some hidden village in the Miles Standish State Forest which is also here in Massachusetts. Is it true that you guys all know how to shoot guns?"

"Only the American mundanes are obsessed with guns, Nick," Crista, said. "In Bolivia, only the criminals and the police have guns."

"But why? Guns are cool!"

"They kill people!"

"People kill people!"

"I'd kill ten people for you, baby, if I could go 'Pew! Pew!'."

Crista punched his arm. "You jerk!"

Mark laughed. "You two are like a married couple."

Nick rubbed his punched arm. "This aint like with mundies who marry whoever they want, Mark."

I blinked. "You mean, you guys can't do that?"

"It's not that we can't," Mark said. "But we're a small, isolated community. Our elders prefer to choose for us."

"'cept for daredevils like your Mommy," Nick added. "They won't have that."

"Mom went to this school, right?" I asked.

"Why not go to the library?" Crista suggested. "You should find her in the old yearbooks."

"Where is that?" I asked.

"I'll show you."

Crista led us through a skull-filled laboratory and a classroom with uncleaned blackboards before she showed us the door to a cobwebbed library. As she promised, it had a shelf full of arcane yearbooks. I walked closer, turned around the volumes like they were the pages of a book, and searched for the one that corresponded to my mother's year. I found her in the one for 1991. It contained an old-school daguerreotype photograph of her class standing in a dungeon and everyone smiling. As a sixteen-year-old, Mom had hair as bushy brown as mine, a body as skinny as mine, and a face covered in mischievous freckles like I never had them. She looked perfect. Dad got lucky that none of the male apprentices was good enough for her.

When I searched for Darcy's yearbook, I found pictures of a class with a dark-haired boy that stood out. He was taller than the rest, wore distinctive glasses along with his robe, and was handsome enough that he stood at the edge of the picture so that the girls would leave him in peace. Wait, was that Zane the changeling? Did he attend this Cunning Folk Academy? He looked so different without his scarf. He didn't wear it at all and instead, a brown-haired girl standing next to him had it slung around her neck.

"Oh, lemme guess, the scarf is a keepsake from his dead girlfriend?" Siris asked as he searched for mice on the library floor.

I was more surprised that he was here at all. Did that mean the teachers knew his real name? Why didn't they use it against him? Were they too afraid of this Titania, whoever she was?

My Magia Phone buzzed and I got a message from Darcy on our communications app. "Hope you're enjoying yourself, but I've got piano lessons soon, can you please hurry?"

I told her what I found out about Zane before I ran back to the overworld.

The Lady let us back despite the Grief Eater incident. As we flew back through Seelie, Darcy and I traded jokes about how silly it was that they called our communications app "WitchsApp" and wondered when Witchstagram would come.

Our ways parted at the Waystone Tavern and I took the bus home. While the combat magic course had its flaws, Professor Wiggs made us play a video game for homework. Really! It was an old-school open-world game called Domain Diving designed to simulate the experience of monster hunting.

My potions lessons sounded less exciting, but if I elected it, why not do it right? Crista said sympathetic magic was like physics in that its underlying principles were foundational to magic. And many myths about potion making had it that you needed ingredients symbolically related to what you wanted your brewage to do. Putting two and two together, I had an idea of how to prepare practice recipes.

Our neighborhood housed an old lady named Carolyn who loved collecting cute cats. When we moved here, she let me play with them, even though they made me sneeze. When the bus stopped, I hurried behind the fence and let Siris collect bundles of kitty hair.

"Listen," he told me as he came back. "I get you're jealous that you weren't born part of the beautiful feline elite, but are you really planning to make a cat-shapeshift potion?"

"Nah, I only need to shapeshift the eyes."

Monsters prowled in the shadows. It was what made them monsters. They were at home in an environment that put humans at a deadly disadvantage. Cats, however, were crepuscular creatures dwelling in the twilight between day and night. If I designed a night vision potion, I stood a chance against the creatures of the night. And, taxonomically speaking, cats were closer to humans than owls, making their eyes more aether-efficient to emulate.

The twilight sun settled behind our house and I noticed Dad's Ford behind the overgrown lawn.

I checked my phone. Since I didn't answer her call, Isa messaged me instead. "hammerfall's coming to nyc this weekend. can you believe it? dad wont allow me 2 go, but I got friends who can help out. interested? :3"

I typed without thinking. "Maybe another day."

Siris watched my Xperia from the doorstep.

"What?" I told him. "Isn't your job to make sure I uphold the Veil?"

"Sure. But as long as you don't try to break it deliberately, I'm under no obligation to punish you. That's the Council's job. So, I'm just sitting here, eating popcorn, and wondering how long it'll take before she finds out."

"Or Dad."

"Or Dad. He's allowed to know, but the drama will be delicious!"

"C'mon. That's called being a teenager. Some girls lie about having boyfriends, others about being witches. Most normal thing in the world!"

I went into the house. Once I made it to the living room, I saw Dad sitting on the couch. Dressed in khakis, he looked as tired as a marathon runner. No idea if his fatigue was physical or mental. He had the same brown eyes and curls as I did and the same large nose, although his hair was darker, his face rougher, and his stature significantly bigger and burlier as if he were a mountain man. If he were a practitioner, he'd be of the high-power, poor shaping kind and maybe do earth-based elemental magic.

He had chocolate eyes that used to be full of warm smiles. Now, unshaved hairs jutted out of his hawkish chin. He scrubbed his stubble and looked for a second before he even realized I opened the door. So typical of him.

He sat on the right side of the couch, even these days. Back in the day, Mom and Dad always used to watch TV together like that.

I vividly remembered those days when I was allowed to join. Mom wanted to watch some cop shows, but Dad hated them because they reminded him of work. He thought television should be escapist and instead suggested TV shows dealing with the paranormal. That reminded Mom too much of work, however. The old times.

"Where have you been?" Dad asked. "I hope you don't mind the question because you normally don't skip chores and the lawn-"

"I was meeting friends!" I said. "It was a great decision to move here. The townsfolk are so nice!"

"That's lovely to hear. Whom did you meet?"

"I was with Darcy," I said. "She's the sister of someone at my school."

"With Darcy?" he repeated the name, as if glad to hear she wasn't a boy. "How did you meet her?"

"Well, her brother Simon became sick. We were both concerned about his health, so, we got to know each other." Which was true.

"Ah," he said. "Well, I know her father. He's a good man. A very good man, but he seems to be part of that Salem cult."

Oh, noes. "H-how did you meet him?"

"How I met him? Take a guess, sunshine. Where is he working?"

The hospital. Should I ask him about the Mrs. Turner case?

"You look tired," he said. "And you are thinking about something. Had a glummy school day?"

"You can say that again."

"What happened?"

"Nothing. It just sucks to be in school again. Summer was way too short."

He laughed. "Well, that's life for you. Once you're in college, you'll miss the freedom you have now. And once you have work and a family, you'll miss college."

"As if."

I took a seat on the left side of the couch. "How was work?" I asked.

He calmly stroked my hair. "I hoped you wouldn't ask. Mrs. Turner died. There was nothing we could do. Right now, we can only sit back and dreadfully wait until our enemy will strike again."

I frowned.

"Yes, it deeply saddens me, too. We interrogated her. In her last fleeting moments, she claims to have been drawn to a warehouse that used to belong to the PPE Research Facility. We'll call crime scene analysts from surrounding towns and I'll have to fight through mountains of paperwork before I can do anything."

Man. I didn't know Mrs. Turner, but why did Dad sound so calm when he explained all of this?

"How do you feel?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I have seen people die before. It never gets easier to know that you have been too slow or too weak to prevent it. Time will tell how long it will take me to avenge her."

As he said this, I materialized Siris behind him. He didn't turn around. He was oblivious to the floating white ghost cat behind me. Oblivious like he was to me and my pain.

There were loose hairs on his head that Darcy could use for a poppet. I felt so bad. How could I be too paranoid to entrust Darcy my hair, but give her Dad's? I was a terrible person. Maybe Jaclyn was right. Maybe I was drawn to the dark side. But if I gave Darcy a strand of his hair, she could track his state of health from a town's distance like she had done to Simon in case anything happened.

Siris got the hair and still didn't notice anything. Instead, he looked over me and my emaciated boy.

"Did you eat anything?" he asked.

My stomach growled. "I'll cook us something if that's okay," I said.

Before he could even really answer, I stood up from the couch and dragged myself downstairs into the patio containing the kitchen.

I tried to prepare something proper. Emphasis on "tried" because Siris kept playing with forks, scratching plates, and throwing around spoons out of boredom.

"I'll only stop when you give me fish!"

"You're a ghost cat! You don't need to eat!"

"But I want to!"

It was only when I took my rod out that he obeyed.

We ate some corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes. After finishing first, I stood up, gave Dad a small kiss on the cheek, and hurried to my bedroom.

I fell onto my bed, shoes and all, and shut my eyes. Man, going to two high schools was bad enough. I didn't want to deal with that Erlking nonsense. The fact that our teachers apparently knew Zane's real name and hadn't used it made Titania less likely as a school attack suspect. But, who knew? Maybe she was scary enough that they held back out of fear.

I texted Simon if he already found out anything about the disease. He replied that the book he was searching for was owned not by his Dad but by his uncle and that it'd take a long time for him to get it. Isa didn't find out anything about Klaus Kringle either. Quiet days followed until late September happened...