Page 41 of The Magic We Made

“Hey!” Emma cries, laughing. “Give it back.”

“I will,” HecateHaley says. “But only so you can sacrifice it when you’re ready. You’re all going to need to sacrifice every vestige of your past lives if you truly want to be victorious in this fight.”

Emma’s expression puckers over this. She seems to be giving the matter some serious thought. The girl beside her—Meg Boucher again—is the one who objects.

“But I need my phone,” Meg insists.

“You don’tneedit,” HecateHaley says. “You only want it. It’s a material thing that gives you pleasure.”

“Well, it also serves a valuable function.” Meg is looking at the other girls for support, but they seem too cowed by Haley to speak up—including, at that moment at least, Emma. “How else am I going to call my family?”

HecateHaley shakes her head. “You don’t need to call your family. We’re your family now.”

We’re your family now. Emma and Meg, along with the other girls, exchange pleased, excited looks. The cherubic-looking HecateHaley is an astute leader, one who knows not only how to perform to her audience but how to control its members as well.

Ash abruptly shuts the lid of his laptop, then rises from his chair.

“That’s it,” he says as he walks back to the coffeemaker. “That’s Emma’s last post. A few days later, she lied to her mother about going to a slumber party at a different, non-witchy friend’s house, one who claims not to know anything about a sleepover, and no one has seen or heard from her since.”

I watch as he fills a white coffee mug from the spigot on the machine. “Until today, you mean.”

“Right.” He walks back over to the table to hand the coffee mug to me. No offer of milk or sugar. He’s too distracted. “Meg’s is the first proof I’ve had so far that Emma is even still alive... well, this, and the footprints outside that window.”

“Those footprints were Emma’s?” I ask in surprise.

“Some of them. Emma’s mother says she was wearing Silver Stars when she disappeared.”

“So in other words,” I say slowly, “your superpower worked. Emma found you, but you weren’t home.”

“It’s starting to seem like it.”

He’s gone to stand in front of the wall of sliding glass doors that look out across his back deck. He doesn’t open any of them. He just stands there, looking unseeingly out across the water... probably berating himself internally for having missed his opportunity to rescue Emma. At least, that’s what I’d assume someone with the delusion that they have the power to find missing things would be doing in his situation.

“But you did find Meg,” I point out. I don’t know why I’m playing along with his fantasy... maybe for the same reason Mark played along with Mrs. Baumgarten’s conviction that her rental was haunted: I’m embracing his reality. “Maybe, once Meg reunites with her family and gets the medical care she needs, she’ll feel safe enough to tell you where she last saw Emma.”

“I don’t think so.” He finally turns his head to look at me. “She’s too scared of Haley.”

“Haley?” I rise from my chair but don’t approach him, even though a big part of me wants to. To keep myself from doing anything stupid—such as running my hand soothingly along those broad shoulders—I take my coffee mug and head to the enormous stainless steel refrigerator. “What do you mean she’s too scared of Haley?”

“You saw the videos. All of those girls seemed cowed by her.”

“Oh, right. Any idea who she really is?”

“Yeah. Haley Leeanne Nesbitt, twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Texas,” he says. “Computer science major.Had an internship with a hundred-billion-dollar biomedical foundation for a while, but according to her supervisor—who would only speak to me under condition of anonymity due to being so afraid of retaliation from Haley and her followers—she was let go for—”

“Her followers?” Ash doesn’t even seem to notice that I’ve opened his fridge and am doctoring the coffee he served me with some milk from the brand-new carton I find inside it. It’s the only food item in the house that I can see, unless you count the cauliflower pizza crust in the freezer, and some packets of sugar I find in a nearby drawer, along with dozens of soy sauce packets from West Harbor’s best Chinese food restaurant, House of Hong...

As well as the binder of local information I made and forced Harbor Hideaways to put in Ash’s house so his renters would quit bothering me with questions.

“Yeah,” Ash is going on, oblivious to the kitchen search I’m conducting. “The supervisor said she let Haley go for hacking the foundation’s confidential donor base... and for refusing to stop proselytizing about her belief that the world’s current climate challenges are all the fault of a single individual.”

I don’t reply right away. I’m too stunned by the sight of that binder. It looks as fresh and clean as the day I dropped it off, probably because no one has ever opened it. It was stuffed in this drawer and forgotten.

Telling myself to think about the implications of this later, I extract the sugar packet I need and close the drawer. I’m proud of myself when I’m able to ask in a completely nonjudgmental tone, while tapping sugar into my drink: “And who does Haley blame for the world’s current climate challenges?”

“Mother Nature.”

I made the mistake of lifting the mug to my lips just as he started speaking. Now I choke on the mouthful of coffee I’ve taken.