Jane woke up the following morning to her now-familiar empty bed. She rolled over and rubbed the crusted salt from last night’s tears off her face.

A square piece of stationery, thick and cream-colored, lay on her nightstand. It looked like Lynne’s, but the handwriting was Malcolm’s. “Dear J: Amazing acquisition possibility in Moscow. Back in a few days tops. Miss you! Love, M.”

“You win again, Lynne,” Jane croaked sleepily. She tried to clear her throat, but it was as if last night’s crying jag had dried up all of the water in her body.

She had no idea why Malcolm’s mother wanted to put distance between them, but she was certainly getting her way in spades. She had hoped that morning would shed new light on the bizarre argument she had overheard the night before. But even with the sunlight streaming in and Jane’s mind arguably calmer, it was just as confusing. Lynne was thrilled about the wedding, and was pretty damned convincingly ecstatic about Jane. So what was all that about loyalty and “that girl”?

“She didn’t mean me,” Jane tried out, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. It sounded good, and not so much as a static-shock’s worth of magic hummed in her blood when she said it, so she took it further. “So I guess Malcolm has another fiancée. Ooh! Or Malcolm has a split personality, and his other half thinks it has a different fiancée and Lynne wants him to snap out of it.” She wandered into the bathroom and made a face at her ratty hair and streaked mascara. “The family has tried to keep his affliction secret for years,” she went on, warming to her subject and waving her arms theatrically, “but it nearly got out during that turbulent time in college when Malcolm formed a four-man rock band with no one in it but himself.”

She smiled a little in the mirror, but it looked forced, even to herself. Whatever was going on with Malcolm and his mother, it wasn’t something she could just joke away on her own. They needed to talk, to open up. Or he did, at least. She still had a fairly major secret to keep.

Hypocrite.

The thought made her pause, though. She had a secret, sure, but even she barely knew what it was. She had spent the last few weeks so focused on trying to suppress it—rather ineffectually, she had to admit, after last night—that she wasn’t exactly sure what she was hiding from everyone.

She was a witch because the women in her family were, and other mysterious people out there were, too. So . . . what was a witch? Was it just having those uncomfortable random flashes of power that she couldn’t control? Or was there more? Witches in stories could do all sorts of amazing things, even if most of them were spectacularly ugly. So if I’m kind of a fox, Jane wondered, does that mean I have less power? Whatever she had inherited certainly hadn’t done much for Gran . . . living and dying basically alone in the middle of nowhere. But maybe that had more to do with Gran than with witchcraft itself.

“Well, then,” she told her reflection as she brushed on jet-black mascara, “I guess I need to know more. And with my split-personalitied fiancé out of town, I have some time on my hands.”

She felt the faint gravitational pull of her sleek little laptop, but that didn’t seem right. Computers were new, and magic was old. Besides, computers had long memories and secret Internet caches. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to surf anything but theknot.com since they had arrived. But libraries have genuine old things. And I’m pretty sure New York has a library or seventy.

Two hours later, she was cozily ensconced at a back table of the New York Public Library, as close as she could possibly be to the occult section without actually sitting there. The vaulted ceiling and honey-colored wood certainly had the antiquated feel she had been looking for, but other than that she was beginning to feel a little silly.

“Witchcraft,” she had said succinctly, when the helpful young man with the skull-faced ring had asked if he could direct her search. He’d burst out laughing, which did nothing to make her feel any less silly. Things had improved, though, when he had explained that his laughter had more to do with the huge size of the category than her request. Once she had narrowed her search down a little (“historical mythology” had a useful ring to it), he had pointed her in the right direction and recommended a few authors. He’d even told her how to shake the photocopier just so, to make it work for free. She had no intention of leaving a paper trail lying around the house, of course, but it was still nice to know.

It wasn’t long, though, before the library’s wealth of information about witches began to frustrate her. There were so many conflicting stories and descriptions that it was impossible to choose just one that matched her own limited knowledge, unless she was ready to select at random. Had her ancestors made a pact with the devil? Or had they come into the world already able to tap into unseen natural forces? Was it a blessing? A curse? A mutation? None of it sounded any more likely than the rest.

Jane dropped her head down on her pile of open books. I should have had a plan, she thought woefully. It had seemed so straightforward: she had imagined a montage of herself rummaging through the stacks, the Dewey decimal system her new best friend. She was even wearing tortoiseshell glasses, although all she had in reality were sunglasses. Out of nowhere, her witchy blood would draw her, like a moth to a flame, to the one passage that would make sense of it all. Or perhaps it would even make a book jump off the shelf. The montage continued until she understood everything she could possibly want to know, without having to bother sifting through any dull, inapplicable information.

The reason that movies had montages, she now realized, was that the long version—the real version—was lethally boring.

“Time for a break,” she announced. She had said it under her breath, but it still earned her a glare from a white-haired woman in a blue tracksuit and clashing orange earplugs. “Sorry,” she mouthed, and headed off in search of the bathroom.

Before she had gone ten steps, her ankle snagged a book on a low shelf. She tripped and crashed sideways, smashing her elbow on the wood paneling. The ear-plugged woman collected her books in her arms and stomped off in silent protest against Jane’s not-at-all silent cursing, although Jane felt that she had been fairly restrained under the circumstances. Feeling fed up and just plain childish, she sat down heavily on the floor and worked out a way to rub both her ankle and her elbow at the same time. It was awkward, though, and it didn’t make her feel any better, so she turned her attention to the book that had caused her trouble in the first place.

At first, she assumed that it was simply too large for the shelf, and blamed the librarians for not putting it with the other oversized books. But it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t really so big . . . it was just hanging out into the aisle because it hadn’t been pushed fully in by the last person to peruse it. She turned the book over in her hands. The faded gilt letters spelled out: A TRUE HISTORY OF WITCHES AND MAGICK, BY ROSALIE GODDARD.

Jane’s imaginary montage flickered briefly through her mind, and she grinned. Frustration and sore elbow completely forgotten, she opened the book on her lap and began to read it right there on the floor. Soon she had a whole collection of books stacked next to her: in addition to the “true history,” there was one about female authors in the seventeenth century, another about New York’s high society during the height of the witch hunts—with several passages on Rosalie Goddard’s family itself—and two about the histories of mental illnesses and psychology in America.

Rosalie Goddard had written twelve thrilling chapters, in which she made quite a lot of claims about magic. It was real, she had insisted, and hereditary, although the trait only manifested in women. Witches could do all sorts of amazing things . . . including, of course, blend in with regular human beings. Jane, convinced that she was on the right track, forced her way through the more obscure and confusing parts: there was a dense section on seven magical sisters and their children, complicated wars between those seven witch families, and extensive but vague descriptions of how magic was transferred from one person to another.

Every witch was born with some magic of her own, Jane read avidly, although the amount seemed to vary widely. Rosalie suspected that the variation had something to do with astrology, but Jane got lost in the star charts and couldn’t follow the author’s logic to any kind of conclusion. If the witch wanted more magic—and, apparently, they all did—she had to either inherit it . . . or steal it. It could be transferred from person to person through silver—Jane stroked her smooth silver ring absently—but the exact process was complex. There was a lot of stuff about “right” and “will” and the witch’s “last breath,” which didn’t make any sense, because Gran had kept on breathing for six more years after protecting Jane in Paris.

A note from the publisher was inserted at the very back of the book, explaining that Rosalie’s family had tried to suppress her book entirely, and then to pass it off as fiction. When their efforts failed, the Goddards decided their main PR problem wasn’t the book at all—it was the author. They shipped Rosalie off to a European mental institution, never to be heard from by the public again.

When Jane finally came up for air, the rectangles of sun on the floor had moved all the way across the room. It was also more crowded than it had been in the morning. Jane blinked at the assortment of elderly people, students, and families that had filled the honey-colored tables, trying to bring herself back to the present.

Between one blink and the next, something changed.

I saw something, her mind told her insistently, but she couldn’t think what.

Just then sunlight flashed off of a perfectly bald head across the room, and Jane started, the hairs on her arms standing on end. Even in profile, she had no trouble recognizing Yuri, Lynne’s huge, silent driver, who was now striding silently out of the library. There were plenty of reasons why he might have been there, of course. And plenty of reasons he might be leaving now. There was no reason to think that his presence wasn’t a coincidence . . . except that, just as he reached the door, he turned back. His beady black eyes found Jane’s and narrowed. An instant later, he was gone.