1
CALLING ANDRONICUS A MEAN LION WOULD BE LIKE CALLING A TSUNAMI A big wave.
He tore off our wrangler Montague’s face. He didn’t mean to. Lions are wild animals, even if they live with a circus—especially if they live with a circus—and the show Andronicus came from used bullwhips and cattle prods to train him. That cat had some stuff.
But I saved Montague. I was young—six? Seven, maybe? I heard the screams coming from the menagerie, and if you spend any time at a circus, you get to know the good sounds from the bad ones. Montague’s hollers for help, the yowl and roar of an enraged big cat—definitely not good sounds. Naturally, all the important players went running: Ted Cinzio, my “adopted” uncle and owner of the Cinzio Traveling Players Company and the man who rescued Andronicus and his girl Hera (and Gertrude and countless other beasts) from their terrible situations; Baby, the show’s tentmaster and Ted’s right-hand man in all things, and the other half of my mother’s heart; crew leads and roustabouts and Aunt Cece, Ted’s wife; Aleks Jónás of the Jónás Family Flyers, Ash and Violet’s dad; my mother, Delia.
And me.
She didn’t want me to see it, but out of all of them, I was really the only one who could do anything for Montague. Baby and my mother warned me, but I loved Montague, just as I loved all of my circus family. I couldn’t just let him die there in the lion’s pen, hay and dirt matting to his hair and neck from the incredible blood loss.
I saved a bird once. It flew into the side of our Airstream trailer. I picked it up and my head exploded in a firework of pain and light. I squeezed that little bird gently and mended its wing and it went from almost dead to alive and flying away in less than a minute. Then I threw up and my mom told me that we have secrets. It was the first time I really listened to the story—the one she told over and over again—about the little girl whose mother told her of a secret family treasure. I knew from then on that we were different.
Which is how I knew I was the only one who could save Montague.
While Ted and the wranglers tranquilized the lion, I sneaked in under their legs and laid my hands on Montague’s face. I pushed the skin back where it should be. I stopped the bleeding and saved his eye.
I was just a kid, so I wasn’t strong enough to restore him completely. I might have been able to if Baby hadn’t scooped me up and run out of the menagerie tent. Too many people were watching. But this was before everyone recorded everything on their phones. No one thought to record the little girl with the magic hands.
No matter. It has all caught up to me now.
And as I watch Montague in his predawn jog across the massive lawns of the Delacroixs’ French estate, his heavily scarred face a reminder of that day at the circus, I think about how I’d give anything to go back to that life, to those people, to that day, when I saved someone I loved.
When I believed I still could.
2
THE DOOR OPENS BEHIND ME, QUIET EXCEPT FOR THAT TINY SQUEAK WHEN it catches on the plush carpet.
“I come bearing gifts. Hélène made us hot chocolate.” Henry enters, holding a tray with two mugs.
“With whipped cream?” I ask.
“So much whipped cream,” he says, setting down the tray. “Did you sleep in the chair?”
“I wanted to watch the sunrise.”
Henry hands me a cup, pulls the ottoman closer, and then sits next to me in front of the window that overlooks the rolling green hills of the massive estate belonging to Thibault and Hélène Delacroix—his grandparents. This place is a fortress, hospital, and five-star hotel all in one, in the middle of the French countryside. Henry leans in and pushes the springy curls back from my forehead.
“I hate how short it is. And how dark,” I say. The weirdest part—when I look in the mirror, I don’t see my mother’s face staring back at me anymore. Our shared red hair, mine wilder and frizzier than hers, but still—it’s all gone. Not even long enough to make a ponytail anymore. It’s like being naked.
But it’s necessary, to keep us hidden, and alive.
“It makes your green eyes pop.” His smile fades when he runs a hand over his own head. It’s been cut so close I can see his scalp, his messy curls shorn and dyed from his usual blond to dark like mine. His cheeks are pink again, his eyes less purple this morning. He lost so much blood—it wasn’t just the car accident near Boeing Field when Lucian Dmitri and his witchy minion, Mara Dunn, ran us off the road and flipped us like a diner pancake. Mara Dunn, the talented aerialist brought to our circus after my mother, Delia, died, now known by her true identity of Aveline Darrow, my half sister, stabbed him. They wanted the magical AVRAKEDAVRA texts so much—my mother’s and the one Henry stole from his father’s study—they were willing to kill for them.
During the circus’s New Year’s Eve fundraising gala, my mother was pushed from her lyra to the circus floor thirty feet below, murdered by an Etemmu, a vicious Mesopotamian demon made of swirling arms laced with hate and pain, controlled by Lucian Dmitri and his Death text. I tried to save her, but as her life drained into the fine soil, she took with her too many secrets. About the daughter she had long before I was born, about the world’s most powerful magical books, about how, in the wrong hands, they could rewrite everything.
About how all this secrecy and torture by the Etemmu would land firmly upon my shoulders in her absence.
I miss her, fiercely. I see her in every flower stretching out of its vase, in every tree that whispers in the breeze, in every tiny sprout pushing out of the dirt. Mirrors trick me when I pass by, thinking I’m seeing her face when it’s only my own.
But I’m so angry. I’m so angry, I could burn a hole through a granite wall with my bare hands.
I run my hand through what’s left of my hair. “We’re still ourselves,” I say. “Right?”
Henry leans in and kisses the whipped cream off my lip. “Still ourselves.”
“For now.”
“For always.”
“How do you feel? Since . . .” Since last night, when Thibault Delacroix—aka Nutesh, Henry’s grandfather, one of the three Original Creators of the AVRAKEDAVRA, and our host and chief strategist—sealed his grandson to his book. For something so important, it is such a brief, quiet undertaking. Like he did with me on the plane hurtling away from the carnage left at Boeing Field with Lucian and Mara Dunn, Nutesh pulled on his leather gloves, placed a hand flat on the Memory text, and voilà! Henry was a sealed heir, all ready to be assailed by whatever new magical endowments the text might decide to share.
Henry is in line for two books, though—Memory, through his mother’s family, and Death, the text he stole from his father’s study back in Oregon. Why Henry has only been sealed to one family’s book remains a mystery, but it’s probably better that way, for now. I love Henry—I know this in my heart—but my head tells me that one person sealed to two books? Unwise. It’s only a short walk across the house for him to take the third, and this whole mess starts over again.
“I’m fine. Nothing new or weird yet.”
“The day is young,” I say, wishing I felt as light as my words suggest.