I lean in to Laurie. “So where’s the witch?”
“Sean said there’s a back room,” Laurie says, pointing to the far end of the store. Behind the service counter I can barely see the outline of a closed door. “But I don’t know if it’s available to anyone or if you need special access.”
“You’re just bringing this up now?” I ask.
“Don’t worry about it,” Stephen says under his breath. “If you two get stalled out here, I can check it out on my own.”
“Hey, silver lining,” Laurie says.
I shake my head, moving towards the back of the store. At first I think it’s empty, but then I notice a hunched figure sitting on a stool behind the counter. His head is bent and I think he’s sleeping. But when I get close, he looks up, peering at me through the gloom. I’m glad I stop myself from gasping. He’s missing an eye, and a wicked red scar runs from the empty socket down his face and neck until it disappears beneath his shirt collar.
“Help you?” he croaks.
“Uh . . .” I am frozen.
“We heard you have a witch,” Laurie says, as if he says such things every day.
The man laughs like gravel crunching under boots. “Did ya now?”
“Laurie.” I tug at his hand. If this guy thinks we’re a bunch of teen pranksters, we’ll get booted from the store with a life ban in hand.
“Why would you need a witch?” He’s not looking at Laurie, he’s looking at me. My heart thuds against my ribs.
“To help a friend,” I say, not sure why I answer.
“Mmmm.” The man slides from his stool. He walks past us all the way to the front of the store. When he locks the front door, Laurie grabs my hand.
“Millie!” the man shouts, and then begins hacking like he’s about to lose a lung. When the coughing fit passes, he calls again. “You got visitors!”
I hear the sound of someone climbing stairs. The door behind the counter opens. A woman steps into the shop. Behind her I can see stairs leading down to who knows where. She’s wearing a modest flower-print dress that reminds me of a tablecloth. Her silver hair is neatly rolled in the way of ladies who have a once-weekly appointment at the beauty salon. After eyeing me critically for a moment, she shakes her head.
“I can’t help him,” Millie says.
“What?” I stare at her.
She wiggles her fingers and I realize that she’s wiggling them in Stephen’s direction. “He’s beyond my pay grade. Sorry.”
Stephen draws a sharp breath. “You can see me?”
She gives no sign of alarm at the sound of Stephen’s voice. The one-eyed man looks towards Stephen with curiosity but quickly returns to his usual slouch on the stool.
“No such luck,” she says to Stephen. “But I can see the curse.”
Then she turns to me. “It took long enough for you to find me.”
Millie pivots around, tottering towards the staircase. We stare after her until she throws a glance over her shoulder. “Come on.”
Chapter 13
“Who are you?” Elizabeth asks as we head into the darkest recesses of the moribund comic store.
“Who I am is immaterial,” Millie replies.
“But what you are is important,” I say.
Millie nods. “You understand perfectly.”
I can feel things shifting. My whole relationship to the world is shifting. I thought it was all pretty straightforward, all observable at one point or another. But now it seems that I was wrong. There is a world I didn’t know within the world I knew. And Millie, it appears, is its emissary.
The room she takes us to is lined with bookshelves on every wall. A private library . . . but something is off. At first I don’t realize what’s so disconcerting about it, and then I notice: none of the books have writing on their spines. It’s an anonymous library. Or maybe a library I can’t read.
“Please sit down,” Millie says, gesturing to a table in the middle of the room. Four chairs sit around it, as if she had been waiting for three people.
I find myself hoping for Laurie to interject some humor into the situation, but he’s as speechless as the rest of us.
“Why have you been waiting for me?” Elizabeth asks once we’ve all sat down.
“For the same reason you’ve come, no doubt.”
“I’ve come because he’s invisible.”
Millie shakes her head. “No, you’ve come because you can see him.”
“Are you a cursecaster?” I ask.
The old woman looks gravely offended.
“Well, I’ve never!” she exclaims. “What a horrible thing to say!”
“I’m sorry,” I quickly continue. “It’s just that—”
“I’ll have you know, I am a spellseeker! And”—she looks at Elizabeth—“I know another spellseeker when I sense one!”
“Excuse me?” Elizabeth says.
“A spellseeker. A hexologist. A spellvoyant. Surely someone’s told you? You don’t just see through invisibility curses with no training!”
“I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about,” Elizabeth tells her.
“I’ll second that,” Laurie chimes in. “I know you’re speaking English, but none of it really makes sense.”
“Hmpf,” Millie says. Then, with a certain acidity, she adds, “So you’re a natural talent?”
“I assure you, she’s had no formal training,” Laurie says. “Our town didn’t even have a magic club.”
“Look,” I say, “you clearly know much, much more about all this than we do. I know that my grandfather was a cursecaster, whatever that is. I know that he cursed my mother, so I’d be invisible. And that’s about it. That’s all I know. We need help. Lots of it.”
“Clearly,” Millie says, a little less hostile than before. “But you’ll have to appreciate that I can’t get involved in curses. Especially when it’s a family matter.”
Part of me wants to weep and part of me wants to grab her by her shoulders and shake hard. To be so close to some kind of answer and to not get it—I liked it so much more when I was oblivious. But there’s no going back now.
“You said you could see my curse?” I prompt.