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“Okay,” I said to Phil as she breezed along with us into the windowless room. “Look for a good place for a stray paper to just happen to be lying out. Somewhere he’ll believe Celestine could have hidden it—or missed it—but where he’ll see it while he’s searching.”
“Aye, aye, my lady,” Phil said with a wink.
The sound of our footsteps seemed to dull amid the windowless walls. Dad and I crossed the polished wooden floor to the room’s sole piece of furniture: a large cabinet at the back. I wasn’t supposed to have any idea what it contained, but the truth was I’d searched most of it last week. With the magic I wasn’t supposed to have either.
Dad opened the cabinet doors and gave the shelves a quick glance. I did a similar mental inventory, though for different purposes. It wouldn’t make any sense for a note to be mixed in with supplies like feathers or gems, or to be sitting out far too obviously on a shelf. The contracts box wouldn’t work, because it contained only official documents…
A deeper chill sliced through me. The contracts. I’d taken the one relating to my consorting out. Now that I didn’t have to worry about Celestine tracking it down to retrieve it, I’d secreted it away in the pages of one of my novels—a gothic romance featuring a vain and ruthless stepmother as the villain, which seemed appropriate. But if Dad were expecting to find it, if he looked through that box and found it missing…
Common sense broke through the rising haze of panic. It was okay. If he didn’t find it there, he’d just assume Celestine had hidden it somewhere else. That would be the obvious explanation, not that I’d managed to find it and hide it using my theoretically non-existent magical powers.
Dad grabbed the first couple boxes off the top shelf. I knelt down and tugged out one from the lowest, which I hadn’t made it to in my explorations before. I didn’t look at the box of contracts waiting for us, now at eye level, but my skin prickled with my awareness of it.
“It’s too bad I can’t just put the contract back,” I said to Phil as I pawed through a heap of incense packets. “You couldn’t ask for better proof than that. But it’s also the only proofIhave. I can’t risk Dad keeping it if he really is in on the scheme.”
Philomena cocked her head. “Can’t you just conjure a new one? Stick it right on the top, so he’ll see it the second he opens the box…”
I shook my head, just slightly. “There’s a certain quality to magical contracts. You canfeelthe binding magic in the signatures. I couldn’t conjure something that intricate and specific, at least not until I have a lot more practice using my powers. Even without any magical ability, Dad would know it wasn’t right.”
I pushed the incense box back onto the shelf and reached for a bag that proved to be full of glyph tokens, some on smoothed stone, others carved into what looked like chunks of bone. Those weren’t standard, but some witches felt the former life essence gave the tokens an extra kick of power. I restrained a shudder as I shoved that bag back.
“What about those books?” Phil said with a tip of her chin. Dad had just opened up a box of old journals and private witching texts stamped with family names. Private archives and spell notes. I’d dismissed them when I’d made my earlier search because they hadn’t looked recently used, but Dad was considering them.
“I’ll have to go through these later,” he said. “I doubt they’ll say much if anything about your stepmother’s recent activities, but if nothing else offers guidance…” He ran his hand through his dark hair and turned back to the shelves.
I exchanged a glance with Philomena. That could be perfect. While he was distracted with the rest of his investigation, I could quickly conjure a slip of paper tucked inside the first notebook. He’d see it as soon as he started paging through them. I could even leave it poking out a little to draw his attention.
I’d already come up with the wording I’d use… Notes about binding and the consort ceremony, the date when mine was supposed to happen, a mention of some of the resources Master Cortland had been looking up. Any witching man would recognize the morbid significance of the symbols. I’d spent a good deal of the day yesterday poring over the few papers I had with Celestine’s actual handwriting on them and practicing conjuring an accurate facsimile.
The false evidence only needed to convince him long enough for him to act. Or not act, as the case might be. My stomach twisted at the thought.
The outcome didn’t matter right now. What mattered was getting there—getting an answer, even if it was hard to accept. I just had to perform the magicking without him noticing…
A rustling sounded near the door. My head snapped around. Mrs. Gainsley had come into the doorway. She was watching the proceedings.
Shit. I couldn’t magick anything with her watching.
I yanked out the last box at the bottom of the cabinet as I stewed. How to send her off, for long enough that I could finish the magicking…? I wet my lips and looked up again.
“Matilda,” I said. My tongue stumbled over her first name. She’d told us all to call her by it as we always had with Meredith, but it felt strange to me being just as familiar with her, a relative stranger, as I’d been with the woman who’d practically raised me alongside my father. “Would you mind—I was thinking it might be useful to have any records of purchases Celestine asked Meredith to make on her behalf, so we know what supplies in here are most recent. Could you check the office for those?”
“Yes, of course, Rosalind,” she said. My hackles rose despite myself. Celestine had always insisted on calling me by my full name too.
The estate manager slipped away. I eased the lid off the box in front of me, watching for the right moment. My gaze fell on a stack of file folders inside.
Celestine had been keeping some other sort of records in here. I hadn’t made it to this box last time. The contract had been such a damning find I hadn’t seen the need to keep going.
At the same moment, Dad hefted the box of contracts. He peered inside, and his eyes sharpened. He rested them against the shelf, looking at each intently as he paged through them.
Now—this was my moment.. I turned away from him and faked a cough, rotating my arm and then dancing my fingers through delicate movements, hidden close to my chest. My spark jittered inside me. Power flowed into my hand. Just one little piece of paper, a few lines of handwriting, the image in my head made real…There.
The paper trembled into being just under the cover of the first notebook in the box he’d set aside earlier, a corner jutting out exactly as I’d intended. A wash of relief swept through me as the energy inside me ebbed.
It was done. As soon as he looked at those books, I’d know whether my father was the loving if sometimes distracted man I’d always thought he was… or my worst enemy.
“What are those, then?” Philomena asked, kneeling beside the box I was supposed to be looking through.
I turned back to it. “Let’s find out.”
