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BELLA
Imade it until late afternoon somehow, dreaming my way through lunch and a lecture on water magic, then pacing the halls once everyone else went to do homework.
Anya and Cori exchanged sympathetic glances, but let me be. They probably assumed I was nervous about the claiming that would surely happen tonight.
And they weren’t wrong. I was distracted with thoughts of Luke. But I had a task to complete before I saw him again. A task that could let me have my cake and eat it too, if I played my cards right.
When the sun began to sink, I headed toward the library, my backpack packed, wondering how I was going to pull this off.
Just inside the double doors, Nina was organizing a stack of slim, cloth-bound volumes on the glass surface of one of the cupboards.
“Hey Nina, you aren’t the only one on duty, are you?” I asked her.
“Sure am,” she said. “The others left early since there’s a staff meeting tonight. Did you come to keep me company?”
“I came to tell you that Anya was just looking for you,” I lied. “Want me to keep an eye on the place while you go chat with her?”
“I’ll go see her after my shift,” Nina said. “Unless you think it’s urgent?”
“She did seem kind of upset,” I confided. “Go ahead, I’d feel better if you did. And I seriously have nothing to do.”
“Really?” Nina asked.
“Of course,” I told her, feeling rotten. “Glad to help.”
“You’re a life saver,” she told me as she jogged out of the room.
Okay.
Okay, okay, okay.
I had maybe ten minutes to get the book and get out of here before Nina came back wondering why I had lied to her.
I opened my backpack and pulled out the school gown I had been wearing this morning.
Professor Batts had told us that the parts of a thing want to come together to form the whole. I had failed at nearly every spell I had attempted. But this was my last shot. And it sounded like the subjects of my spell would be inclined for it to work too.
I held the gown out in front of me and approached the mighty oak at the center of the library, murmuring the words of the spell.
At first nothing happened.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to breathe slowly. I pictured the dress and the button, back together again. It had seemed so easy when Lark put the pieces of her ring back together.
I spoke the words once more, slowly and clearly.
The dress began to twitch and wiggle in my hands.
I was so elated that I almost dropped it. But it seemed the dress was too heavy or the button too small for this to work.
In desperation, I held the dress out in front of me instead of piled in my hands.
One of the arms lifted and began gesturing toward the tree, as if the dress had an invisible wearer that was trying to tell me where the lost button was.
“Yes, the tree,” I said. “I know that part. Where in the tree?”
But that was obviously too big a question for the poor thing to answer.
I gazed up into the huge canopy. I was going to have to start climbing. But if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to hold the dress out in front of me, I’d need my hands to hold on.
