"And she's a witch," Audrey said.

  "That's good," I said, thinking of the Wizard's admonishment to stick to magical areas.

  But Audrey had no idea about any of that. She just raised a questioning eyebrow at me.

  "Sorry, I didn't mean good," I said. "The lead is good. And given the likely nature of the poison used, the fact that it's actually a witch makes me think we're getting closer."

  "Yeah, me, too," Liam said as he got up to fetch the pages from the now quiet printer.

  "Is she downtown, then?" I asked. As densely populated as the Square was, it was still a single block of buildings. Most of the witches in Minneapolis lived in the multiple interconnected pockets that were hidden throughout the downtown area on the other side of the river.

  But Audrey was shaking her head. "No, she's an outlier. She has a pocket of her own, hidden away in one of the suburbs."

  "Not magical ground?" I asked nervously.

  "Her house is," Audrey said. "It's been around as long as the Square, at least if prosaic property records are to be believed. But it's not an entire neighborhood. Just a single house."

  "It's called the Crofts' Cottage," Liam said as he handed the pages to me. "'Cottage' makes it sound small, but given the neighborhood it's hiding in, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a modestly named mansion." He shrugged, as if that were something he saw every day.

  Then he saw the book I was still hugging close to my chest.

  "Are you done with that?" he asked anxiously. "I have to head to work soon, and it would be great if I could put that back before it's missed."

  "Yes, the Wizard made copies," I said, holding the book out for him. He gave it a quick once-over as if checking it for signs of damage before stuffing into his backpack. "Thanks for letting us see it."

  "Yeah, it's quite a coincidence, me finding that," he said as he closed the straps on his backpack.

  "Coincidence," I said, rolling the word around in my mind.

  That word kept popping up. And kept feeling like it wasn't quite appropriate.

  I couldn't help remembering that he had only found his job in the first place because of a spell I had crafted for him.

  The spell was a reworked version of a spell that helped a witch find answers to her questions. And I hadn't even been the one to cast it. That had been Audrey.

  But I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow that spell which had been intended to help Liam find his perfect job had—also? or instead?—found the book that was just what Houdini and I had been looking for.

  "Shall we?" Audrey asked, indicating the papers in my hands.

  I looked down at the address on the top page. I didn't recognize the street name, and I was nowhere near familiar enough with zip codes to know which numbers were in which parts of town.

  Liam must've read my thoughts on my face because, as he hoisted his backpack up onto his shoulder, he said, "it's in Prospect Park. That's in Minneapolis, but further east than here. But you can totally get a bus there."

  "A bus," I said, and I knew I was visibly flinching.

  "Tabitha?" Audrey asked with concern in her voice.

  "It's just, the Wizard thinks I should avoid the prosaic world. For a while," I said.

  "Oh, right," Audrey said. "Because of what happened before. Sure."

  Liam looked back and forth between us, clearly not having a clue what we were talking about.

  "Let's go down to the pub," Audrey said brightly. "Thaisa Wolsey knows all the routes the boats take through the tunnels. She can get us close to there, if not all the way there."

  Then Liam laughed out loud. Audrey and I both looked at him in frank confusion.

  "Sorry," he said, putting a hand over his mouth. "It's just, it would be pretty ironic if that location wasn't part of your magical network."

  I exchanged a glance with Audrey, but she just shrugged, as clueless as I.

  "Why is that?" I asked him.

  "The water tower they have there is kind of famous," he said. When the confusion still didn't leave my or Audrey's faces, he pulled out his phone and tapped at the screen as he spoke. "It's more than a hundred years old, not a functioning water tower anymore. Colloquially, it's known as the Witch's Hat. Granted, that's just because of its shape. I've never heard any urban legends about actual witches being connected to it."

  Then he turned his phone screen towards us to show us a structure that did, indeed, look like a stereotypical witch's hat.

  "You know we don't actually wear those," I said.

  "Except ironically," Audrey said.

  "Except ironically," I agreed.

  "Oh, sure," he said as he tucked his phone away. "And for the record, I'm also aware that urban legends I may or may not have heard about witches have not tracked at all with the actual goings-on of Minnesota witches. Still, I bet you can find a magical route to that place, no problem."

  "And I'll fill you in with what we know about this woman on the way," Audrey promised.

  We walked Liam back to the door he was most familiar with, the one in the Loose Leaves Teashop. Then we headed to the Wolseys' Pub to start our journey across town.

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  The Wolseys' Pub was the only restaurant in the Square. Although the blocks around us in the prosaic world were packed with a variety of cuisines, when I didn't feel like cooking dinner, I usually found myself crossing through the orchard to grab something warm and filling in the pub.

  The interior was cozy, reminiscent of actual pubs I'd been to in England and Ireland. Everything from the wattle and daub walls to the heavy oak tables and chairs felt like it had been there for centuries. The wood planks of the floor had been worn into smooth grooves by countless boots and shoes. Even the food smells of roasted meat and potatoes as well as the ever present aroma of ale felt like they'd always been there, freshened daily but never diminishing.

  The mullioned windows were few, small, and of a mottled sort of glass, letting in only a little of the light from outside. This was scarcely noticeable in the evenings, when the fire in the fireplace filled the spacious, high-ceilinged dining room with warmth and the candles burning on every table added enough light to see your dining companions.

  But it was still too early for dinner, and with no customers sitting within, it made the space feel both larger and darker.

  When Audrey and I stepped inside, we hovered near the doorway for a moment, waiting for our eyes to adjust. Almost as if she sensed the moment we could see well enough to recognize her, Thaisa Wolsey emerged from the kitchen. Her long, red hair was pulled back in a thick but short braid at the nape of her neck, and her clothes were a mashup of magical and prosaic fashions: a long emerald green tunic that looked Celtic but with its impractically large sleeves tied back with a cord in a Japanese style, and a worn and faded pair of designer blue jeans.

  "Early dinner?" she asked as she wiped her just-washed hands dry on her apron. She was the same age as Audrey and I were, but had opted out of the higher magical academies we had both attended. She had instead done a few courses at a local school that focused on just the aspects of magic she needed to know to take over for her parents and run the pub after they retired.

  It was very rare to run into her anywhere outside of the pub, and rarer still to find her anywhere when she wasn't trying to accomplish a thousand tasks at once.

  "No, no dinner. We're heading downstairs to catch a boat," I said.

  "Heading to the hospital?" she asked. "I know he's still in a coma, but even so, let Barnardo know we're all thinking about him, okay?"

  "Actually, we're looking for someone else. In Prospect Park," I said.

  "We're hoping she can help us figure out what happened to Barnardo," Audrey added.

  "Prospect Park," Thaisa said with a ponderous frown.

  "Her name is Ursula Croft?" Audrey said. "She lives in a place called Crofts' Cottage."

  "Have you heard of her?" I asked.

  Because unlike me, who had spent her entire life moving from place to place all over the world up until just a few months before, and unlike Audrey, who was from Mankato in the southern part of Minnesota, Thaisa had lived in the Square in Minneapolis for her entire life.

  But after a moment's thought, she shook her head. "No. Sorry. The name Croft sounds a little familiar? But also a little common."

  "I get the sense she's a bit of a recluse anyway," Audrey said.

  I looked at the thick stack of papers I was still clutching in my hands. I had only glanced at the top sheet so far, but it was clear that Liam had assembled quite a story in whatever he had printed out for me. Audrey knew at least some of it, I was sure. But I had no real idea where we were going.

  I just had such a strong urge to keep moving, to keep working. Like that would help Barnardo somehow.

  "The boats can take you to Prospect Park," Thaisa said. "You'll go up to the St. Anthony Falls, but stay with the river rather than crossing it into downtown. Then you'll catch the remnants of the Bridal Veil Creek that the prosaics buried years ago. There's still a falls there, but our ways are deeper, of course."

  "And that takes us to this address?" I asked, squinting at the street name printed on the top sheet of the papers in my hands.

  "Close enough," Thaisa said with a shrug. "There really isn't a community of us there, so there's no actual station. But the boat will wait for you."

  I nodded. But I knew what she wasn't saying out loud.

  Our ride would be waiting for us in the sewer. Granted, one of the deeper sewers where the buried creek still ran. But we'd have to climb out through more conventional sewers to get to the surface. And then just start walking around.

  Well, I had made worse trips in my time.

  "Thanks for your help," I said.

  "I hope you find what you're looking for," Thaisa said. "Barnardo used to come in here every midafternoon to share a plate of fried potatoes with me on my break. And to gossip, of course. I hadn't realized how much that little break in the day meant to me. I don't get out much, but talking to Barnardo, it was like he was bringing the whole Square in for me."

  "Ironically, this investigation would be so much easier with his help," I said. "He knew everyone, or at least could find out who they were much faster than we can without him."

  "We'll find her," Audrey said, raising her chin as if stepping up to a challenge.

  With one last nod of thanks to Thaisa, we passed through the kitchen and down the cold stone steps to the quay that was our station in the witches' underground transportation system.

  The magical neighborhoods in New York had secret subways. The ones in Paris had catacombs no prosaic had ever found. The ones in Hong Kong were connected above ground, crossing the tops of buildings in a parkour system that was not for the faint-hearted.

  And Minneapolis had its system of buried creeks and rivers, spreading like a watery web all through it and into neighboring St. Paul.

  But, like the magical subways in New York, you needed a card to get a ride. Luckily, Audrey and I had acquired our own some time ago. We touched them to the art déco turnstile that waited incongruously next to the mostly clean storm runoff water that drained past the Square towards the Mississippi River.

  And a short wait later, a boat appeared. There was no driver, just two bench seats and a tall prow from which hung a magical lantern that glowed an eerie shade of green. Audrey and I climbed on board and settled in.

  "Prospect Park, please," Audrey said. Although I had my suspicions that wasn't even necessary. The boats always seemed to know what was needed of them.

  We slipped away from the quay and headed down the dark tunnel with its stone arches that seemed far too grand for such a place.

  I glanced down at the papers stacked on my lap, but the glossiness of the printer paper was too reflective, the ink of the text too dim, for me to make out much in the unnatural greenish light.

  "Tell me about Ursula Croft," I said to Audrey. "She lives in a place called Crofts' Cottage, but that's all I've caught so far."

  "She's a recluse," Audrey said.

  "Yeah, I caught that too," I said with a grin.

  "Right," Audrey smiled back at me. "She owns a business that sells potions to prosaics, called Croft's Concoctions. Judging from the look and limited functionality of her website, she's been around for a long time. Probably longer than Barnardo. But unlike the cottage, I don't think the business is a family thing. Because of the placements of the apostrophe. You know, Croft's singular, not Crofts' plural."

  "Do Ursula and Barnardo know each other?" I asked.

  "That's just the thing, we're not sure," Audrey said. "They have no direct communication with each other. If you could read what Liam printed out for you, it's mostly screen caps from various forums and social media places. Both Barnardo and Ursula Croft were using fake names. Multiple fake names."

  "But they were interacting with each other pseudonymously?" I asked.

  "Yeah, a lot," Audrey said. "Although Liam was pretty sure they weren't aware of how often they were talking to each other. Sometimes Barnardo would be friendly with one of Ursula's identities, but antagonistic to another, and vice versa. It's actually a bit of a mess. Who would go through all this work to pretend to be a bunch of people? And why?"

  "Loneliness, I guess," I said.

  "Barnardo had breakfast with the three of us every day," Audrey said. "Then he'd go see Titus Bloom for a coffee before going up to his apartment. Now we know he also stopped into the pub every afternoon to chat with Thaisa. Given how much he knows about everyone in the Square, he's clearly talking to other people, maybe even on the same kind of schedule. We just haven't discovered it yet. And he always had Miss Snooty Cat."

  "I know," I said. "That still doesn't mean he didn't feel lonely, though. Maybe he was looking for some kind of connection we just weren't giving him."

  Audrey chewed her lip for a minute. "He never said anything."

  "No, he didn't," I agreed.

  But he had always felt… well, like he was lonely. I knew the feeling well, having spent my life surrounded by other students who talked to me because they had to, but never really connected with me.

  "We should've noticed anyway," Audrey said.

  "We don't know what he was or is feeling," I said. "But we can ask him when he wakes up."

  Audrey nodded, but resumed chewing her lip.

  We had reached the river, but just as Thaisa had said, rather than taking the channel that dove down below the magically recreated remnants of the once mighty St. Anthony Falls, we instead turned to follow the river as it began its meander towards St. Paul.

  "This Ursula Croft, is she breaking the rules of our community too?" I asked.

  "Maybe?" Audrey said. "Judging from the comments left on her product pages, she has satisfied customers. Or had. Nothing had been updated in years. Or rather, decades. It was very old web design. You couldn't even order online. It was technically a mail-order catalog that you could browse in a very limited way on her website. But you still had to write in to place an order."

  "Weird," I said. "If she was on all the forums and that, like Barnardo was, wouldn't that make her also extremely online?"

  I knew the words sounded funny coming out of my mouth.

  But Audrey just shrugged.

  The boat beneath us bobbed a few times, like an athlete preparing to make their move. Then, as the aqueous ceiling of the channel above us shifted from a smooth bluish-green of steadily moving water to the fractals of expanding rings as we reached the bottom of the Bridal Veil Waterfall, the boat dipped and plunged through a deeper channel.

  There was a confused moment where I wasn't sure where we were heading. The waterfall broke up the light from above, and the lantern hanging from the prow of our boat was swinging wildly.

  Then we left the sunlight behind, sliding once more into a subterranean stone-walled tunnel. The green light from the lantern danced slickly over the damp walls, but barely lit the surface of great patches of what I really, really hoped was moss.

  The air around us was damp and chill, but the only smell was a slight odor of rotting plant matter. Normal storm sewer smell. Not pleasant, unless you were comparing it to a septic sewer.

  Then the boat lurched to a halt so suddenly that both Audrey and I were catching hold of the sides of the boat in near panic.

  We had stopped at the base of a ladder, metal rungs set directly in the stone wall of the tunnel. The rungs went up and up, past the point where the green lantern light could reach.

  "I guess this is our stop," I said, folding the papers to stuff them into one of the cargo pockets on my pants.

  I was so glad that Violenta Court insisted on copious pockets in all of her designs. They were a real lifesaver.

  I grabbed onto the rung of the ladder that was at my shoulder height, then put my feet on the bottom rung just above the reach of the oily-looking water.

  And then I started to climb.

  Chapter

  Seventeen

  The grate at the top of the sewer was on hinges and opened easily at my touch. So, while we might not be in a magical neighborhood per se, it was definitely one that was visited by magical types often enough for someone to make the path convenient.

  But it had been a long climb up the ladder, and I was happy to sit down on the curb and rest for a minute while I waited for Audrey to climb out behind me. My arms were trembling a little. But mostly, after touching rung after rung of damp yet gritty metal, I longed to wash my hands.

  The sun was just starting to set, but the sticky heat was still going strong. We were at the end of an alley that snaked between the backs of street-facing properties, and where that alley met the road was dominated by two ancient oak trees. They had been planted on either side of the alley, but their branches tangled together over the top of it in a living archway.

  Their roots were doing a number on the sidewalk, too. Perhaps not surprisingly, the families walking with strollers and the runners jogging by with earbuds in were all doing it on the far side of the road, where the sidewalk was smoother.

 

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