The sky was streaked with red on a palette of the palest blue. Bara stood below it, alone and shivering in Library Square. Amy and Colin had already gone in. After spending the night out in the cold, they’d needed to find shelter and fast. There were few places to go. They couldn’t go back to the Lavender House until they had a plan. Discovery was all too likely in their dorm rooms. The library had seemed the only option. Under the filmy cover of twilight, they’d slipped through the maples and oaks of Windfall Boulevard, hoping to be inside and down in the stacks before the sun rose, and they’d be clearly visible to anyone looking.

Bara saw but one other person while she waited, a tall teenage boy. She assumed he was a teenager. His face and hair were hidden under a hood. He passed the clock tower and took a left onto Windfall Way. He didn’t look her way. There was something familiar about him. His walk and form, but they lived in the same town. She’d probably seen him around.

It was Ms. Korey at the counter. Amy lost her nerve. She took a step back and bumped into Colin. He pushed her forward and then seated himself on a lobby couch. He took out his cell and made a call. Ms. Korey smiled at Amy. Amy fidgeted like someone who’d mistaken a flea farm for talcum powder. Anyone who knew her well would have known she was up to something. Ms. Korey didn’t seem to catch on. She nodded and started typing away on the computer, looking for some book Amy had said she needed. Things were unlikely to get much better. “Come in now,” Colin whispered into his phone. “Make it quick.”

Bara hung up and tore herself free of the bush she’d taken cover behind. She rushed up the library steps, through the doors, and passed the front desk. Colin watched. Ms. Korey never looked up. Colin returned his phone to his pocket. He crossed the foyer, whistling a nonsense tune, the signal to Amy that their plan had been a success. He finished on a long high note, descended the stairs, and joined Bara in the lower stacks. Amy should have followed on their heels. She didn’t. Bara was worried. “Maybe you should go up and check it out,” she suggested to Colin.

He was already half-way up the staircase when an out-of-breath Amy came up from behind. He retraced his steps.

“What took you so long?” Colin asked. “Why didn’t you use the stairs?”

“Ms. Korey pointed out that all the books I’d asked about were on the third floor. She came with me to find them. I had to wait for her to go back down. Then I took the elevator.”

“You took the elevator!” Bara exclaimed.

Almost no one ever used the old iron-caged elevator that stood like a geriatric dragon in the back corner of the library. It hissed and rattled and yes, even smoked, whenever it was used. Only those with a heavy load ever used the damnable thing. It was original to the building and far from being up to code. Yet somehow it managed to jar itself between the floors without claiming any lives or burning the place down.

“I had to or she’d see me come down,” Amy explained.

Colin shrugged. “Let’s find somewhere to sit.”

They settled at a study carrel in their favorite corner. Colin and Amy grabbed two chairs and formed a human shield around Bara. It was time to talk. Faced with confessing she’d dug up a grave, Bara felt the freak and so put the spotlight on her friends.

“What happened to you guys?”

Colin squinted as though in pain. “We had the pleasure of dealing with your sharp-toothed, furry friend.

“The Wolf? No!”

“It must exist in real life as well as in your dreams and be immortal to boot.”

“How did you get away?”

“That’s the thing. We figured after we ran for eons it didn’t actually want to catch us.”

“It was toying with us,” Amy added.

“Why would it bother to do that?”

“Who knows?” Colin replied. “But when we figured it out, we stopped running. We were right. It charged us a couple more times, always stopping a few meters away.”

“The next time it came at us, Colin charged back.”

“That was brave,” Bara marveled, “And stupid.”

“I thought it might run the other way.”

“Did it?”

“No! It came at me and knocked me to the ground. I thought I was a slice of Sunday bacon. Amy picked up a stick and started whacking away at the thing.”

“I could have been stroking it with a feather,” Amy continued on. “It didn’t seem to feel it.”

“Well, you’re not torn to shreds, so what happened?”

“It was the strangest thing,” Colin told her. “The Wolf gave me this queer look. I’d have sworn it was smiling. Then the infernal thing licked me. From chin to forehead.”

“It licked you?”

“Like a pet dog,” Amy offered.

She giggled. Bara laughed too. Colin didn’t.

He spoke over their giggles. “It got off me. Amy was hitting away, but it moved like it had all the time in the world.”

“It got off Colin, looked me in the eye, and growled. I got so scared I dropped the stick. It sniffed like I’d hurt its feelings and then it well … it disappeared ... and this weird mist rolled in. The wolf disappeared and the maze and this mist appeared … like in a dream or something.”

“Weird!”

“Your turn,” Colin told Bara.

Still looking to avoid airing the tale of when she’d taken to grave robbing, Bara reached into her bag and took out the dagger instead. The light of the library turned the green blade almost neon. The distraction worked. Colin held out his hand and she handed it over. He lightly touched the tip of the blade. It was definitely sharp. A small bead of blood formed on his fingertip. The blood sparked with silver and then dissolved to nothing. Colin looked at his finger, not even a mark. He dropped the blade to the desktop. “What the hell are we supposed to do with that?”

Bara hesitated to share her thoughts. Killing her stepmother, as evil as she might be, wasn’t something she wanted to do. Digging up a grave at midnight was bad enough, but killing another human being? Was her stepmother human? Are witches human? She didn’t know. Colin and Amy were waiting for her to say something. “It must have some purpose,” she offered.

“Maybe there’s something in the diary,” Amy suggested.

Bara took the diary from her bag and placed it on the table next to the dagger. She opened to a random page. Way too quickly to be natural, the air in the library changed. A current traveled down the stairs, through the stacks, and found its way to their secluded corner. Diary pages flipped by an invisible hand and then stopped. Creating a small vacuum in its wake, the supernatural wind then backed away from the book, retreated through the stacks, row after row, and finally up the stairs.

Before them now was a sketch of the dagger. It lay horizontally across two pages. On the second page was a drawing of an amber stone. The dagger was piercing it. They looked closer. This amber was different from those on the cover. There was what looked like an insect embedded within. They all knew that insects could get caught in tree sap and be preserved over the millenniums as the sap turned to amber.

Amy narrowed her eyes.“You know what. I don’t think it’s an insect. Wait here.”

She retreated from the table and disappeared into the stacks. Colin and Bara continued to look down at the diary. Running over both pages was calligraphy. Colin read.

“Mucro Libertas ac Ligatio … it’s Latin.”

They both attended Catholic schools. Along with Mass and Religion, they took Latin.

“Libertas, that’s liberty, right?”

“Liberty or freedom, and ligatio means imprisonment.” Bara put the words together. “The dagger of freedom and imprisonment.”

Amy returned with a magnifying glass and placed it over the page. She gasped and handed the lens to Colin.

“It’s not a bug,” he said. “It’s a woman!”

Bara took the glass. She peered through to the page and saw long hair, long graceful limbs, and pale, pale skin.

“It’s not a woman,” she told them. “It’s the Wisp.”

“Are you certain?”

Colin looked again. Bara didn’t need a second look.

“Yes! Absolutely!”

“What does it mean?” Amy asked.

Bara thought. Courtney wore a locket, the locket the dark-haired boy had stolen from the Wolf. Sedgewick had said that Guenevere, who was also Courtney, had worn amber around her neck contained in a locket. It had to be the same piece.

“Courtney has trapped the Wisp in amber … the Wisp wants to be set free.”

Colin put it together. “You can get close to the amber. The dagger frees her.” He continued to stare down at the diary. “Stab the amber and free the Wisp?”

They fell silent. Bara was relieved. She wouldn’t have to stab Courtney, just the amber.

“But are we sure we should set the Wisp free?” Amy asked. “I mean what is she? A ghost? A fairy? A spirit? A Slip Spirit that Sedgewick talked about? What’s a Slip? We have no idea. I think we should wait. We should read more of the diary.”

“The Wisp did save Bara from the Wolf.”

Bara hadn’t confessed it had been the dark-haired boy to save her from the Wolf. And she hadn’t told them about seeing his face in the cottage window. She wrote that off to a trick of a tired mind—or the circus dream. That one was just too weird, but if there were a time to talk, now was it. She looked at Colin. He returned her gaze intently, and she chickened out.

Did it really matter? She knew her stepmother was evil. She had to be. Courtney was the problem.

“All we know is my stepmother is a witch. She drugged me and kept an innocent man prisoner and talked about killing him. The Wolf is her pet or something, remember? She controls it. I don’t know what the Wisp is but without her, we’d never have found out about Courtney.”

Amy still looked unconvinced.

“But yeah,” Bara relented. “We should read more of the diary. Make sure.”

There was a low rumbling sound—Amy’s stomach.

“We need coffee and food first,” Bara said with a giggle.

“I’ll go.” Colin volunteered.

Amy shook her head. “They’ll be looking for you too. They’ll have noticed you missing. No one will be looking for me. Why don’t you two read ahead? See what else you can find out.”

She stood and put on her pink coat. Colin handed over money. He and Bara watched her leave and then turned back to the diary. They’d have no chance to read on. She heard them first.