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“A séance, yeah,” Miles replied thoughtfully. “That might help us connect to her. Let’s set it up right here.”
We gathered around the fireplace in the corner and sat in a circle. Grant conjured a few candles, and we all joined hands.
“Calm your minds,” Miles encouraged. “We must expel all dissonance and tune ourselves to her spirit.”
I drew a deep breath and relaxed my shoulders. From beside me, I felt Lucas and Talia do the same.
“Professor?” Miles called out. “I think there’s something you want to tell my friends—”
Miles stopped dead in his tracks, and he stared at something I couldn’t see. I knew it had to be the Lady of the Tower.
A few beats passed before he said, “Is that so…? Let me help you speak with my friends.”
Miles reached his hand out to thin air, and within moments, an ethereal form appeared before our eyes. The woman had to be around fifty years old when she died. She wore a long, flowing dress, and she hovered several inches above the ground. She had kind eyes, unlike the first time I’d seen her in the library. We all got to our feet.
“I’m so glad you found me,” Angelica said, her soft, ghostly tone filling the room. “I deeply apologize. I struggle to make my presence known at times. Since the Waning began, it takes a great deal of energy. Even my magic is drained as a result.”
“That means we may not have much time,” I said. “Professor, you’ve been trying to contact us.”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “I appeared to you in the library. What you were about to do was very dangerous, and I had to stop you.”
“What can you tell us?” Lucas asked.
“I know many things,” Angelica said. “The first of which is that you must do everything in your power to banish Professor Leto. I have stuck around this tower year after year to ensure that he never returns.”
“You’ve met him, then?” Grant asked. “Before or after you died?”
Angelica frowned. “Both, I’m afraid. It was the demon himself who killed me.”
A shiver traveled down my spine, and I held up her yearbook. “This is from forty years ago, just before you died. That’s when the demon was here before, wasn’t it? It’s the same time Adrik Harvey died in his wand shop. The demon killed you both.”
“Yes. He used a spell to poison me.”
“You told us that History will repeat itself. He has come to kill. Return to the past to vanquish the demon for good,” I reminded her. “What did you mean by that? How do we vanquish him?”
Angelica’s eyebrows pinched together, like she couldn’t quite remember.
“Ghosts are often confused,” Miles reminded us. “Time can seem jumbled to them—”
“No,” Angelica protested. “I remember. One of Professor Leto’s victims sent him back to hell. But that… that was after my death. The details are… fuzzy. You must find out how they did it. Then you can do the same.”
Grant pressed his lips together. “This person could still be alive. If we figure out who it was, we can talk to them and learn how they did it.”
“Unless the victim didn’t make it,” Talia mused. “Adrik was one of his victims, and his ghost threatened to kill demons. What if he was the one who banished him?”
“Then we need to fix that music box and get answers,” Lucas insisted. Grant was still working on that.
“Professor,” I said. “We found your yearbook while searching for clues about the Oaken Wands. We’ve heard there may be a Wand inside the school. Do you know anything about it?”
“Yes,” she said, sounding more confident. “One of my former students, a man named Nicholas Tucker, brought the Seer Wand to the school many years ago.”
“That’s my grandfather,” I remarked.
“He came to me just before I died,” she said. “We spoke of the space-bending spell inside the school. He wanted to know if he could bend reality to hide a specific object, though he didn’t say what it was at the time. I got the sense that whatever it was, he wanted no one to ever find it. I said, Why bother with new spells, Nicholas? There’s already one place inside the school not a soul will dare set foot. It was only after I died that I witnessed him hide the Wand.”
“And he went to that place?” Lucas asked. “Where not a soul would dare set foot?”
“The Vanishing Stairwell!” I realized.
