CHAPTER ONE

An explosion shattered the morning air, startling Lucy Banks so she made a mess of the big red X she was putting on the Yangtze River. She glared at it. The only wall space she had left for her map of China was above her headboard. The rest of the walls were thickly plastered with brightly colored maps liberally covered with red Xs and blue arrows marking the spots where Lucy planned to travel.

She capped her marker and jumped down from her bed to investigate. The open window was only a few steps away, and a moment later,

leaning out precariously, she saw what had caused the commotion. Pink smoke billowed from the windows atop the tower jutting up from the old mansion at the end of the street. Dee was experimenting again, and it looked like this one had “not gone according to plan,” as he would say. She wanted to make sure he was okay, even though he’d escaped any harm so far and she didn’t expect this time to be any different, and to help him with the inevitable cleanup. But there were a few things she had to do before she could safely escape the house. Lucy headed for her bedroom door. On the way, she kicked two T-shirts, a pair of shorts, and one sandal under the bed and pulled the duvet up over a messy sheet. She picked up three issues of National Geographic and tried to squeeze them into her bookcase alongside

the previous five years of issues. Giving up, she put them on top, under- neath her grandfather’s globe. It was one of her most-prized posses- sions, with its countries all different colors that blurred together when she gave it a twirl. She longed to visit every country—at least she could dream about the travel adventures she would have some day. Although, it was annoying that so many names and borders had changed since her grandfather was a young man. She hummed a little tune to herself. Next year at school she would start taking a proper geography class. Her glance around the room fell on the diorama of a strange and exotic country, the product of her vivid imagination. She had spent the spring building it on an old card table wedged into the corner between the foot of her bed and the wall. It was her pride and joy, but it did seem to collect dust and cat hair. She pulled one of the T-shirts out from under the bed. She used it to give the three-dimensional model a quick flick and called it dusting. Lucy looked back at the room from the doorway and nodded to herself. Now she could say that she had tidied her room. Clattering down the stairs, she hit the bottom step with a thump. To her right, the TV in the family room blared the football game. “Where are you off to, pet?” her father called over the ruckus of a crowd gone wild over a goal. Lucy crossed the hall. Her dad was in his customary Saturday afternoon position, slouching in his cracked leather armchair, his stockinged feet on the coffee table. His big toe poked out of a hole in his left sock and a large bowl of chips rested on his tummy. Lucy’s cat, Peebles, nestled into what was left of his lap. Lucy sighed as she looked around the shabby room. There wouldn’t be any trips to new places any time soon. “I’m off to see Dee, Dad.” He clearly hadn’t heard the explosion over the roar of the television so there was no point in mentioning it. Lucy’s mother came out of the kitchen. “You need to clean up your room before you go out.” Parents were so totally predictable. Lucy rolled her eyes and then, catching her mother’s stern gaze, said, “I’ve already done it.” She had her hand on the doorknob and was almost out the front door when her mother said, “Stop right there, missy, the laundry needs to be hung on the line. The dryer is on the blink again.” Lucy huffed a heavy sigh. The dryer had been on the blink since, like, 2013. “Why?” she moaned. “That’s such a drag. Didn’t you hear that explosion? There was pink smoke, Mom.” “I did.” Her mother’s mouth set in a thin line. “I suppose that boy is up to his silly experiments again.” It drove Lucy crazy that her mother refused to call Dee by his name. He’d moved in with his aunt four years ago, and ever since, her mom had only ever called him “that boy.” But Lucy didn’t care what her mom thought. She and Dee had been best friends ever since the first day Dee was in her class. Lucy had flubbed a science experi- ment spectacularly and Dee stayed to help her clean up the mess so she wouldn’t get a detention. “I have to go and see if Dee needs some help.” Lucy made sure she put some extra emphasis on Dee’s name. “And find out what this latest excitement is all about.” “I’ll give you plenty of excitement if you don’t do as your mother asked right this minute,” her father barked from the doorway of the family room. “Yeah, yeah, I’m going.” Lucy’s shoulders slumped as she followed the jagged crack in the linoleum that snaked toward the dim corner of the kitchen where the washer and dryer lurked. The faint smell of mildew assailed her nostrils as she pried open the door to the washing machine. “Ugh,” she groaned, wrinkling her nose as she pulled out a wad of soggy clothes. Why couldn’t her parents get their act together and get the dryer fixed? She loved them, at least she was pretty sure she did, but there were times, like right now, when she wished she’d drawn a better set of parents—one where at least one of them could hold down a job. She would do pretty much anything to live in a nice house where everything worked. Resentment filled her chest as she pegged out the clothes as quickly as she could. Her parents never even tried to make things any better. They just sailed along, telling each other stories about how the next job would be the one to make them all rich. All the while their house quietly collapsed around them. At least it wasn’t a big load of washing today, and she soon had everything on the line and snapping in a fresh breeze. But doing laundry was hardly the adventure that she craved. She made her escape, grabbing a chocolate bar from her mother’s not-so-secret stash at the back of a kitchen drawer, before she was given another dreary chore. As she walked down the street peeling the wrapper off the chocolate, Lucy heard another blast, and this time, purple smoke billowed from the tower windows. “Oh man,” she murmured, “What is it this time?” She finished the chocolate bar and broke into a sprint. Gravel crunched under the soles of her sneakers as Lucy rushed up the circular driveway to the old mansion. She loved this house. She knew that Dee often had to go home to an empty house because his Aunt Delia was an emergency room physician, but Lucy didn’t see that as necessarily a bad thing. She wished that sometimes she could do the same. It would be lovely to have a house to herself, especially a house like this. The flower beds were mounded with early summer flowers and lined with pretty stones. The smell of fresh earth rose around her. In the distance, coming from behind the mansion, she could hear a power mower. She bounded up the three freshly painted steps to the porch and approached the double front doors of the mansion. They were bracketed with yellowing marble columns on either side supporting the roof above the wide veranda. A bird’s nest perched on the ledge that ran above the front doors. She had to use both hands to lift the brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. When she dropped it back against the wood, a boom sounded behind the door followed shortly by the click of high heels on a hard surface. The door slowly swung open to reveal a tall, slim woman wearing a slightly harassed expression. Her hair was swept up in a messy bun that released strands of hair around her face, and there was a smudge of what looked like cocoa powder on her left cheek. Warm baking smells wafted toward Lucy, and she inhaled appreciatively. “Hi, Aunt Delia.” Lucy loved Aunt Delia. Dee’s aunt had never seemed the least bit fazed that Lucy lived in the most ramshackle house on the street. Delia Ringrose smiled as she wiped her hands on the apron covering her black skirt and pretty blouse and pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up to the bridge of her nose. “Come on in, Lucy,” she said as she swung the door wide. She opened her arms wide and Lucy stepped into the hug, delighting in the softness and warmth of the embrace, and the faint scent of Aunt Delia’s delicate perfume. “Dee’s in his tower,” said Aunt Delia as she released Lucy. “But I’m sure you’ve already figured that out. He’s fine—I went and checked—but he’s made another unholy mess.” “Well, I’m here to help.” Lucy smiled as she scooted past the older woman. Lucy stepped into a broad foyer with dark wood paneling and a diamond pattern of white and black marble tiles on the floor. A sparkly chandelier swinging gently overhead scattered prisms of light across the walls and floor. “I’m not sure what experiment ‘has not gone according to plan’ today, but can you go up and take it from here? I have something in the oven . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked anxiously back down the hall toward the kitchen. A faint smell of a cake scorching drifted toward them. “Hopefully, Dee’s already started cleaning up,” Aunt Delia said. “And there will be a piece of chocolate cake ready for you when you’re done.” “Sure . . . and great!” said Lucy. There was no such thing as too much chocolate. She paused, one hand on the banister. “Are we celebrating something?” Aunt Delia nodded. “It’s Litha, the summer solstice.” “What’s so special about that?” Lucy wondered. “According to my Irish grandmother, the summer solstice was one of the three Spirit Nights of the year,” Aunt Delia said, “the other two being Beltane and Samhain. It’s when the veil between the worlds appears exceptionally thin.” She turned and rushed back down the hallway toward the kitchen. “It’s also one of the eight Sabbats, accord- ing to the Pagans.” “Cool,” said Lucy as she mounted the main staircase up to the first landing. She loved it when Aunt Delia, normally a no-nonsense doctor, got all mystical. Lucy thought the world needed more magic and mystery. She turned left, walked to the end of the hall and then up the spiral staircase that went to the tower room. The spiral staircase was steep, and Lucy’s knees began to shake from climbing. Soon she was outside a half-open door on the landing at the top of the tower. The first thing she saw was the lab bench covered in a complicated arrangement of glass containers and tubes and jars of all kinds of strange-looking ingredients. A burner, still lit, was surrounded by shards of broken beaker, and a thick wet paste dripped onto the floor. Beside the lab bench stood Dee. His back was to her and he stared out the window, his clenched fists digging into his hips.