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“Now open your eyes, and you will see it.”

It was exactly as she’d said. I saw a river of blue smoke, like the tail of a comet. It pulsed out of Violetta’s body, cutting around the mall, following the exact path we’d taken here.

“I see it,” I whispered, afraid that if I raised my voice, I’d blow the smoke away.

“Good. Now, try to sense a nearly identical trail of energy. The energy that belongs to Violetta’s sister.”

I nodded, keeping my lips firmly pressed together. Then I pushed out my senses—stretching and prodding, poking and seizing—until my own life energy snagged against something very familiar.

“I can feel it,” I said quietly, rising to my feet.

I followed the feeling, and within a few blocks, I could see it too: a trail of blue smoke, slightly lighter and looser than Violetta’s. But it sang the same song.

We chased the trail for a few more blocks after that, until it dead-ended in a small park.

“Do you see her?” the ghost in Violetta’s body asked me.

I looked around, then shook my head. “No. But the energy here…it feels strange.”

“Strange how?”

“Strange like…” I tried to find words for the feeling. “…like the energy is there but not there. Like it’s shifted somehow.” I gasped. “I know what happened to the kids.” I waved my hand through the air in front of me, right where the blue trail ended. My fingers brushed against something. “The kids are invisible.”

I’d felt something very similar the day I’d met the invisible stranger. I hadn’t seen him, but I’d heard him. And I’d felt him too.

“Are you all right?” I called out to the kids.

“Violetta?” said a small voice. “Is that you? Help us! We’re trapped!”

“Trapped how?” the ghost asked.

Another child answered. “Someone cursed us!”

“No, not cursed.Infected,” said a third child. “I was the first one infected. And when I touched the others, it spread to them.”

“Are you saying you kids have been infected with…well, some kind of invisibility flu?” I asked them.

“Yeah!”

“An invisibility flu!”

“Help us!”

And I’d touched one of the kids. I guess that meant I’d been infected now too. If we didn’t figure out a way to fix this, I could spend the rest of my life as ‘the invisible Apprentice’.

I looked at Nixi. “How do we cure this curse?”

“Don’t worry. We can fix this,” she assured me. “I just need to teach you how to navigate the layers between dimensions.”

“Oh, is that all?” I choked out.

She grabbed my hands again. “You worry too much, Savannah. Now, concentrate. This isn’t all that different from the spell I taught you to sense a person’s energy. Except this time, you need to sense dimensional energy.”

I felt my jaw drop.

“You can do this,” she told me. “Close your eyes and reach out with your senses.”

I shuttered my eyes. And somehow that made this all feel a lot less scary.