Page 26 of With the Key in the Office

“It will thrive,” Tamsin said, fierce out of nowhere. “I will sing to it, and it will hate my playlist and still grow.”

They grinned at each other. The energy in the room softened.

Jessie set the hourglass on the mantel and pressed two fingers to the return form. It hovered. Ink filled in answers in that tidy type that isn’t a font so much as a suggestion from Upstairs. She slid the support token from her pocket. “Time to go,” she said. “We leave you to do the boring, holy work of dinner.”

Tamsin stopped us at the door. “If my dad calls, I’ll tell him we didn’t burn down the house,” she said. “I’ll tell him we have a lamp that tattles.”

“Tell him you like each other,” I said. “Even when you don’t.”

Tamsin surprised me by hugging me, quick and fierce, the way certain kids hug when they decide you passed a test you didn’t know you were taking. Then she let go, embarrassed at her own sincerity, and vanished down the hall, already arguing with a playlist.

Victoria walked us to the stoop. The sky over Franklin Park had turned the color of a ripe plum. She rubbed her temple and then dropped her hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I didn’t want to be the villain of my own house.”

“You aren’t,” Jessie said. “You’ll do fine. Email if the lamp gets mouthy. Or if you need additional help.”

We touched the charm. Air folded. The Academy’s corridor received us with its familiar draft and its scent of old stone and new plans. Jessie jotted down the required information, sealed the return envelope with a thumb, and the thing vanished with the softest pop, as if a soap bubble had remembered it had somewhere to be.

Jaylyn sagged against the wall and laughed into her sleeve. “I kept waiting for a raccoon to burst from a cabinet,” she said. “That was gentler than I expected.”

“It was still a fiasco,” Jessie said, cheerful in a tired way. “A small one. Those are the kind that change a life. We can throw fireworks. Most days we hand out hourglasses and tell people to talk.”

Jaylyn bumped my shoulder. “We’re good at the small,” he said. “Even when dirt decides to hang in midair.”

The four of us walked toward the Godmother wing. A student darted past with a stack of books and a grin, the kind people wear when they’ve solved something the world told them was too small to count. The day had miles left in it, but the part that mattered had already done its work. We had stood in a kitchen, we had watched a basil plant stage a protest, and we had left two people with a lamp that would light at the right time. For this job, that counted as a win.

14

JESSIE

Mr. Vanderflit caughtme outside the supply room with a stack of papers to grade. His hair was messy, his tie looked wrinkled, and his eyes carried that combination of worry and purpose that meant he was about to ask for a favor and expected me to say yes.

I stiffened, wondering what more he could want from me. Being a new teacher was already enough to fill up my days, and evenings, preparing for my classroom, but I’d been managing to wedge the investigation with the ghost and the key around everything else I was doing. I didn’t mind, because I wanted to help Cendi, but I was hesitant to take on more responsibilities.

“Ms. Crayne,” he said, soft enough that the corridor didn’t steal the words. “I need a substitute for Magical Creatures, lower division. One period. The regular instructor had a situation with an owlbear permit.”

Looking at the man, my heart softened. He hadn’t quite been himself since the key was stolen. I can’t even imagine what that would’ve been like, to finally have hope of finding my lost friend, only to have it all dashed away from me.

“I can do it,” I said before confidence had time to raise objections. “What lesson?”

“Camouflage and cohabitation,” he said. “Elementary safety around small shapeshifters. You’ll have the same cohort you met two nights ago.” A quick lift of his brow said Goldie and her cadre. “They like you. Or at least they behave for you.”

“They behaved because Cendi was scowling behind me,” I said, which earned a flicker of a smile from him. “I’ll take it though.”

He pressed a brass key into my palm. “Creature lab three,” he said. “The syllabus is in the binder under the lectern. And Jessie.” His tone turned a half shade warmer. “You’re doing well. Even when it doesn’t look that way from inside your own head.”

“I’ll teach the class,” I said, because if I acknowledged kindness I might cry, and he did not need that at nine in the morning.

The lab smelled of hay and lemon oil and the faintest hint of singe. Glass terrariums lined the far wall, lids latched, humidity just so. A net enclosure held a handful of moth-bright sprites that tucked their wings when the room stirred. Two hedgehog-sized puffs snored in a straw pen with small whistles on the exhale, which would have been adorable even if I hadn’t needed an anchor.

I set my bag by the lectern and checked the binder. A tidy hand had laid out objectives. Identify differences between mimicry, camouflage, and shifting. Practice consent rules around sentient small forms. Review chameleons versus animal shifters. The page flagged a caution about chameleons blending in high-traffic corridors.

Chameleons. My stomach did a small, sober turn. The section ran three pages and didn’t waste words. Human-presentingmagic that borrows other humans’ faces. Limited to people, not animals. Blending that works on more than color, that lifts pattern and posture and the way light lands, then folds a body down into the wallpaper until eyes slide past. Not true invisibility; a kind of social gravity. Their changes don’t grant memories. They guess, they watch, they miss small things under pressure, and certain wards ignore them because their edge dips under the threshold.

I touched the corner of a diagram. The key on Vanderflit’s desk. The double wearing Cendi’s face. The way our nets slid off the thing as if oil had slicked the air. We kept saying shifter. Shifter fit and didn’t fit. A chameleon could have slipped into the staff corridor, mirrored Cendi’s shape, and coasted on attention blindness. It would explain how every restraint skimmed. It would explain the wrongness when the glamour ran long in the orchard. We could be chasing a chameleon.

Footsteps in the hall snapped me back to the room. I set open the pen for the puffs, rolled the lid to half, checked the wand safeties by habit, then breathed deep and put on the calm I wear like a useful jacket. I might have just gotten a break in the case, but I still had a class to teach. I could talk to Cendi and the others when I was done.

The door swung open and in came a small parade of kids with more elbows than sense. Goldie entered first with her chin up and hair doing whatever it wanted. The tall boy from the dare cluster trailed her, trying to decide whether to be a leader today. Pigtails arrived with a friend from potions and a backpack full of snacks that had already tried to escape twice. Two more filed in, smaller, bright-eyed, the kind you want to wrap in bubble wrap and also hand a wand.