I dream of a boy with turquoise ringlets. His face is underwater, and his eyes scream for me. Seaweed wraps around his limbs, tangling with his fingers and toes. A bubble escapes from his open mouth. He lies among starfish, and waits.
I wake with a gasp, desperate for air. It floods my lungs, and my muscles relax. I still feel it on my skin, that cold dreamwater.
Onyx and Addy are waiting for me in the potions room.
"Wow, Lily," Addy says, taking in my rumpled clothes and dishevelled hair, "you really aren't a morning person."
"No, I'm not," I grumble. If it wasn't for that creepy vision I'd never wake up this early, but Amanda's coming in today and I want to be prepared. I don't like witchy stuff jumping up on me, and this was definitely witchy stuff.
Did you remember to water your cactuses? Onyx asks. The leftmost one has gone brown.
"Shut up and give me the griffin tears."
If he cares about the cactuses so much, he can water them himself. I've got a case to solve.
Addy hands me a bottle of griffin's tears. They're not what I expect. Griffins are only found in the southern deserts, so I've never seen one, but I somehow expected their tears to be clear and sparkly. Instead they're like molten bronze, thick and syrupy.
When sunlight strikes a griffin's tear it turns to liquid bronze or gold, Onyx explains, depending on the breed of griffin. It's why griffins only cry in the dark.
I pause, the bottle suspended between my fingers. "You didn't go make a griffin cry, did you?"
It was a favour from a friend. I have many friends, he tells me, rather smugly.
Addy marvels at the tears as they drip into the cauldron's steam. If I though this were a short-term curse I could've gone with standard crocodile tears, but anything longer than 20 years needs heavier stuff for detection.
I add a handful of gingko berries and top it off with 20 carats of fire quartz. When I drop Amanda's blood in, a cloud of deep burgundy smoke rises from the cauldron. A terrible reek comes with it.
Addy covers her nose with her sleeve. Onyx takes cover behind a desk.
"It's definitely a curse," I announce, gagging on the last word. "And it's been around a very long time."