She barely kept from giving a little shout at her discovery when her fingertips brushed the same netting lining her sleeves as lined her skirting. But why?

“We must all be men of science here in the New World,” he pointed out.

“What if there was another Weather Witch present at each of those moments?” she asked. “What if I was mistaken for being something I am not?”

“Accidents happen,” Meggie said with a slow and solemn nod.

“Accidents…” The Maker shook his head. “No. How? If there was another, we would have to find it. Gather it in and do whatever I must do to Make it. But…” He ran his hands through his hair and shook it out. “How? How?” he demanded, and Jordan scooted away, more frightened of him now than she had been before. “By some strange transference of power? That is the only imaginable way … No. Highly unlikely at best.” Still he paced, his hair becoming wilder and his face more frightening with every turn he made. “There are no people around you who have been in each place. It would mean the involvement of at least one additional Witch. It would mean there is one loose in Philadelphia and one loose here.”

“Yes. Perhaps,” Jordan whispered, her voice soft with desperation. “Think on it. At the Reckoning the Wardens held both my body and my chain … Are they not Witches, twisted as they now might be?”

The Maker paused and stared at her. “Yes.”

“Could they not have transferred a charge … if excited? What Makes a Witch?”

“Heritage and the proper trigger. Most frequently pain.”

“Must pain always be physical?” Jordan whispered. “Is not emotion as powerful as physical pain? Perhaps even more powerful?”

He dropped suddenly into a crouch before her and she drew back in fear. “Yes, I guess so. But pain can be regulated. It teaches control. The metal of the chain…” His head tilted, his eyes searching her face for some clue. “But the party…”

“Was emotionally charged,” Jordan said, recalling the debates, the entertainment, all of it.

Meg came forward and stood between them, her small hand on her father’s shoulder.

“A Witch had been found once before in my household; could there not be another lurking? Leaving us unawares?”

He rubbed a heavy hand from his chin up his jaw and snarled his fingers into his own hair again. “The chain conducting I can fathom. But…” His gaze raked over her, examining her body language but finally falling frozen on her underskirt.

Jordan blushed and flipped the fabric back down.

“No,” he said, grabbing the hem and throwing it back so fiercely Jordan and Meggie both gave a shout of protest. “This is the dress you wore at the party?”

“And ever since, minus my corset and stockings. And shawl,” Jordan mumbled, barely keeping herself from smacking his hand—it was unnervingly close to her thigh.

“What is this web?” he demanded, tugging at it. “It is not even attached”—he turned it to examine the artistry of the decorative front—“to the design. It is no clever method of uniformly working the back of someone’s embroidery handiwork.” He ran his hands roughly up the outside of the rest of the skirt and the side of her bodice, saying, “It is something entirely separate, something designed to nearly encase you in a shroud of metal … In a cage of conductive material. Expensive conductive material…” His expression shifted from one of horror to one of wild wonder. “Someone must hate you with a finely burning passion,” he concluded, flipping her skirts back down and staring at the wall, his mind puzzling things together. “Someone connected to this dress.”

“It was a gift from my very best friend,” she said.

His eyebrows rose simultaneously.

“My very best friend,” Jordan repeated. “But it was crafted by a strange little woman from the Below…”

On one of the most special days of her life as a young lady she had worn a very special gown—so special she hadn’t even realized … A gift from her very best friend.

A gift designed by a most peculiar modiste with a reputation for churlishness and oddity. Jordan jumped to her feet. It was the modiste! She had planned things out to bring her family down by first destroying both Jordan’s and her mother’s reputations.

Meg clasped her hands together and her face lit as if fired from within as she hopped from foot to foot. “See? Accidents happen! The lady is a lady, not a Witch.”

Jordan’s heart soared in her chest, exhaustion turning to elation. She was Grounded. She had been a victim of some other Weather Witch, but she was Grounded. Her mother’s name might yet be restored and the Astraeas returned to their appropriate rank.

The Maker winced at the oversimplification. “So you are not an abomination…?” He smirked. Standing, he rested his hands on his hips. The smile fell away from his face. “But you are a failure. And I can have none of those to my name. I have no choice.”

It seemed a most frighteningly desperate apology.

“I will never say a word…”

“Yes. Yes you would. You are bred to a certain standard. Your type talk if only to complain and bring down those around you.”

“No,” she insisted. “Release me and I will find my family and move us all quietly away. We will live out our days in solitude in the countryside and I will never ask nor want for more than this—just my freedom…” Her heart, so briefly flying with relief, tumbled into her stomach.

“Papá, please,” Meg asked, slowly realizing that not being a Witch could also be bad.

“It would be so much easier if you were a Witch … and there is the little matter of this morning’s strange display of magicking…”

Jordan threw her hands into the air. “I am Grounded! There must have been another Witch there.”

“He would have needed to be touching you or your dress or chain.”

“He or…” Jordan’s eyes widened and she turned slowly to the little girl still standing between them both. The little girl with big, soft eyes who wanted nothing more than for Jordan to go free and for her papá to be blameless—who wanted nothing more than for everyone to be happy. And the word tumbled out to damn and doom them all in far different ways. “… she.” And then Jordan felt it—a pain so sharp it had to be heartbreak.

Meggie gasped, hands flying up to clap over her mouth, her tiny heart-shaped face stretched and stunned. Her eyes went from Jordan to her papá and then to the board with its thick restraining belts and buckles and finally her gaze fell upon the array of her papá’s sharp tools that she cleaned daily—tools she never asked about, never dared to wonder aloud about what he used them for or why they always came to her sticky and covered with a red so dark it was brown …

He caught the child—his child—as she fell, weeping. The water nearly poured from her then, a deluge from her eyes and ten tiny rivulets running from her fingertips. Clouds moved in above her and liquid crept out of the very stones and crawled across the floor to pool at her feet and await her command.

“Oh. Oh no,” he whispered, “Meggie…”

“Papá,” she whispered, eyes wide as she stared at her fingertips and the liquid that leaked from them. “Papá … what is happening to me? I have no control…”

He shuddered but forced himself to take her tiny hands in his own. “You’re…”

“An aba—abom—abomination?” she asked, raising her eyes to ensnare his before they darted away to hide under trembling and thick eyelashes.

He dropped her hands to place a finger under her quivering chin and tip it up, again raising her eyes to his. “No. No, darling girl,” he said, fighting the tears stinging at his eyes. “You are still my bright and pretty daisy, Meggie—my dear little dove…”

Jordan fell to her knees then, her stomach rioting as realization struck. This sweet child, this tiny innocent had been damned by her own doing … Jordan bent, her broken heart racing, her stomach rebelling as she imagined every cruel thing that had been done to her being done to a child, by her father. She vomited until nothing remained in her stomach and her body shook with dry heaves, her head aching as everything came into awful focus and the pain of all the torture, and the torture of all the exhaustion of the uncertainty, took over, wrapped round her like the whip from before, and tugged her into the darkest place her mind had ever been.

Above them the cloud cover tripled, pulling in like a shroud to cover Jordan and protect its Conductor. Lightning danced from one black and roiling mass of clouds and reached out to embrace another.

The Maker gasped, cradling his child in his arms and trying to wipe away the tears that flowed from her and seemed to be never-ending. “You cannot,” he said to Jordan. “You are—”

“No,” she insisted, seeing what he saw high above. “No. I am Grounded,” she whimpered before collapsing.

He watched one set of clouds, Jordan’s clouds, whisk away to nothing and he simply knelt with Meggie, rocking back and forth as he stroked her face and said the only soothing words he knew. “It will be all right,” he promised again and again like a mantra. But it was a lie. It was all a lie.

Jordan Astraea could not be a Witch. It was a scientific impossibility based on her heritage and Bran’s knowledge. Impossible. And yet, the storm had come when she realized Meggie was a Weather Witch … If Jordan Astraea had, against all scientific reason, been Made a Weather Witch out of sorrow …

His work, his proud tradition, the idea that the little dove quivering in his grasp would not be discovered and that only those of a certain taint in their bloodline could be Made … He shook as hard as Meggie then, knowing the truth of it. That anyone—if taken far enough into the darkness—could be turned and Made.