El is waiting for us in from of her parent's house when we pull up. Felix doesn't even bother putting it in park, he just pulls up along the sidewalk and El jumps right in the backseat, hauling a bulging backpack with her.

“Circe, did you pack everything you own?” Felix asks, eyeing the backpack. It's practically as big as El herself.

“We have no idea how long this is going to take! And last time you two went on an adventure, you ended up stranded on the other side of the world. I wanted to be prepared.”

“If there is any higher power out there looking out for me,” I say, turning around in the front passenger seat to look at her, “this trip won't be anywhere near as exciting as that one was.”

“Hey,” Felix says as he pulls away from the house and starts off down the street. “I had a lot of fun during that trip.”

“You got kidnapped,” I remind him.

“I got you,” he replies with that cocky grin of his.

El pretends to gag behind him.

“Are we picking up Martin too?” Felix asks.

“No, he's in Chico visiting his grandparents this weekend.”

I'm privately a little relieved. I like Martin well enough, but I feel better about this just being the three of us: me, El, and Felix. I don't know what's going to happen, or how I'll react to whatever does end up happening. They’re the only ones I'd feel totally comfortable sharing this experience with.

“All right, here we go then,” says Felix, and he hits the 'start' button on his car's GPS. The coordinates are already entered, and it pulls up the quickest route in an instant.

“Six hours,” he says. “That's not too bad. It'll be about nine when we get there. We can grab dinner, find a hotel, and get started first thing in the morning.”

I don't want to have to wait until tomorrow morning, but I know we don't have much choice. My entire body is tense with some confusing combination of eagerness, anxiety, and terror, and I have to force myself to lay my head back and relax a little. If I stay like this the entire ride, I'll probably end up having a stroke before we even get there.

“I grew up in that area,” I say, closing my eyes and trying not to feel so sick to my stomach. “I never realized I was still so close to where my mom and I had lived. Or where she died, at least. We must have lived somewhere around there, if she was grocery shopping when she collapsed.”

I feel a hand reach over to squeeze mine, and I know it's Felix's. I squeeze back.

Spending the entire six hour drive as a ball of stress doesn't appeal to me, so I try to sleep as much as I can, half-listening to El and Felix's conversations as I drift in and out of consciousness.

It's dark when I finally rouse completely, and I peel my forehead off the window to look blearily at the digital clock illuminated on the car's dashboard.

“Eight forty—are we almost there?” I ask through a barely suppressed yawn.

“Sleeping Beauty's finally up?” El quips. “Thank Solomon. Now can we stop somewhere to eat? I'm starving and my legs are killing me back here.”

“You're about a foot tall; you have plenty of leg room back there,” Felix replies, glancing back at her in the rear view mirror. “But fine, I'll find somewhere to stop. You hungry, Adam?”

“Always.”

“Anyway, to answer your question, yeah, we're almost there. Maybe twenty, thirty minutes away? We can probably just find a motel near here and drive the rest of the way in the morning.”

“Ugh, I never want to get in a car again,” El groans. “Look, a Denny's is coming up at the next exit.”

Felix merges into the right lane, and he takes the exit, following the signs that lead weary travelers to street that's home to all-night diners, gas stations, and cheap motels just off the freeway.

It's a lot cooler in Southern California than it is this time of year in Northern California, and it's a relief when I step out of the car in the Denny's parking lot and I'm not immediately hit by a ninety degree wave of heat. El, on the other hand, starts shivering.

“Damn, why is it so cold? It's June!” She climbs back in the back seat of the car before Felix can lock it and rummages around in her backpack until she pulls out a sweatshirt.

While we wait for her, I take a good look at the lot around us. I haven't been back in SoCal since the summer before sophomore year of high school, and it's hard to work out exactly how I feel about it.

On one hand, there's something comfortingly familiar even just standing here; something in the air, maybe, that I didn't even notice I was missing until I came back to it. On the other hand, it's not exactly like I have a lot of warm, fuzzy memories of the years I spent living down here. It's where I grew up, but I can think of less than half a dozen places I'd actually want to visit while we're here. Even the thought of the possibility of driving past my old high school makes me feel a little sick to my stomach.

“All right, come on. Hopefully it'll be warmer inside,” El says once she's pulled her sweater over her head, and she marches up the sidewalk to the diner's doors.

“Coming?” Felix asks, stopping when he realizes I don't immediately follow and looking back at me with a raised eyebrow.

“What? Oh—yeah. Sorry.” I hurry to catch up with him.

“Have you been here before? You looked like maybe you knew this place.”

“No, I've never been here. I mean, I've been to Denny's before obviously, but not this one specifically. I just got distracted.”

“Probably because you haven't eaten in about six hours,” he grins at me. “I'm surprised you've survived this long, I would have thought you'd waste away to nothing by now.”

“Oh, ha ha,” I reply dryly. I have to say it loudly to drown out the rumbling of my stomach.

I'm not the only one of us who's starving though, and we order so much food between the three of us that the waitress has to make about a dozen trips to bring everything out to our table.

Between stuffing our faces, we discuss more about our plans for tomorrow, and the different options we can take from there once we figure out what new information we've actually got. There's not much we can plan in advance without knowing exactly what we'll find, but it feels good to at least try.

Eventually our plates are cleared, and we're just waiting on the check while Felix sips on his second cup of coffee. I don't know how he does it; I can't have caffeine anytime after five or I'll be up all night long.

“Well,” he says, speaking into the lull in the conversation that has just fallen. “I suppose now is as good a time as any to bring up what I've found out so far.”

I was in the middle of making straw snakes, but my head snaps up at his words. “What do you mean? You've found something else out? And you haven't mentioned it?”

He sets his cup down, looking almost guilty. “I didn't want to say anything until I was sure I actually had something worth saying. Up until now, it didn't help at all. But now that we've got a location, maybe even access to people who remember your mother, however briefly—I think what I've researched could be of some use now.”

“What is it?” I demand.

“Yeah, quit being cagey,” El adds, leaning on the table in interest.

“I looked into all the female magicians who went missing between eighteen and twenty-five years ago,” Felix begins to explain while El and I listen with rapt attention. “We know your mother was in her early twenties based on the estimate of the doctors on her death certificate, but we have no way of knowing how long before her death she had dropped out of magician society. For all we know, she ran away when she was fourteen or fifteen. But we know it had to have been before Adam was born, because there are no cases from that time frame of a young woman and an infant going missing. So I combed through probably a thousand issues of the Sorcerer's Times searching for every reported missing person's case, which I then narrowed down based on age and race, making sure to weed out those who were eventually found.”

“When did you have time to do this?” I ask, so taken aback by the effort he must have invested in this research that my frustration at once again being left in the dark suddenly seems petty.

He shrugs as if it doesn't matter. “I found the time. Anyway, I was left with about about twenty women across the entire U.S. We know she ended up here in California, but she could have come from anywhere; which will certainly make things harder for us. And we can't even be sure that she was reported missing at all. So few magicians ever seriously go missing, because all you have to do is contact the Department of Missing and At Risk Magicians, and they'll help track the person. So we have to assume that either no one reported your mother missing for some reason, or that she was able to break the tracking spell whenever it was placed—which is, honestly, unlikely, and almost certainly would have been mentioned in the newspapers if that were the case. My point is, there's a very good chance that none of the  women I uncovered are your mother. But, on the off chance that one of them is, I figured it wouldn't hurt to have photographs to show if we meet anyone who might be able to identify her by face, if not by name.”

“You have photos?” I say, standing up so abruptly that I bang my hip against the table. “Where are they? Let's look at them!”

“They're still in the car, in a binder in my bag,” Felix says, making a face at me. “Sit down, we still have to pay.”

I can't sit back down, not now that I've just been told that there might be a picture of my mother in the car I just spent six hours driving in.

“Why didn't you show me? Damn it, Felix, I might recognize her if I saw a picture!”

Felix's eyes go suddenly wide, and I realize he hadn't considered that. “I—you told me that you don't remember anything about her,” he stammers. “I just assumed—”

“But I might remember if I saw a photograph! We could have figured out who she was weeks ago!”

There aren't many people in the diner, but the few that are sitting nearby turn to look at our table. I make an effort to lower my voice.

“I'll go get them,” El says quickly, jumping to her feet. I can't help but notice the look she gives me; almost concerned. “Where's your bag, Felix?”

“The trunk,” he replies, and he passes her the keys.

She half-jogs out the diner, heading for the parking lot.