Well, not until I got to the back page.
The men peered over my shoulder at the shaky drawing of a giant sunflower.
Miles made a disgusted noise. “Kids defacing books. Little brats.”
“Dandelion,” I said.
“Wrong. It’s a sunflower,” he said.
I stroked a finger over the flower as if I could draw warmth from it. “The Crayola color on the petals. Dandelion yellow. My favorite.”
It was a happy color, like my home. Talia had joked about me going through my “monochromatic phase” which was much preferred to “the sassy sixes” of my peers. Dad had praised my prodigious artistic output, and my finished drawings crowded the front of our fridge.
“I don’t understand,” Arkady said.
“This was my dad’s copy.” Buzzing filled my ears. I felt like I was spinning in place, a hollow shell in a reality comprised of a thousand shards of glass, flaying me alive.
“Are you sure?” Miles said. “Lots of kids draw flowers.”
I tapped the happy face in the middle of the flower with a small “A” for a nose. “I’m sure.”
I dragged in a breath. I wasn’t that child anymore, helplessly riding out the shockwaves of other people’s actions on my life.
“Pickle,” Arkady said, concern in his eyes, “there’s blood crawling over your skin.”
Fire laced my veins and snaked up my spine. I stoked that bonfire with a dark rage that blazed behind my eyes, threatening to ignite everything.
Sherlock Holmes famously said, “…when you have excluded the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
This was mine: My father had taken away my magic. He’d then reached out to a Jezebel with some kind of coded message, making him more deeply entwined with this mystery than I’d ever imagined. Had he somehow always known what I was? Was this book part of some long con?
Was I?
“Hey, breathe.” Miles kept his breathing slow and measured until I had matched it. “What do you want to do?”
I bundled up all my complicated emotions around my dad and shut them down along with my sputtering blood armor. I’d spent the past fifteen years in a state of uncertainty around him and I’d had enough of the past hanging over me. It was time for answers—and for closure. “Find out Adam Cohen’s game once and for all.”
And hope it didn’t cost me everything.
Chapter 2
I tossed the cell into the lockbox and carried everything to the kitchen to bring home with me when we left. “Let’s finish up already.”
After a round of rock, paper, scissors to see who’d pick the lock, which I was too distracted to play and Miles flat-out refused, Arkady broke in.
It wasn’t an office, but a darkened stairwell leading into a basement. Arkady flicked the light switch but when nothing happened, he pushed Miles in front. “Get going.”
“Scared?” Miles smirked.
“Hardly, but exploring creepy basements is a stupid white-person move. People of color are infinitely smarter than that.” He waved us goodbye. “Call me if you survive.”
Miles pulled a coin out of his pocket and tossed it into the darkness. “No motion-activated traps.”
“Ooh, brains and a pretty face.” Arkady prodded Miles. “Move along, Mr. Badass.”
Miles called up a ball of flame and he and I peered into the gloom. The way seemed clear. My patience was frayed and I wanted to go home and brood, so I manifested my full-body blood armor and shoved past Miles. The top step creaked ominously but nothing happened.
“Stick close,” I said.
We crept down the stairs.
I stepped into the large unfinished room. “There’s nothing—”
A length of orange yarn about the thickness of my thigh shot down from the ceiling and knotted around my ankle, yanking me upside down and into the air. Red-hot stabbing pain flared through the old injury on my right thigh. I did an ab curl to grab for the knot, but more yarn—purple this time—wrapped around my wrist, flinging me sideways toward the wall. My curses turned to shrieks.
Was my armor impact-proof or was I about to hit like a crash test dummy, my skull splatting like a cantaloupe? I tried to protect my head with my free hand, only to have another knot wrap around it and jerk my arm straight. I flailed my left leg and, in response, a blue strand snagged and bound it, flipping me.
Could this get more undignified? I was splayed spread eagle on my back in mid-air, my limbs tightly imprisoned, but at least I’d come to a dead stop without colliding into the wall. And people accused me of being a pessimist.
Miles hadn’t fared any better except he lay on his side. “A fucking spiderweb. Are you kidding me?”
I wrenched on the yarn but it defied my low-level enhanced strength. “It’s kind of poetic if you think about it. A Weaver, knotting her prey.”
“That armor of yours fireproof?” Miles said. “I could burn us out.”
“Go for it.”
Fire burst forth from his forearms and the yarn knotted against his flesh glowed red. Yeah, show that string who was boss.
The fire crackled higher; the room grew hotter.
Sweat ran down the side of my face inside my armor, both dank and ticklish. I was boiling in my own protective suit. “Fought bravely. Died sous-vide.” was not going to be my epitaph.
“Hurry up,” I growled.
His magic flared so bright and high that it almost licked the ceiling. The yarn crackled.
“Gotcha,” he said.
Uh-huh.
The yarn sizzled, the room filling with a noxious black smoke that sent us into paroxysms of coughing. His magic abruptly shut down, with no real harm done to the yarn.
Never send a man to do a woman’s job.
“My turn.” A sharp blood dagger, my weapon of choice, did zip against the heavy fibers. Huh.
“Much better,” Miles bitched.
“That was just step one.” Dropping my magic armor only bought me the slightest wiggle room, but it allowed me to send a silky red ribbon into the green yarn manacling
