“Did you see that?” he asked.
“What? No, I was looking at you,” Felah said.
Tone stopped the car. The road was mostly abandoned.
He saw the black figure move again.
“There!” he said.
Felah followed Tone’s finger. She saw nothing. “Maybe you should let me drive the rest of the way.”
“I’m not crazy. I saw something.”
“Maybe it was just a bear,” Felah said.
“No way. There are no bears around here.”
“Maybe it escaped from the zoo.”
“What zoo? The only zoo around here is almost ten miles away. And the bear wouldn’t head toward Target, it would head toward the woods.” Tone shook his head. “Whatever. You’re right. It’s probably nothing. Let’s go.”
They arrived on Ignatius’s street about five minutes later. The house was dark.
“Not home,” Felah said. “Maybe we can go check out Salem’s.” She had a hankering for buckeye ice cream.
“Who eats ice cream this late?” Tone asked, then he chuckled. “Oh, that’s right. I do.”
“Have you had their ice cream? It’s, like, the best ice cream I’ve ever had,” Felah said.
“No, I haven’t,” Tone said, smiling. “Maybe we could have a cone or two…”
“Or ten,” Felah muttered under her breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Let’s go,” Tone said, grumbling.
Tone shifted into drive and began to pull back out onto the street when the black shape crossed the view of their windshield. He slammed on the brakes, sending them forward, Felah almost bashing her head in on the dashboard.
“There! Did you see that?” Tone shouted.
Felah was rubbing her head. A knot had begun to form. Great, she thought, sarcastically just before school pictures. Mom’s gonna kill me. Then she shook her head. Man, I’m losing it. I've been out of school for years.
“Yeah, yeah, I saw it,” she affirmed.
“It went around the house.”
“Tone, if it’s a bear, we should call the proper authorities. Like bear patrol or something. Ow, God, can you not slam on the brakes next time? I need all my brain cells.”
“Wear your seatbelt.”
“I’m a witch; a witch in the Order of the Silver Griffins, at that. I don’t need to wear my seatbelt.”
Tone chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “Come on, let’s go check it out.”
They both got out of the car. Fear seized Felah’s heart. You can’t fear. You’re a Silver Griffin. You can handle any and everything that comes your way. Still, her hand slipped into her sleeve and pulled the wand hidden there closer to her grip. Bear or not, this is your job, isn’t it? They headed around the back of Ignatius’s house. Not a single light seemed to be on. The streetlight overhead, which was the sole source of illumination, flickered and went out.
Tone stopped and looked at Felah as if to say, ‘let’s go home, leave this one alone.’
Felah shook her head. She may be a rookie, but she wasn’t backing down from darkness. It was her job to investigate illegal uses of magic and, by Oriceran, she was going to do just that.
She walked on.
Tone whispered, “Wait up.”
Felah turned the corner around the house. She had a view of the Apples’ backyard. The grass was wild and overgrown, sunflowers lolled lazily in the wind, and a smattering of quirky toys (probably left by that weird old Ignatius Apple) had been left on the back porch.
“Pig-sty,” Felah muttered.
“There’s nothing. Let’s go,” Tone said.
Felah smiled and started laughing, mostly because she allowed herself to be spooked. Over what? Nothing. “Lonny and Calan aren’t gonna believe it!”
“Huh?”
“That Tone is getting shown up by a rook! I can’t wait to see the look on their faces when I tell them you practically wet your pants over shadows!” Felah slapped Tone on his fleshy back. His face was still pale, but she could feel the heat baking off of him. He was pissed. Perfect.
“I’m not scared!”
“Yeah, you are. You’re practically shaking in your Keds!”
“Stop it, rook!”
Felah waggled her index finger. The weight of the situation and the darkness seemed very far in her head. “Ah-ah. Here, I’ll make you a deal. You stop calling me ‘Rook’ and ‘Rookie’ and ‘Fresh Meat,’ and all those other lame pet names meant to demean me for being new, and I won’t tell anyone about your little…episode.”
Tone’s mouth twisted into a snarl, but he was silent, weighing his options. “No one ever listens to a rookie!” Tone said.
Felah kept smiling at him.
After a moment, he relented. “Fine.” Then with emphasis, “Felah.”
“Ah, I like the sound of that. My own name. How sweet it is coming from your lips—” She stopped abruptly.
“What?” Tone grunted.
Felah looked to her right at the tree line near the back of Ignatius’s yard. She heard a noise there, much like the one a man named Sean had heard in an Ohio forest not many days before. A rustling, then heavy footsteps snapping loose branches.
“Someone’s there,” Felah said. She stood a little straighter and brought her wand from her sleeve. “Show yourself,” she commanded loudly.
They watched the tree line.
Nothing came out.
“Show yourself and we’ll—”
The rustling she had heard came back, this time behind her, coming from the street, and it turned into thunderous footsteps. Before she could turn around, the Arachnid already had Tone in its clutches.
She aimed her wand, which was slick in her sweaty palm, and tried to speak a simple spell of protection, but the words wouldn’t come out.
The creature roared — a terrible sound of metal raking against metal. The stench that radiated off of it was somehow worse than the sound escaping its fanged maw. Tone was not fast enough in conjuring a spell. The spider grappled him with with six arms and ripped him in half. A rain of blood sprinkled Felah’s face, and she took off before it could drench her.
She ran across Ignatius Apple’s yard, where the high grass came up to her waist. She looked over her shoulder. All her magical knowledge disappeared from her mind, replaced with one thing—the
