Page 26

"Give me the book!"

I threw myself at her.

No magic. There wasn't any left in me. Just nine years of the mats and every scrap of fury in my body. I got exactly two steps before the air in front of me turned solid and I hit it face-first like a bird hitting the glass of a closed window.

I fell flat on my ass in the gravel.

My nose was bleeding. Somewhere behind me Sissily said my name, and somewhere further off River said something to Alex in a low voice I couldn't hear. My grandmother looked down at me from a few feet away with an expression I could not read at all. I could, however, see the disappointment plastered all over her beautiful face.

"You were closest," she said. "To the boy. Weren't you."

I didn't answer.

"Of course you were." Danika Byrne turned and walked toward the broken north fence, and the dark took her in about four steps. By the time anyone thought to follow she wasn't anywhere on that property at all. I knew she was gone because I could finally breathe like a normal person.

I sat in the gravel for a while.

The floodlight was still broken, pieces of glass sprinkled on the ground underneath it. The house was still lit like a Christmas tree. Somewhere upstairs a nine-year-old was getting stitches from a pack healer and asking, I found out later, whether Hazel was coming up to say goodnight to him.

River crouched down in front of me, his eyes searching my face for something I doubt he found. He didn't touch me. He just put himself in my line of sight, which is a thing he's learned to do every time I felt lost or overwhelmed.

"Firefly."

"She took the book, River."

"It will be okay, Hazel."

"That was the only thing I had with his mark on it." My voice did something humiliating on the last word. It cracked loud and clear, and there was no way of masking it as anything else but a half sob. "That was my only lead on my father and she put it under her arm like last season's magazine…"

"Hazel." Sissily came and sat down on the gravel next to me. Right down in it, in that ruined cardigan, among the innards of the dead imps. Then she held out the back of her hand.

Two lines curving away from a third, with a dot below them. Smudged, but every stroke of it still there.

I looked at it for a long moment. Then I started to laugh, which concerned everybody considerably more than the crying would have.

"She took the book," I said.

"She did." Sissily's chin came up and her lips twitched in a barely there smile.

"She didn't take the sigil."

"Nope." With a snort she reached up and tugged her ponytail in hopes of tightening it. It made it look like a wild bird's nest on the side of her head, and that was what calmed down the rising panic inside me. No matter what, we would figure things out together. We always did.

I got up off the gravel. Everything hurt but I batted River's hands away when he tried to help me. My left shoulder was throbbing, my feet were shredded, my nose was still bleeding, and there was a pack standing in the dark waiting to see what the girl who ruined their lives was going to do next. No way in hell was I being manhandled in front of everyone. I'd crawl if I had to but I'd do it on my own.

"She said Thursday, didn't she." The rhetorical question earned me a nod from River. Then I looked at that little smudged drawing on my best friend's hand, and I thought about a detective with a filing cabinet full of mysteries who'd left me four voicemails, each one more desperate than the last.

"We will deal with it later. First I need to make a phone call."

Chapter Eight

Sissily's phone has a cracked screen and a case with a cartoon avocado on it. Who was my best friend becoming? I had no idea. I had to ask her twice for the passcode because she gave me the wrong one first and didn't notice.

"My birthday," she said.

I typed it in. The screen shivered and cleared and asked me again.

"It didn't work." And I flashed the locked screen at her like that would make a difference.