Koa was bent over his workbench in the corner, and Zane sprawled in a chair nearby as he regaled our brother with an unnecessarily detailed account of yesterday’s hunt.
“—and then the stupid bastard actually tried tobargainwith me. Like I don’t know what harpy venom fetches on the black market. So I told him—” Z caught sight of me and straightened. “What’s Fosterfly got for us this time?”
“Not sure yet.” I set the package on the central table. “Arabesque update. She’s off to Europe until next week.”
“Probably spending Cho’s bounty money,” Koa said without looking up from his project. His voice had that distant quality it took on when he was deep in concentration. “Run it through the protocols?”
“About to.”
“Remember rule number seventeen!” Zane produced a magi-wand from somewhere, neon beam dancing across the package.
“Assume everything’s cursed until proven otherwise,” Koa and I chorused, only he didn’t look up.
Curious, I moved behind him and peered over his shoulder. Ah. He’d finally finished repairing Jonathan Bell’s fishing reel case and was attaching it to a new pole.
He’d spent hours on it, hunched over his workbench, his powerful hands suddenly delicate, my mountain of a brother handling a broken reel with reverence. Koa always understood the importance of objects that carried memories. I was still learning.
“Some things shouldn’t be erased,” he’d explained when I asked why he hadn’t just replaced the damaged casing. “The crack tells part of its story. How it broke, how it was fixed. Hiding that would be like pretending the hard parts never happened.”
Sometimes, his soul was too deep for me, but that was Ko. He felt everything, and so much deeper than anyone else. I wondered if it was because he was half human.
Our father certainly thought so. Lucian had always viewed Koa’s emotional depth as a weakness, a regrettable inheritance from his human mother. I’d long ago realized it was his greatest strength. He understood people in ways I never could, saw straight to the heart of them while I was still analyzing surface behaviors and calculating probabilities and Zane was spinning off into chaos.
“She’s going to love that,” I told him with a nod of approval.
“Hope so.” He set down his tools and rolled his chair toward the package. “Let’s see what the stepmonster has sent today.”
“You think it’s something cursed this time?” Zane stood, energy rolling off him in waves. He was always like this after a successful hunt, buzzing with residual adrenaline, unable to sit still. “Maybe one of those creepy dolls with the eyes that follow you?”
“Let’s find out.” I pulled on a pair of protective gloves and breached the seal following our established protocols: Silver shears, containment orb, and what Zane called ‘The Works’: A spray bottle that held the magical equivalent of a fire extinguisher.
Inside lay two items. The first was a gold-tone clapper bell with a dog tag attached at the bail.
“Rasputin,” Zane read the tarnished metal heart. His usual smirk faltered. “Bat’s bones. Wereallydoing this?”
“Damnation,” I muttered.
We knew the pet goat was dead. Zane had seen as much in Eluned’s memories when he used telepathy to “interrogate” her after the lake incident with the monster crayfish. Arabesque had lied to Seri, however, saying she’d sold the old goat. We hadn’t had the balls to tell Seri the truth yet, although we knew we needed to confess soon.
“That’s going to break her heart,” Koa sighed as he stared at the dinged and dented bell.
“Add it to the list of reasons Arabesque deserves what she’s gonna get,” Zane growled. “What kind of monster keeps a dead goat’s bell? Like, is there a villain checklist? ‘Step one: Be fundamentally disturbing in every possible way’?”
“She kept it because it could be used to hurt,” Ko murmured. “Priority one for any villain.”
The second item was a book made of plain linen fabric, each page filled with a number of different embroidery patterns and designs. I studied the precise stitches, curiosity building about the woman who’d created them.
“Look.” I turned the page to show them the outline of a wolf embroidered in brown thread. Beneath it, in delicate script, was the name Feather.
“Her mama’s wolf,” Ko whispered.
I nodded, remembering Seri’s stories, her voice wistful as she talked about her parents and Feather.
The final page featured an apple, embroidered so realistically, it looked like a painting rendered in thread. Jocelyn Bell must have used some kind of specialty floss for the red color because it caught the light and glittered like rubies.
“She needs to know.” Ko touched his fingers to the edge of the cloth. “This book alone will be precious to her.”
“Lemme check it first.” Zane passed the magi-wand over each page, revealing nothing.
