“Say you’ll let me come with you on your next adventure! I want to see a unicorn or a yeti….Are there yetis? What about the Loch Ness Monster, real or dead? Fairies, elves—are they more like Santa elves or Tolkien elves?”
I placed my hand on hers. “Gabriela…”
She had tears in her eyes, bright in the corners. “Please, Sky, I need this. There’s nothing special in my life. I’m no one special.”
“You’re the smartest person in our grade! And you’re”—glancing around her cluttered room, I tried to find the right word—“unique, exactly as you are!”
She sank onto her bed. “Sky…all my life, I’ve studied things. Research—that’s my hobby. I love knowing everything about everything. But I don’t want to just see it secondhand. I want tobethere. I want to touch the impossible. I want to do things that no other human has ever done. I wantmagic.”
I knew what I had to do: Tell her no. Tell her that except for my wyvern DNA, I’m just a poor little rich girl whose mother left her and whose boyfriend dumped her, like the tabloids all say. No adventures, no treasure, no heists, nothing to see here.
Except I didn’t want to be that poor little rich girl anymore.
I wanted Mom back. And Ryan. I wanted my father to smile again, my brothers to joke with me, everything to be the way it was.
And to get that…“What would you do if I said yes? Tell the tabloids? Go on TV? Become famous? ‘Girl discovers secret to wyvern wealth’?”
“I don’t care what everyone else thinks. I want it for me! Maybe that’s selfish, but…Sky, please, don’t shut me out of this! You’re on some adventure, and it has to do with that jeweler, the wizard—I saw his eyes spark. At least I think I did.”
I studied her and thought about Maximus. He didn’t have a spell to bypass the wyvern detection spell.Dad will be furious,I thought. And then I thought,He’ll only be furious if I fail. I’m not going to fail.“If I let you on my crew…”
“Yes!”
“Gabriela, stop. It will be dangerous.”
She beamed at me. “Danger is my middle name.”
“Right. Okay. Well, your theory has a few flaws. One major flaw, really.” I took a deep breath and hoped I wasn’t making the worst mistake of my life. “We’re not treasure hunters. We’re thieves. Very, very good thieves.” And I explained: who I was, what I wanted, and what I needed her to do. I also told her the truth about Maximus, as well as a few key details about Mom’s failed heist.
The entire time, she perched on the edge of her bed, staring at me with her eyes wide. She was trembling slightly, vibrating, and the unshed tears were still pooled in the corners of her eyes. They clung to her eyelashes.
When I finished, she was silent.
“So…what do you think?” I asked. “Are you in?”
“You’re only stealing from someone who stole from you,” Gabriela said.
“Technically, he took our gold after the council voted at the last Reckoning…but yes, you could say that.” If she needed to justify the theft as honorable, that was fine with me. It was true that we had strict rules about who one could steal from and how much, especially on a first heist. The rules were a practical necessity, to keep us from destroying the economy of the world.
Also, humans weren’t nearly as fun to steal from.
“And there’s a fire beast, whatever that is,” Gabriela said. “And that man, the jeweler, is a wyvernanda wizard. And you really wantmeto help you. You need me?”
“I swear by the flame and the ash, all that I’ve told you is true.” Closing my eyes, I concentrated.Heat. Burning bright.I felt a warmth stir in my stomach.Mom, I’ll find you.Opening my eyes and my mouth, I let the spark of fire flick off my tongue. The flame danced in the air and then fizzled. I looked at Gabriela.
The tears fell, rolling down her cheeks. She put her hands over her face, bent over, and sobbed into her lap.
I patted her back awkwardly. “Gabriela? Um, are you in?” Really hadn’t expected this reaction to asking a friend to engage in illegal activities, even if magic was involved.
She said something muffled.
Leaning closer, I asked, “What was that? I couldn’t quite make it out.”
“Luisa,” she said. “My middle name is Luisa. Not ‘danger.’ But I’m in.”
And just like that, I had my crew.
AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXTday, Liam picked me up, blasted his music as he tore across Aspen, and dropped me off at Maximus’s shop. “You’re sure about this?” he asked as I got out of the car. Across the street, at a tapas restaurant, three of my old wyvern friends were hanging out around an outdoor table. I did my best to avoid eye contact, focusing instead on Liam. “Retail, Sky? You’re descended from some of the best thieves ever to walk this Earth, and you want towork?”
