“Benden,” Worm said. “My name’s Benden.”
Liam was the first to pull back. “Sky, you were a dragon! You transformed!”
“Seriously cool,” Tuck said.
“The secret is surprisingly cheesy,” I told them. My voice was only shaking a little. My eyes felt hot with unshed tears—I was home! “You have to believe in yourself. And leap off a cliff without dying. I can do fire in dragon form too, sort of, though not as well as Wor—as Benden. He helped teach me, along with his sister, Novi, and Mom—I saw Mom. I was with her.”
“Mom?” Charles could not have looked more shocked if I’d said I’d seen a dinosaur. My brothers also wore similar expressions of stunned amazement. “Where? How? Sky, what happened? Where were you?”
His arms still wrapped around me, Dad shepherded all of us inside. He beckoned for Worm to come too. “Are you being chased?” he asked me.
That depended on how well Ryan had covered for me. If his father believed him, then we were safe until tonight’s Reckoning. At the Reckoning, Ryan would have to explain to the council how he executed his first heist—and then the truth would come out, because even if Ryan lied like a champion, he wouldn’t be able to explain any of it without mentioning me. “I don’t think so. But we don’t have much time, and there’s a lot to explain.”
Dad shooed us all into the kitchen. “Get her food,” he ordered. “Check the security feeds—make sure all our alarms are working.” He kept looking at me as if he expected me to disappear. All of them did.
Liam sprang out of the room.
“I’ll get the food,” Tuck said, hurrying to the refrigerator. He pulled out a box of leftover pizza and began adding to it—strips of prosciutto, slices of olives, all the toppings that he knew I liked best. “What kind do you like?” he asked Benden.
“Ahhh…,” Benden answered.
“He’s never had pizza. He’s from Home.”
Their eyes widened so much that I nearly laughed out loud.
“I think you’d better start at the beginning, young lady,” Dad said. “You’re alive. How…?” There were tears filling his eyes. He didn’t let them fall. “You’ve been Home? And you saw your mother?”
I told them everything.
As Liam returned from checking the security, I started talking, beginning with the day that Ryan came to me and told me about the jewel. I didn’t leave anything out. Maximus. Gabriela. Mom. Novi. The wyvern Reckoning, and the realization that the underappreciated wyvern called Worm was the key to returning. All of them were, for the first time in their lives, listening to every word I said.
I stopped once to dart into the bathroom and then again when Tuck served us the pizza. Both Benden and I ate our slices, shoving the pizza into our mouths as if we’d never tasted anything like it, which for Benden was accurate. The cheese was perfectly melty, and the prosciutto was perfectly salty. I wished Mom were here to eat it with us.
Soon,I promised myself.
Talking as I ate, I continued, “So we need to break into the Keene family vault. Only twist is that we have to do it before Ryan testifies to the council at the gathering tonight, or Mr. Keene will know something’s wrong, and he might move the Door to a location that we won’t know. If he does that…I don’t know how long it will be before we can save Mom.” I swallowed hard and tried to keep my voice steady. “Besides, if we do it tonight, during the Reckoning, in front of everyone, we can expose him. Bring him down.”
Dad stood up abruptly and moved to the window. “You want to endanger yourself again. After I…after we…You can’t imagine what it was like, believing you’d died!”
Putting my pizza down, I looked at each of my brothers. All of them seemed to be in various stages of shock. “I didn’t, though, and now we have to act quickly.”
More quietly, Dad said, “You can’t imagine what it was like believing you’d died doing what I should have done.”
“You knew?” Of course he knew. I should have realized it. He’d been hinting at it. All the cryptic statements, the way he was so sure she was alive…
“I guessed,” he admitted. “She’d told me what she intended—invited me to join her, in fact—and I thought I’d convinced her it was too risky, especially since it was unlikely the Door still existed at all….But I was wrong. By the time I realized she was going through with it anyway, I was too late: she’d been caught. And he’d banished her.” His voice broke. “Exile or death—that was the choice he gave her. He told me everything when I confronted him, after I realized what she’d tried to do. I tried to challenge him, but…she was already gone. And I had to promise secrecy. He threatened to force the council to destroy your lives if I didn’t. I thought, by making that promise and accepting our disgrace, it would keep you all safe.”
I felt anger buzzing in my ears. But I forced it down and kept my voice soft, gentle.He did what he thought was right,I told myself.He was trying to protect us.But if he’d come to us, trusted us, told us…we could have worked together as a team, as a family. “So you just abandoned Mom?”
“I protected you!” Smoke curled around him as his voice rose, and then it dissipated and his shoulders slumped again. “But not well enough. Sky…I shouldn’t have lied to you, to any of you. I should have told you all the truth.”
My brothers looked troubled. Especially Charles. “You told us Mom had been banished by the council,” Charles accused Dad. “You didn’t tell us where. We assumed another continent. Or a desert island somewhere. You said we weren’t allowed to know—that was part of the punishment. You didn’t tell usyouknew.”
“Believe me, I thought it was for the best,” Dad said. “It wasn’t safe for you to know.”
Oddly, that made me feel better. He hadn’t told them everything. My brothers, though, did not look happier. If we made it through this, I had the feeling we were in for alotof family discussions. But there wasn’t time for that now.
Seeming to realize that, Charles turned to me. “Your heist tonight—do you have a plan?”
