Jennifer Estep: Spider's Bite

Finally, I sighed. Fucking, fucking curiosity. The one thing I wish the old man hadn’t taught me.

I picked up the paper first. It was blank, except for a solitary name written in Fletcher’s handwriting. Mab Monroe . The Fire elemental’s name was underlined twice, but that was it. There was nothing else on the paper. Why would the old man have written her name down and stuck it in this file? Was she the elemental who’d killed my family? Did she know who did? Fletcher had always longed to see her die. Was it because of me? And what she might have done to my family? Or did the old man have some other vendetta against her? Something I’d never known about?

My head pounded, and I rubbed my temple. After a moment, I looked away from the name. I was too shocked to puzzle out the old man’s motives tonight, so I set the sheet aside and reached for the photo. It had landed facedown on the floor. I stared at it a few seconds before my hands felt steady enough to pick it up. There was a date on the back written in Fletcher’s tight hand. August of this year. Only a few weeks ago. I turned the photo over—

And my heart stopped.

Because the woman smiling out of the picture looked like my mother. Long, blond hair, cornflower blue eyes, rosy skin. But it wasn’t my mother. Her nose was a touch too long, her mouth a bit wide, her eyes harder than I remembered. But I still recognized her face, even though I’d only been thirteen the last time I’d seen her and she had just been eight. Seventeen years had passed since then. The terrible night I’d thought she’d died along with our mother and older sister.

My eyes latched on to the necklace she wore. A silverstone pendant rested in the hollow of her throat. A rune, shaped like a primrose. The symbol for beauty. The same rune I had up on my mantel.

“Bria,” I whispered. “Bria.”

My baby sister was alive.