screen.
“Give me a sec, Crys. I need to take this.”
“Okay.” Any other day and Crys would have chastised hermother for being rude and answering a call in the middle of an important cultural event, but she was still riding high from the news about her father, so she let it go. “I’ll be over here drooling at literally every single piece.”
Julia nodded, then turned and walked away a few paces. “Yes?” she said into the phone. “Yes, I can talk now. Go ahead.”
Crys distractedly wondered who had called her mother. Maybe Dr. Vega with news about the book, but Julia’s tone was a little too formal to be talking to him. Maybe it was Angus Balthazar, the penthouse owner extraordinaire who was supposed to be able to help them with all things magical. She wasn’t sure how convinced she was of his unparalleled expertise, but she had to admit: The guy had a great apartment.
Still, there was one thing about Angus that kept nagging at her: He was a thief. More than that, he was a thief who was so accomplished and successful that he could afford a lavish, professionally decorated home. So why was Jackie so ready to trust him with something as precious and valuable—and dangerous—as the Codex? What was to stop him from stealing it and selling it to the highest bidder, no matter how close he and Jackie were?
Stop thinking so much
, Crys told herself. Of all the people involved—her well-connected aunt with the somewhat sketchy past, her former-society-member mother, and her half-immortal-and-touched-by-magic sister—she was the least qualified to question any aspect of the situation. She was merely related to these people.
Nothing special.
It was something she’d never admit to anyone else, but this thought—that she was an ordinary nobody in a family full of extraordinary somebodies—had become a recurring one lately, and conjuring it now gave her an unpleasant twisting feeling in hergut. Becca had been through a laundry list of madness, and after witnessing what happened yesterday, even the most skeptical bones in Crys’s body were starting to believe her story.
Becca was special. Important. Probably magical. Potentially powerful, Crys supposed, even if Becca herself didn’t realize it yet. Her sister was a secret that needed to be kept.
And Crys . . . well, she was just taking up space and getting in the way.
No. She refused to feel weirdly envious that she hadn’t been the one to get jerked out of her world and sent on a roller coaster ride to another world. Crys liked it when her world made sense. She actually enjoyed planning for—well, daydreaming about, mostly—a solid future. It was funny, really. She hadn’t even known that about herself until recently.
I am Crystal Hatcher
, she thought.
And I love it when things are boring and predictable.
She guessed that made her boring and predictable too, but she was pleased to find she didn’t even care.
She tried to clear her head and focus only on the photo in front of her: a black-and-white image of a perfectly ordinary person. According to the museum label, the subject was an old woman who was raised in Montana on a horse farm where she’d lived all her life, through summers of blazing sunshine and winters that ranged from bitterly cold to devastatingly harsh. Each of her eighty-some years showed in the depth of her expression and the wrinkles, sunspots, and smile lines on her face. Her eyes told a story that could fill many books. By physical description alone, she appeared to be perfectly normal, yet that didn’t keep her from being—or Andrea from capturing her in such a way that she appeared—magical in her own way.
Crys knew her father would have loved this show, especially since he was the one who’d introduced her to photography in the first place. Her heart ached as she wished he were here to share it with her too.
“Call me crazy, but this? This
has
to be fate.”
In an instant, Crys’s blood to ice. Every single shred
“Give me a sec, Crys. I need to take this.”
“Okay.” Any other day and Crys would have chastised hermother for being rude and answering a call in the middle of an important cultural event, but she was still riding high from the news about her father, so she let it go. “I’ll be over here drooling at literally every single piece.”
Julia nodded, then turned and walked away a few paces. “Yes?” she said into the phone. “Yes, I can talk now. Go ahead.”
Crys distractedly wondered who had called her mother. Maybe Dr. Vega with news about the book, but Julia’s tone was a little too formal to be talking to him. Maybe it was Angus Balthazar, the penthouse owner extraordinaire who was supposed to be able to help them with all things magical. She wasn’t sure how convinced she was of his unparalleled expertise, but she had to admit: The guy had a great apartment.
Still, there was one thing about Angus that kept nagging at her: He was a thief. More than that, he was a thief who was so accomplished and successful that he could afford a lavish, professionally decorated home. So why was Jackie so ready to trust him with something as precious and valuable—and dangerous—as the Codex? What was to stop him from stealing it and selling it to the highest bidder, no matter how close he and Jackie were?
Stop thinking so much
, Crys told herself. Of all the people involved—her well-connected aunt with the somewhat sketchy past, her former-society-member mother, and her half-immortal-and-touched-by-magic sister—she was the least qualified to question any aspect of the situation. She was merely related to these people.
Nothing special.
It was something she’d never admit to anyone else, but this thought—that she was an ordinary nobody in a family full of extraordinary somebodies—had become a recurring one lately, and conjuring it now gave her an unpleasant twisting feeling in hergut. Becca had been through a laundry list of madness, and after witnessing what happened yesterday, even the most skeptical bones in Crys’s body were starting to believe her story.
Becca was special. Important. Probably magical. Potentially powerful, Crys supposed, even if Becca herself didn’t realize it yet. Her sister was a secret that needed to be kept.
And Crys . . . well, she was just taking up space and getting in the way.
No. She refused to feel weirdly envious that she hadn’t been the one to get jerked out of her world and sent on a roller coaster ride to another world. Crys liked it when her world made sense. She actually enjoyed planning for—well, daydreaming about, mostly—a solid future. It was funny, really. She hadn’t even known that about herself until recently.
I am Crystal Hatcher
, she thought.
And I love it when things are boring and predictable.
She guessed that made her boring and predictable too, but she was pleased to find she didn’t even care.
She tried to clear her head and focus only on the photo in front of her: a black-and-white image of a perfectly ordinary person. According to the museum label, the subject was an old woman who was raised in Montana on a horse farm where she’d lived all her life, through summers of blazing sunshine and winters that ranged from bitterly cold to devastatingly harsh. Each of her eighty-some years showed in the depth of her expression and the wrinkles, sunspots, and smile lines on her face. Her eyes told a story that could fill many books. By physical description alone, she appeared to be perfectly normal, yet that didn’t keep her from being—or Andrea from capturing her in such a way that she appeared—magical in her own way.
Crys knew her father would have loved this show, especially since he was the one who’d introduced her to photography in the first place. Her heart ached as she wished he were here to share it with her too.
“Call me crazy, but this? This
has
to be fate.”
In an instant, Crys’s blood to ice. Every single shred
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