Is that all I am?
Jameson had said, right from the beginning, that I was special. I hadn’t realized until now how badly I’d wanted to believe that he was right, that I wasn’t invisible, wasn’t wallpaper. I wanted to believe that Tobias Hawthorne had seen something in me that had told him I could do this, that I could handle the stares and the limelight, the responsibility, the riddles, the threats—all of it. I wanted to matter.
I didn’t want to be the glass ballerina or the knife. I wanted to prove, at least to myself, that I wassomething.
Jameson may have been done with the game, but I wanted to win.
CHAPTER 81
Top of the clock
Meet me at high
Tell the late day hello
Wish the morning good-bye
A twist and a flip
What do you see?
Take them two at a time
And come find me
I sat on the steps, staring at the words, then worked through the rhyme line by line, turning the piece of stained glass over in my hands.Top of the clock.I pictured a clock’s face in my head.What’s at the top?
“Twelve.” I rolled that over in my mind.The number at the top of a clock is twelve.Like dominos, that set off a chain reaction in my mind.Meet me at high…
High what?
“Noon.” That was a guess, but the next two lines seemed to confirm it. Noon happened in the middle of the day, when you said good-bye to the morning and hello to what came after.
I moved on to the second half of the riddle… and I got nothing.
A twist and a flip
What do you see?
Take them two at a time
And come find me
I focused on the stained glass. Was I supposed to twist it? Flip it? Did we need to assembleallof the pieces somehow?
“You look like you swallowed a squirrel.” Xander plopped down on the stairs next to me.
I definitely didnotlook like I’d swallowed a squirrel, but I was guessing that was Xander’s way of asking if I was okay, so I let it go. “Your brothers don’t want anything to do with me,” I said quietly.
“I guess my kind gesture of sending you all to the Black Wood together exploded.” Xander made a face. “To be fair, most of my gestures end up exploding.”
That startled a laugh out of me. I tilted the step in his direction. “The game’s not over,” I told him. He read the inscription. “I found it last night, after the Black Wood.” I held up the stained glass. “What do you make of this?”
“Now, where,” Xander said thoughtfully, “have I seen something that looks like that?”
CHAPTER 82
Ihadn’t been back in the Great Room since the reading of the will. Its stained-glass window was tall—eight feet high to only three feet wide—and the lowest point was even with the top of my head. The design was simple and geometric. In the topmost corners were two octagons, the exact size, shade, color, and cut as the one in my hand.
