By the time Lily and Eury showed up, Elly had already worn a trench in the living room. Back and forth, muttering curses under her breath that made the lamps flicker.

  The second she saw them, she threw her arms wide and spilled the news. “They took it. My car. My baby. My scissors. Do you people understand what that means?!”

  “Not the scissors,” I muttered, quickly regretting opening my mouth. If looks could kill…

  “Yes, Daniel. The scissors. Do you want to guess how many eldritch supply stores stock fae-tempered iron with an ergonomic grip?”

  I held up my hands. “Zero?”

  Her jaw locked. “Zero. Special. Fucking. Order. Catalog.”

  The silence after that stretched, broken only by the rattle of a shopping cart somewhere down the block.

  Lily’s brows arched, copper hair catching the glow of the parking lot lights. She was dressed sharp tonight—black skirt, blouse soft enough to make me self-conscious about my hoodie—but she didn’t miss a beat, perhaps even coming to my rescue by saying, “So you’re in the market for an Uber?”

  “Not funny, fire crotch,” Elly snapped, her eyes wild with anger.

  “That’s a low blow.” I returned, trying not to giggle.

  Lilly burst out laughing.

  Before Elly went after her with claws or a spin kick, Eury stepped in. “The car, the Collectors took it, yeah? How. We’ve not seen that happen before. We know stuff vanishes, but not how.”

  “They surrounded it, like six of them. I saw it. Daniel saw it.” She jabbed at me like I was the world’s worst corroborating witness. “The Collectors close in, and then—” She snapped her fingers. “Flat. Two-dimensional. Like somebody pressed it into a Polaroid. And then gone.”

  Lily whistled low. “Okay. Creepy.”

  Eury’s expression didn’t shift, but her mirrored lenses tilted toward me. “Describe it.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “It’s like… you know when you print out a photo of something and then hold it up where the real thing should be? That, except the paper vanished after. Just… nothing left.”

  “An extraction from our reality,” Eury murmured. “They’re not destroying. They’re archiving. It could still be somewhere, and we might be able to get it and everyone they’ve taken back.”

  Elly let out a sharp laugh. “Yeah? Well, they archived my scissors, and when this is done, I’m storming their library.”

  I held up my hands. “That’s what we need to figure out. Where does it all go? If they’re flattening things into… files or whatever, someone’s keeping the files. And we need to know where. We need to find this library of theirs.”

  Eury’s head tilted. “Tin Can might know.”

  Elly nodded instantly. “Already thought of that. He’s been working with Willard.”

  “He’s Ratborne,” Elly explained quickly. “Half-breed. Child of Reeva the Rat Queen. Calls her ‘Mother,’ which is all kinds of uncomfortable.” She shot me a sideways glare. “And before you say it—”

  “Willard,” I said anyway. “Like the rat movie. Sorry, I’m not calling him anything else. Even Tin Can agreed.”

  Lily hid a smile behind her hand. Eury did not.

  “They’ve been using the rats to follow the Collectors,” Elly continued. “Tunnels, sewers, alleys—rats see everything. If anyone can tell us where all this vanishing loot is going, it’s them.”

  “We need a counterspy. A rat-cam.” Eury suggested.

  “Or…” I jerked my chin toward the kitchen counter. “A spider-cam.”

  The spider was there again. Frosted, glitter-carapaced, a dozen eyes glittering. Watching.

  Lily stiffened, her whole posture sharpening like she was on stage. “Why is that thing still living here?”

  “Because it eats my Pop-Tarts and knows things it shouldn’t,” I muttered. “I think it can see beyond this room.”

  The spider clicked its mandibles. “ARCHIVE. ARCHIVE. DELIVERED.”

  The four of us went silent.

  Eury broke it, her voice steady but low. “It did see something!”

  “More than saw,” Elly whispered. Her arms folded tight across her chest. “It understood. That’s not just a pantry pest anymore. That’s a recorder.”

  Lily’s eyes narrowed. “Then we use it. If it’s been tracking the Collectors, maybe it can lead us to where they take things.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  I swallowed, the idea sitting uneasily in my gut. “You want to sic my Pop-Tart pantry spider on the bogeymen of the supernatural IRS?”

  “Got a better plan?” Elly shot back.

  No, I didn’t.

  The spider’s eyes glittered like tiny lenses, catching all of us in fractured reflection. My stomach churned at the thought—because whatever game Jade was playing, whatever long con the Curator was running, we weren’t just pieces on the board anymore. We were already being catalogued.

  And the worst part?

  The spider was turning out to be the best librarian on the team.

  The burner phone buzzed on the coffee table like an insect trying to break glass. We all went still. For a second the apartment felt too loud — too many breaths in one room.

  Elly grabbed the phone first, the glow washing her face pale. “Hoardlink,” she said flatly. “Of course.”

  On the counter, the Pop-Tart Spider had arrived and was sitting like a jeweled taxidermy piece, frosting caught on its mandibles. Nobody saw it come in. It never did — it simply was.

  The spider clicked, slow and deliberate. “FLAME. ROOM SIX. PAYMENT DUE.”

  Elly froze. “How does it—”

  “Know?” I finished for her. My skin went cold. “I’ve been asking myself that same question for a while.”

  The spider tilted its head. Mandibles flexed. “SUCCUBUS. REQUIRED.”

  We all turned at once to the black slab of a phone on the table. The screen lit with Hoardlink’s cold text before any of us touched it:

  FAVOR THREE INITIATED.

  DELIVER WITH YOUR SUCCUBUS.

  NORTH RIDGE HOTEL — ROOM 606.

  PAYMENT IN FLAME.

  The room folded inward. Elly cursed — a single, sharp sound. Eury’s jaw set into a line. Lily didn’t flinch; she just watched me, copper hair catching the light, a cat waiting to see if the mouse would move.

  “I told her no,” I said, the protest smaller than I wanted it to be. “I told Jade no.”

  Elly looked at me — not reproachful, not surprised — just tired. “Dragons don’t take ‘no’ as an answer, Dan. They take paper and signatures and then ask nicely when they need you to sign again. If Jade wants Lily, she will find a way.”

  Lily’s expression was a locked smile. “She knows, then. She knows I’m attached to you.” There was no resentment in it — just an odd, flinty pride. “She has eyes everywhere. Or very attentive contacts at that Thai place.”

  “The restaurant is Thai,” I corrected automatically. “Not Chinese.”

  Elly gave me the look she gives to bad history jokes. “Jade is a dragon. She just looks Asian. That doesn’t mean she’s Chinese. She probably speaks at least twenty languages and may have lived in places where they worshipped her kind...” She rubbed at her temple. “Point is: she’s forcing our hand. Whether you like it or not, you and Lily are involved.”

  Eury’s voice cut in, clinical. “The wording is deliberate. ‘Deliver with your succubus’ means she expects the succubus’ particular… talents. Jade plans around leverage. If she included a reference to Lily — well, she’s either watched you bring her in already, or she’s got sources on the ground. Either way: she knows.”

  The spider tapped the counter twice, a tiny rat-tat of legs. “PAYMENT. LATE. WATCH.”

  A hundred tiny alarms screamed in my head. The spider had spoken before the phone vibrated. Not a prediction—an advance whisper. That meant it was listening to something Jade used. Or it was a conduit. Either way, it had a pattern of showing up with useful information. Dangerous, useful, and unnervingly precise.

  “Did anyone else notice that it knows ahead of time? It has sources that seem to connect it to Jade and the Collectors.”

  “Then we use it,” Lily said. Her voice was flat, and the apartment seemed to shrink around the decision. “If it’s listening to Jade, it knows things. If it knows, we can get ahead of her. We can’t let Jade dictate who dies by which favor.”

  I wanted to argue — to insist we should fight the dragon on principle — but Jade was patient and old and used to bargains that bled you slow. Even saying it didn’t change the way the phone glowed with instructions.

  Elly shoved the small paper slip — the phone — back at me. “We go. We go together. Room 606 tomorrow night. You and Lily.” Here eyes flicked to the spider, then back. “And we bring Willard’s rats in case the Collectors show up.”

  Willard’s name dropped like a pebble in deep water. Tin Can’s Ratspeaker ally, the Ratborne who’d been feeding the alley’s gossip to Tin Can’s ever-hungry mind. If there was a trail, the rats could sniff it out; if there was a tag, they could maybe read where it came from and where it went to. Willard’s network was messy and stinky and likely disease-ridden, but it was brilliantly connected.

  “I’ll contact him,” Eury said. Her phone fingered at the air as if she already had the number. “If the spider keeps waking up to Jade’s plans, we’ll need every pair of rat eyes we can get in the sewers.”

  “Payment in flame?” Lily repeated, mouth quirking over the words. “That sounds dramatic. Like a romance novel where someone forgets to read the terms and burns the furniture.”

  “Probably not romantic,” Elly said. “Likely more Literal?” Jade’s offering fire for service. Which means she wants a specific kind of consumption or spectacle. Don’t make assumptions. We’ll find out what the request entails when we get there.”

  The spider clicked, softer this time. “LEAD.” It tapped a rhythmic pattern on the counter, a sequence that looked, for the first time, like a map. A turning in the air, a tiny punctuation. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was everything.

  “I don’t trust this,” I admitted. “But if the spider’s giving us hints before Hoardlink even breathes, we don’t ignore that. Not anymore.”

  Lily’s fingers found mine on the coffee table. “Then we don’t,” she said. “We go together. Let me decide what I’ll do, how I’ll be involved. And if Jade steps on any toes, we step on her back.”

  Eury’s smile was all teeth and no warmth. “Very romantic. Very tactical. Let’s prepare. Bring protection. Bring cash. Bring the rat army. And for God’s sake, don’t bring anything we care about—Elly’s scissors included.”

  Elly stood, already moving, rage and plan colliding in her stride. “My scissors are magicked to return to my hand if they’re lost,” she muttered. “If the Collectors filed them away properly, that means someone neat has a sense of order. Neat people leave a trace. We’ll follow the neat. Maybe I can even trace them magically.”

  The spider clicked once more as if signing the agreement. “ROOM SIX. FLAME. SUCCUBUS. LEAD.”

  We shifted, shoulders squared. The apartment hummed with a dozen small preps: spare chargers, a list of covers for the spider, a pack of antiseptic wipes (my suggestion), Elly’s backup set of iron-edged kitchen shears.

  The thing on the counter regarded us from its many eyes — watcher, recorder, likely traitor, maybe ally.

  And as the night tightened around the city, I realized the three things that mattered then were crystal clear: Jade had written Lily into this by name, the spider was a walking loose end who held more knowledge than it should, and whatever happened in Room 606 would set a tone we couldn’t undo.

  Tomorrow we would step into a dragon’s favor. Tonight, we were the ones deciding to take it.