Although Eyes of the Forest promised to be Bob’s best book yet.

His mom had basically washed her hands of Bob, putting Derrick in charge of his day-to-day care and feeding. Claiming that any change in her schedule might arouse suspicion, Joanne still went to Bob’s house every day. Only now instead of cleaning and cooking, her time was mostly spent watching Netflix and scrolling through Instagram.

The drive to the cabin dragged by. When Derrick finally arrived and walked into the bedroom, Bob was plunking away, with a satisfyingly thick stack of pages next to the typewriter. When he realized Derrick was in the room, Bob’s shoulders jumped, but he didn’t turn off the treadmill.

“Back from school already?” he asked without turning his head.

“It’s after four.” The room was half in shadow. “I’ll heat up something for dinner soon.”

“Okay,” Bob said absently, already resuming typing as Derrick went back to the living room.

When Derrick sat on the couch, a broken spring poked through the worn cushion, but he barely felt it. What did it matter that the couch was falling apart? Soon they could afford to get a new one. Get a new everything. New cars, new TVs, new clothes, even a new house. He would no longer have to sew his own garb and make his own weapons.

He still had about twenty minutes to kill before the twenty-four hours were up. He checked Bob’s email box, which had already lost its appeal. As usual, about half was spam. The remainder was people wanting to sell Bob more stuff to clutter up his office. Today it was dice made of real bones, a ship in a bottle that was also a whiskey decanter, and a dragon hourglass filled with black sand.

There was also a list of terms from Bridget—words, terms, and concepts she had added to the Swords and Shadows database. Just looking at her email address gave him a secret thrill. He stroked his thumb across it.

Aside from Bridget, the only other person who had written Bob was his agent. He had sent a bulleted list of new deals he had made for him. Countries so tiny Derrick had only a vague idea where they were, and for amounts that wouldn’t even buy a decent latex sword.

Derrick checked the time on the top of his phone again. There. Exactly twenty-four hours. His trembling fingers made it hard to type the password into the Bitcoin account.