“If I had to take a guess,” Ash says before Aarya can jump in, “it was designed to look like a threat, in case anyone else found it. It’s actually a brilliant code.”

“An address,” I repeat, and stand, itching to get to it. I need to tell Layla.

Aarya is already up, checking the weapons in her boots and on her belt. “While I understand that we have a seriously limited time constraint to find your dad, I just want to say that it’s a terrible idea to go to an address that the Ferryman may or may not know about without staking it out first.”

“If you wanted to be safe, Aarya, you should have stayed home,” Ash says, repeating her comment from our text conversation.

I grab my coat and gloves and toss Ash his. And in less than a minute we’re out the door.

Ash drives through the streets of London, and I sit up front with him, tapping on my knee, silently repeating my hopes that we’ll find my dad and that this isn’t just the location of yet another clue. Here we are racing to beat the Ferryman, and I can’t even be certain we’re headed toward my dad. If I don’t see another clue for ten years it will be too soon.

Ash looks over at me, periodically reading my face. “Something we should know?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Not exactly. It’s just…that message from my dad…it…” I look over at Ash. “It was a rhyme. My dad doesn’t rhyme,” I say, repeating my objection from earlier.

“Apparently he does,” Aarya says from the backseat.

“Are you thinking the message was altered? That it wasn’t from him?” Ash asks, ignoring Aarya.

“No. It was his handwriting,” I say. “And it follows the patterns of the other clues he’s left us. It’s just that all of a sudden, after seventeen years of raising me in a small town away from Strategia, talking to me in non-Strategia ways, and teaching me non-Strategia values, he suddenly does a one-eighty.”

“Didn’t your dad also lie to you your whole life?” Aarya says, which earns her a disapproving look from Ash through the rearview mirror.

“He did,” I say. “And I’m learning to accept that, even though I don’t like it. But sending me to Logan’s and to that Lion ball is different. Why would he willingly put me in danger…to what, test me? Everything in me tells me he wouldn’t do that, yet here we are with an address that he could easily have hidden in the tree outside my house instead of in a Lion event. What kind of a parent would do something like that to their child?”

“Mine,” Ash and Aarya say at the same time, and it puts the kibosh on my rant.