You’re so good at this game. Like scary good.

Come on, don’t you like a friendly bet, pretty boy?

I won fair and square. Unless there’s something else you’d like to put on the table?

And there hadn’t been. Even buzzed, I hadn’t missed how George’s voice had gone from warm and welcoming to cold and calculating. And in a single harsh look, I’d gone from distracted to heartsick, intuition kicking in a few hours too late. Not to mention literally sick, too, puking in the bushes, my notoriously weak stomach registering its opinion of what had gone down.

Such an idiot. I had to stop myself from beating my head into the exterior brick of the stationery store. The holidays were over, but the window featured a bunch of whimsical angels. My mom would love all the merchandise on display, and simply thinking about her gave me a sick, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. She too was going to be horribly disappointed in me. Again.

What is it this time, Milo? I could almost hear her too-weary voice, the one that said she’d been dreading this latest screwup. My fingers skated over the edge of the phone in my pocket. I could call her. Get it over with. Maybe she’d have better advice than Jasper after she finished being sad. Again. A-freaking-gain.

Chances were also high that she’d attempt to dip into money she didn’t have to try to make this right. I withdrew my hand. I was going to have to solve this on my own.

In the window, a notebook cover featured a particularly celestial-looking guardian angel, and the same sick stomach I’d been battling all day roiled again. Where had mine been last night? Mom was always saying that Dad was my guardian angel now, but I’d seldom felt as alone as I did right then. No Dad. No guardian angel. No common sense. Ten thousand dollars. Wasn’t that what Jasper had said? For cardboard. Seriously?

I had only one thing worth that kind of money, and I sure as hell wasn’t parting with it, no matter how much I’d screwed up. And he’d said something about a hunt too. Research. I had a stack of less-than-awesome grades showing how much I sucked at that skill. Jasper would know, though. He’d always been wicked smart, fingers flying over the keyboard, sharp mind organizing search results while my brain was still sputtering. I supposed there were other genius gamers I could try to recruit to help, but if the incident with George had taught me anything, it was that I couldn’t trust my instincts about people.