Nkiruka was Jeneta’s fire-spider, a gift from me a year ago. Nkiruka and Smudge were currently chasing each other in circles around the pan.

As for Jeneta, a year had done wonders for her. She looked whole again, healthy and . . . not necessarily relaxed, but she no longer had that hunched-over, shadowed look, like she was constantly preparing for an assault.

I sat down across from her. Smudge skidded to a halt, finally noticing me. He scrambled out of the pan and raced over to climb up my leg, leaving tiny oil spots on my borrowed khakis. He perched on my knee, either inspecting me to make sure I was all right or else waiting to see if I’d brought him a snack.

“Thanks for helping me get out of there, Jeneta,” I said.

She shrugged. “You did the same for me.”

I brought Smudge to eye level and studied the quarter-inch stub of his foreleg. The stump had healed over. Fire-spider wounds were self-cauterizing, and I could see the remnants of someone’s magic—either Talulah or Jeneta, probably—where they’d tried to heal him. A second layer of text ran deeper. This was the curse from Kiyoko’s enchanted bullets. I brought a finger toward Smudge, trying to separate the curse from his innate magic.

Red waves of flame rushed over his back. I yanked my hand away.

“Can you help him?” Jeneta asked, her eyes on Nkiruka.

I lowered Smudge back into the frying pan, just as the first kernel popped. I felt sick to my stomach. “I could use his original book to restore his body. It would essentially reset his physical form.”

“But . . . ?”

“I can’t do it selectively. It would reset his mind, too. He wouldn’t be my Smudge. He’d be the Smudge I created back in high school, confused and frightened. He wouldn’t know me. He wouldn’t remember anything.”

She pursed her lips and exhaled softly. “He’s got seven legs left. The missing one doesn’t seem to slow him down much.”

I watched him pounce on a fresh-popped kernel. “I thought I’d be able to fix this.”

“That’s how I felt when my mom and dad split up.”

Paige and Mmadukaaku Aboderin had never forgiven me for the months their daughter had gone missing, possessed by a thousand-year-old necromancer. We’d saved Jeneta, but the strain of those months, combined with the stress of their daughter’s libriomancy and the revelation of magic, had broken their marriage. Last I’d heard, they were in the midst of a trial separation, with Paige on sabbatical back in England. “Is your father here?”

“Guest room in the basement.”

“How’s he doing?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Depends on the day. He doesn’t like you very much.”