Tally flinched backward and I held her hand tight.

“I thought they were all gone, spider-folk. Very valuable you are, coveted, especially by the likes of Bobby Felix. He sought such trifles out, such magical trinkets, and other things: forbidden books, the scrolls written in bark on the oldest trees in the swamp, the whispered mysteries of the bird songs, the code hidden in the lightning bugs’ blink. Power was what he wanted, and power he got. He cut his own left hand off, little Bobby Felix did, and he had it dried and shrunk. He kept it in a jar, he did, and it still moved, it stayed alive, I saw it twitching on a shelf one night, saw it with my own eyes. In its place he fixed a hand of iron, of clockwork.

“I remember the night he showed his new metal fist to us first. Little Bobby Felix strode into your father’s house with that hand, wicked magic it was, and ghastly. The great witch Marina fumed, she screamed and hollered and cursed him. But your mother—a mighty witch in her own right, though of a different sort than Marina—she knew, she understood. She stayed quiet, Samantha Annie, and afraid.”

There was no way. My mom, a witch? Was it even possible?

“Bobby Felix began to change soon after that. He’d disappear weeks on end, come back with some other piece of magic, some mystical tattoo snaking around his little arm. It wasn’t long before Bobby Felix found himself a partner. A woman named Drusilla Fey, a dreaded witch. Pretty she was, silver-haired, could have been twenty, could have been two hundred years old, how would we know? Sneaky, duplicitous, and yet she played the lady. Proper, mincing around our Parsnit halls as if the floors would dirty her shoes. Yes, she’d play the lady prim and proper until her fingernails came out, until she wanted blood. You ever meet her, you’ll understand right quick, children. Your mother, Buddy, she hated Drusilla Fey, and even Marina was made nervous by her. But Bobby Felix was happy, very happy, perhaps for the first time.”

“But why wasn’t Pop worried?” I said. “Wasn’t anybody trying to stop him?”

“Your father was preoccupied, yes he was. He had other things on his mind,” said Sinclair. “Namely you, and your mother. Your birth changed things. Your father became distracted, he withdrew from us, he couldn’t see what was coming. It’s just little Bobby Felix, your father would say. Nothing to worry about him. Let him have his fun. Glad he found someone for himself. Nothing to fear.”

Sinclair leaned in close to me, flinching at the fire.

“You will find, child,” he said, “that your father was wrong. He was wrong about so many things. We were thieves, we were hustlers all of us, but we had a code, a sense of honor. Only Bobby Felix did not care for rules. Bobby Felix had no code, and on that your father did not reckon. So much magic surrounding Bobby Felix, the strings of fate strumming a song only he could decipher. We should have stopped him, for we did not hate Bobby Felix, no, not at all. Loved him, we loved Bobby Felix, every last one of us. Loved him wrong, we did, but yes, we loved him, in our own way.”