Page 29 of The Ruling Class

“Fair enough.” I stared at her for a moment, then kicked off my shoes. “You want to ditch yours?”

“We can do that?” She sounded skeptical.

“It’s your grandpa’s house. You can do whatever you want.”

Accepting my logic, she sat down in the dirt and peeled off the Mary Janes.

“You’re supposed to tell me you’re sorry about my grandpa,” she told me.

“Do you really want me to?” I asked her.

She pulled at the tips of her hair. She was older than I’d originally thought—maybe eight or nine. “No,” she said finally. “But you’re supposed to anyway.”

I said nothing. She plucked a blade of grass and stared at it so hard I thought her gaze might set it on fire.

“You got a pond around here?” I asked her.

“Nope. But there are dogs. Two of them,” she added, lest I mistakenly think she’d saiddog, singular.

I nodded, which seemed to satisfy her.

She plucked another piece of grass before casting a sideways glance at me. “What would we do with a pond?”

I shrugged. “Skip rocks?”

Twenty minutes later, Thalia Marquette had mastered the art of skipping invisible rocks across a nonexistent pond.

“If it isn’t two lovely ladies, off by their lonesome.”

I turned, surprised to see Asher here—until I remembered that Emilia had attempted to hire me to keep him out of troubleuntilhis best friend got back to school to take over the job.

His best friend, Henry. As in Henry Marquette.

“We’re skipping rocks,” Thalia informed Asher. “This is Asher,” she told me. “He’s okay.” She smiled.

Undeterred by the lack of either rocks or a body of water on which to skip them, Asher plopped down beside us on the ground. “I,” he said tartly, “am a master rock skipper.”

Ten minutes later, the cavalry arrived. The cavalry did not look particularly pleased to see us sprawled in the grass.

“You’re not very good at this, Asher.” Thalia was blissfully unaware of her brother’s arrival. Asher shot Henry a lazy grin as he skipped another imaginary stone.

“Five skips,” he declared archly.

I leaned back on my palms. “Two,” I countered. Thalia giggled.

“Surrounded by vipers on all sides,” Asher sighed. He turned to Henry. “Back a fellow up here, my good man.”

Asher’s “good man” looked as if he was considering having the lot of us committed.

“Henry, watch!” Thalia ordered, unaware of—or possibly used to—the dour expression on her brother’s face. She flicked her wrist.

“Excellent form,” Asher commented. “It’s too bad the stone got eaten by an alligator after the second bounce.”

Thalia slugged him. “It did not!”

“Sadly, it did.”

“Henry! Tell him it didn’t.”