All of this junk stirred a feeling in Maria, a feeling that crystallized into a memory. It was like she was back in Grandma Esme’s living room, and she just needed to figure out the pattern to the chaos. There were even books and papers scattered about. Maria had half a mind to check for secret compartments.

The spiders began to gather around her. At first, she thought they were going for the meat. But no, they were forming a circle around one of the books — one already in the center of a crate, set apart.

The book was bound in leather and looked quite old. Picking it up, Maria saw that the cover was adorned with little beads of glass arranged in a symbol. Many of the beads had fallen off over the years, and some of their edges were rough to begin with, but if Maria squinted hard enough, she could make out the shape of a spider inside of a circle. She might have guessed.

The pages inside were yellowed with age. Corners and edges were ragged and torn, and some of the pages had been ripped out completely. Every page was filled with scribbles, sketches, and diagrams. There were detailed drawings of animal anatomy next to arcane weapons and mysterious plants. Maria could tell that the handwriting surrounding these drawings belonged not to one person, but to a countless many.

Some of the writing was in English, and some of it wasn’t. Some of it looked neat and deliberate, while some of it looked hurried, even desperate. Either the many authors of this book had all worked on it together, or it had passed from one person down to the next through the years.

Maria came to a drawing near the back of the book that she recognized immediately. The voices in her head became a frantic buzz. There, in black ink, was her spider ring.

There were seven other spider rings drawn on these two pages, and each of them looked just a little bit different. One of the rings bore a spider whose legs and sternum were drawn in outline, and under that ring was written, The Mirror. Another ring had a spider that was shaded in around its four front legs. Under that ring was the label, The Orb.

The spider on Maria’s ring had what looked like two lima beans on its back. She never would have described it that way before, but now that she saw the drawing, it was impossible to miss.

Maria’s ring was labeled The Brown Recluse. The voices in her head said that this was right.

There were more interesting things about Maria’s ring. For one, hers was the only spider that had six eyes instead of eight. For another, it was the only ring for which there were two drawings. One showed the ring exactly as it looked on her finger. The other showed the ring with the spider flipped open, revealing the secret container Maria had discovered. There was even a little arrow pointing to it. Next to the arrow, a long list of words had been written and crossed out, with different-colored inks suggesting that whenever a person wrote a word down, that person crossed out the one before it. The words included hemlock, cyanide, arsenic, and nightshade.

Maria gulped. They were all types of poison.

She turned the page, hoping for something more pleasant, but at that exact moment, what sounded like a falling rock echoed from the cave entrance. Maria had seen enough.

Against the will of the voices, she closed the book and yanked her hands from the cover. The book hit the crate on its spine, and Maria hurried to catch it before it toppled and crushed a cluster of spiders scrambling to get out of the way. That’s when Maria realized — some of these spiders were brown recluses, with lima-bean backs and six minuscule eyes, but more, many more, of these spiders were not. Most of these spiders had the bulbous silver bodies of the mirror spider.

… Arturo would do the most unbelievable things with just a handkerchief and a mirror …

Oh, no —

Maria turned to rush out of the cave, already telling herself that when she got home and went to sleep, she would wake up and realize this had all been a terrible dream.

But she didn’t make it out of the cave.

She’d taken all of two steps when a black shadow appeared and blocked her way.

The shadow flickered and swirled into the shape of a man — a man in a black silk suit who wore a spider ring of his own.

“They told me you’d be here,” the man said coldly. He didn’t look scared like he had in the woods. He looked like he was in total control.

There was no mistaking it. Maria had been caught.

Maria took a step back, the heel of her foot catching the corner of one of the boxes.

“The Amazing Arturo,” she said, unable to mask her wonder. He was unmistakably the man from the poster. It looked like he’d hardly aged since then; his slicked-back hair and severe eyebrows gave him the look of a black-and-white-film star. But unlike the dashing magician from the poster, the man standing before her wasn’t smiling. The man before her had sharp, cruel eyes.

“I th-thought you were dead,” Maria stammered.

“If it was up to me, you would still think that,” he said.

“Are you going to kill me now? The way I bet you killed Grandma Esme?” She wasn’t sure where this sudden boldness came from. She should probably be pleading for her life instead of giving him ideas about ending it. But the thought that this man had double-crossed Grandma Esme, had killed her over some stupid ring with stupid powers, made her so angry she didn’t have any energy left to second-guess herself.

“What?” the man said, his frown giving way to surprise. “You think I killed Esmerelda? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know that these rings help people do things they later regret. I know these rings can get in the way of friends.”

Arturo sighed. “Well, you’re right, there.” He slumped down onto one of the boxes, planting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. He reminded Maria of Rafi when Rafi was pouting. They had the same stormy eyes.

Maria inched her body to the left. Arturo looked just distracted enough that she might be able to slip past him and run. The rock steps would be tricky — Maria could already picture him grabbing her ankle as she tried to climb — but that seemed better than being killed in this forgotten cave.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Arturo said. Had he read her mind with his ring? She’d have to be more careful with her thoughts. “I wish you hadn’t found my hideout,” he continued, “but now that you have, and now that you think I … murdered Esmerelda — well, I suppose I had better explain a few things.”

Maria wasn’t sure. “How can I trust you?” she asked.

“You can’t, obviously. But at least you’ve got the right questions. Keep your distrust. It will serve you well.”

He looked so sad as he said this, Maria felt that she could … not trust him, exactly, but safely lean against this cave wall and hear him out. The second he tried to get up from that box, though, she was out of here.

“So if you didn’t kill Grandma Esme, what are you doing here in Florida?”

Arturo tilted his head to the side, as if he was listening to something Maria couldn’t hear. Maybe he and his spiders spoke at a different frequency. He said, “How much of that book did you read?”

“Enough to know that this isn’t the only spider ring.”

“Very good. There are eight rings — one for each of the members in the Order of Anansi.”

“The order of a what?”

“Anansi. The spider god, trickster god, god of all stories. Perhaps you have heard the tale of the time he rescued stories from the sky god, only you forgot his name. You would not be the first. His name is as slippery and treacherous as he is.”