Maria dripped water all the way back to her room, only now thinking to take off her shoes. Surely her mother would forgive her the muddy footprints, under the circumstances. For now, Maria needed to change clothes, and she needed to save her family. If she thought too hard about all the steps that came in between those two things, she might faint. Unfortunately, not overthinking things had always been Derek’s strong suit, not hers.

When Maria flicked on her light switch, she had to stifle a scream. The spiderweb that had begun blooming on her bedroom ceiling days ago now stretched all the way across the room. In the center of the web was a small white rectangle.

On closer inspection, Maria recognized it as a business card for Vic’s Antiques. Derek had once used a stack of these cards to do a magic trick. He’d had Maria write her name on one of them, then he’d put the whole stack behind his back and acted like he was trying to feel for which one had pen markings on it. Finally, he’d brought his hands back around to reveal that the card with the writing was the only one left in his hands at all. The rest of the stack had simply disappeared.

The business card in the center of the spiderweb didn’t have any writing on it, but the message was clear enough. The Black Widow had sprung her trap. Rafi and Mom were the bait.

Maria drew back her arm and slung her shoes at the web. The sound of the wet smack as the shoes hit the wall gave her courage.

She felt the ring on her hand grow warm. She heard the spiders before she saw them, and for one paralyzing second, she thought that Arturo had found her — that she’d never get the chance to rescue her family.

But of course she could hear only her own spiders, and her fear turned into a sense of overwhelming relief as a brown recluse swarm surrounded her feet. Her reinforcements had arrived.

The spiders did not stop by her side, however.

Maria’s ring grew from warm to hot, until it was almost painful, as the brown recluse spiders scurried up the wall to the web. The voices in her head were so fast and frenzied, it was impossible to untangle them. What Maria saw clearly was a color: red.

Maria followed her spiders as they climbed, until finally she saw what she had missed before — a black widow spider near the top of the web. It dangled from a thread over the hole Maria’s shoe had just created. It seemed to be injured, or stuck, or afraid.

The brown recluse clutter flew at the lone black widow. In a second, they would be upon it, blind with rage.

“Wait, stop!” Maria shouted. “That’s not what I wanted!”

Her spiders stopped. They turned to face her, confused.

“If you kill that spider, we will only pay the price later. Now, I’m sorry, but at the moment, what I really need is to go save my family, and I need your help. Will you come with me? Please?”

Her spiders hesitated. It seemed to Maria that they didn’t care about the price — they wanted to eliminate their enemy. Maria hoped she wasn’t abusing their friendship by telling them no. But then, a real friend sometimes was the one who told you what you didn’t want to hear but needed to.

Finally, her spiders backed down, and the red in the back of Maria’s mind became a much quieter blue. The black widow pulled itself up to the top part of the web, and it, too, looked at Maria, as if it was considering what to do with her.

“You can go now,” Maria said, none too warmly. “But if I find you doing anything to my mom or brother, I’m not going to stop them next time.”

The black widow fled, and the brown recluse spiders waited at attention.

“I’ll meet you by the front door,” Maria said, and as they left her alone, she took a deep breath. She was happy to have them with her, she thought. Now that she’d seen what they were capable of, she knew it was better than having them against her.

Maria changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It was after three in the morning, and she had reached that point in being tired where she was actually dizzy, as if she might fall asleep standing up. But no good could come of waiting. And the exhaustion was making her braver than she would be in the daylight.

She threw on a hoodie — one with a sewn-on sword patch that always reminded her of Agatha at Sea — and in this armor, headed out into the night.

The historic district was deserted. Maria had been here at night plenty of times before, with Derek’s family or for town festivals, but usually there were cars parked on the street, and other people around. Now the old streetlamps cast pale oranges and yellows on all the empty shops and restaurants, and the wide-open road looked like a set for a movie about the zombie apocalypse.

Maria stepped out of the shadows and hurried across the street before she could think better of it. Even the spiders trailing at her feet were nervous. Their energy crackled like a radio in her brain.

She reached the door to the shop at a jog, but the creepy doll in the display window stopped her cold. Its wooden horse mount was rocking back and forth as if it had only just been pushed. Maria could swear the doll was looking back at her.

Over the doll’s shoulder, a picture caught Maria’s eye. It was one of many old photographs on a corkboard in the display window. All of them had something to do with the history of the shop, and Maria had never paid them much attention before. But one of the photos was a family portrait from when Derek’s great-grandpa Vic was a little boy. And now Maria noticed a girl next to Vic — a girl who looked so much like Aunt Luellen that they could be twins.

But they weren’t twins, were they? This must be Luellen herself, already a teenager almost a hundred years ago. Maria had guessed that the rings had something to do with Arturo’s and Grandma Esme’s remarkable youth. But if this picture proved what Maria thought it did, the combined power of the rings had kept Luellen from aging hardly at all in a century. Perhaps with all eight rings, she’d become immortal.

Maria tried the door. As she expected, it wasn’t locked. She pushed it open quickly. The sudden, frantic warnings of her spiders came a moment too late.

She ran headlong into a heavy black coat, which enveloped her even faster than she could scream.

Maria was thrown back outside, and she heard the door slam closed behind her. When the coat was yanked off, she was face-to-face with Arturo, who in this strange light looked like an alien, and not the friendly kind, either.

“What in the world is wrong with you?” he said, clenching his coat in his fist. “Did you really think you could just barge your way in there and take down the Black Widow by yourself?”

“I’m not by myself,” Maria said defiantly. Her spiders twittered.

Arturo ran his hands through his hair and breathed an exasperated sigh.

“You’re every bit as stubborn as your grandmother. I hope you know that. But even she would have approached this problem with a bit more forethought. You can’t help your family at all by rushing in and getting yourself killed.”

“Oh, so you’re trying to help me now?”

“In my own way, yes.”

He gave off the faintest hint of a smile, not devious or deceitful but perhaps a bit playful, as if to acknowledge just how peculiar his way was. In that smile, Maria could see the young man Grandma Esme had known.

He loved her, Maria thought. He really did.

“All right, then,” she said. “So what now? I didn’t see anyone else in the shop, and this was my only lead.”