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like a tinfoil yeti.
    I raised an eyebrow. “Sexy. Dead sexy.”
    Owen grinned at me through the sparkling silver strings. “I do try.”
    For the next hour, I helped Owen and Eva pick up wayward icicles and put them on the tree. When we finished,Eva announced that she was giving us some private time and headed off to bed.
    “Sorry about the mess,” Owen said, bending down to pick a stray icicle off the rug. “I didn’t mean for you to have to clean up after us.”
    “It’s okay,” I replied. “I had fun helping you guys.”
    Surprisingly, I wasn’t lying. It had been fun doing something so simple, so normal. Something that Fletcher Lane would have considered to be
living in the daylight
, his words for having a regular life. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a Christmas tree, much less decorated one. The old man hadn’t much cared for the holiday, and Finn had always been more interested in the presents underneath the tree than what it looked like. In addition to helping me with certain things, my foster brother was also an investment banker. Finn was all about money and the shiny things you could buy with it.
    While Owen salvaged a few more icicles, I wandered through the living room, staring at the decorations, enjoying the mix of red and green, gold and silver. The gleam of glass on a table caught my eye, and I picked up a large snow globe. A charming Christmas scene of a family gathered around a fireplace lay underneath the smooth, curved surface. I shook the globe. White flakes drifted up before sinking to the bottom once more. Such a small, simple thing, but it made my heart twist all the same.
    My mother, Eira Snow, had collected snow globes. She had dozens of them, and I remembered running from one end of the fireplace mantel to the other, trying to make the snow swirl in the last one before the flakes in the firstone settled back down. A game that I’d played with Bria when we were kids.
    Bria seemed to have the same fascination with the globes as our mother. I’d seen boxes full of them the night that I’d broken into Bria’s house and kept Elliot Slater and the rest of his giant goons from killing her. A few weeks ago, when Bria had first come back to Ashland, Mab Monroe had sent her giant enforcer to murder my sister. Mab had thought that Bria was a threat to her. That Bria was the Snow sister who had both Ice and Stone magic.
    Mab had thought that Bria was the one who was going to kill her.
    Once upon a time, an Air elemental who could see the future had told Mab that a member of the Snow family, someone who could wield both Ice and Stone magic, would kill her one day. Rather than let that happen, Mab had decided to make her own preemptive strike.
    That’s why she’d come to my house all those years ago. That’s why she’d killed my mother and my older sister, Annabella. That’s why she’d tortured me, first by duct-taping the spider rune medallion that I wore as a necklace between my palms. When I hadn’t told Mab where Bria was, Mab had used her Fire magic to superheat the silverstone metal until it melted into my palms—forever marking me. Branding me as the Spider in more ways than one.
    The Fire elemental just hadn’t realized that I was the one that she’d really wanted to eliminate that night. That I was the real threat to her, not Bria. That I was the one with both Ice and Stone magic—magic that I was going to use to kill Mab.
    The prophecy, Mab’s actions, the fact that I’d survived anyway—it was all very tragic and somewhat Greek. Or maybe I thought that only because I’d just finished up a classic literature course over at Ashland Community College. We’d read tales of Oedipus and
The Odyssey
, among other things. Sometimes, I wondered if Mab and I were like two ancient Greek combatants, locked in this epic struggle, each move we made to prevent our tragic fates instead actually bringing us closer to our final, deadly confrontation.
    Owen moved to stand