Jack Noctis was in his study. Conrad Bauer and Kappa were with him. When Iset came in, Conrad looked up from the game of chess. Jacky did not.

“Well?” Noctis asked.

“She’s uncomfortable,” Iset said.

Jacky lifted his eye sockets from the board in front of him. “Is it the room?”

“She says she doesn’t like to be given things.”

“I don’t understand.”

Kappa had been playing around on Jacky’s desk, but he abandoned it, ran over to Iset, and leapt into her arms.

“I know you don’t,” Iset said. “You’ll remember, I tried to explain to you that this might be a problem.”

Jacky held perfectly still for a second, then shrugged the bones that made up his shoulders. “She’ll get used to it.”

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Conrad’s eyes went from the skeleton in front of him to the mummy, but he couldn’t read their nonexistent expressions.

The wolfman moved his bishop. “She didn’t ask about her family.”

“What was that?” Jacky said.

“Fam-ahh-ly,” Kappa chattered in a sing-song voice.

Bauer said, “Wouldn’t that be the first thing most people would ask? ‘Can I see my family?’ She didn’t even mention them.”

“Given her background, that’s less surprising,” Jacky said.

“What’s her background?”

“She was a ward of the state.”

“She looks too old for that.”

“Her cancer was discovered when she was under eighteen. Since then, she’s lived in various hospitals and hospices. It was easier than trying to find her another foster home while she was undergoing treatment. She’s an only child, and she was taken from her father when she was nine years old.”

“Abuse?”

“Neglect.”

“Mainly neglect,” Iset corrected. When Jacky looked at her, the mummy said, “You can’t reach that level of neglect without emotional trauma, but it’s harder to document.”

Jacky nodded.

“How do you know all this?” Conrad asked.

Noctis moved his knight. “There’s very little I can’t find out when I want to know something.”

“What happened to her mother?”

There was a whisper of air, like the ghost of a breeze. Conrad’s ears twitched as he tried to identify the sound.

With some surprise, he realized that Jack Noctis was sighing.

“That’s one of the things I don’t know,” the skeleton said.