The Spider Catcher (Redemption by A.L. Tyler Book 1) Read Free

turned in time to see Gina strike the knife one quick time across the stranger’s face. It made a sound like nails on a chalkboard, and the stranger reached up to grab at the dark, bleeding cut in shock.  
    Gina pointed the knife at his chest.  “Stay away from her.”
    “Why?” He replied with a hiss, pulling his hand away from his face and rubbing the dark blood between his fingers in disgust.  “I didn’t hurt her.”
    Gina shook her head, once again raising the knife to gesture at his face.  “You know why.”
    In her grandmother's arms, Ember disappeared around the corner, clutching her gift ribbon in her hand.  The next day, they put her on a plane to the contiguous states, where she went to a private boarding school and received a first-rate education.  Ember didn't see the stranger again for many years afterward, and when she finally did, she didn't recognize him.  
    She only knew he was someone important to her—the first person to value her as a personal treasure, and not a damaged item.

Chapter 1
     
    Ember held on to the ribbon long after it had lost its childish charm, using it as a bookmark. In her school dormitory room, there were paperback novels hidden in every drawer and tucked away behind her textbooks on the shelves. Amidst her uniforms and shoes and jackets in the closet, there were even more.
    She kept her desk neat and clean, with a stack of college-ruled paper and a cup of pens and pencils for homework. There was a window opposite the door, closest to Ember’s little bed, and in the morning the light cut a straight wedge in the middle of the desk. She liked to think that someday, she would get a plant to sit in the wedge of sun, and it would do well. Of course, Ember was eleven then, and she would be moving to the junior-high dorms in a few years—long before ‘someday’ was ever likely to come, and her imaginary plant would never bask in that wedge on the desk.
    At such times, Ember wondered if she had a gift for growing plants; her mother was a fantastic gardener. She had drawn a picture in crayons and watercolor in art class two years ago of her mother’s garden; the assignment had been to draw a memory of home. The fruit trees and the vegetables in the garden had been the only image she could muster; that, and the bookstore. Her teacher had said that the bookstore didn’t count, and that she had drawn Alaska wrong—gardens like that didn’t grow so far in the north.
    When she closed her eyes and thought hard, she could still see the strawberries and the mint patch. It might have been a figment of her imagination, like the notion that her mother gardened, and in that case getting a plant might have been riskier than she wanted to believe.
    “What are you looking at?” Tiffany asked, turning over in her bed and rubbing her eyes.
    Tiffany was the same age as Ember, and had short, blond hair. When they had met at the start of the year, Ember had told her that she was an orphan in the care of a nun who had sent her to the school. Her last roommate had asked incessant questions about Ember’s home, and her parents, and her sister, and Ember hadn’t been able to answer any of them. Luckily, Tiffany believed just about everything she was told.
    “Nothing.” Ember shrugged. “Do you think they’ll have pancakes today?”
    Tiffany shrugged, turning over to hug her pillow. “Maybe. I like pancakes.”
    “Me too.” Ember agreed.
    Tiffany was simple, and easy to please, and Ember liked her. When there were pancakes, they would take great ceremony in properly buttering and drenching each in the stack with more than enough syrup. Eggs were made to be eaten on toast, and bacon was eaten last so that the taste lingered on the tongue. They agreed that the apple juice in the cafeteria was too sweet, their English teacher was so old he was likely to die at his desk one day, Jason in Social Studies was the cutest boy in their grade, and having any more than one piercing on each