We didn’t need to discuss what came next. Jax and I each gripped a dagger, Flint clutched my free hand, and together we touched the blades to the portal’s edge at the precise moment Adalinda laid the sword against her side. There was a rush of pressure, a vacuum-popping sound, and then nothing. The portal closed with a whoosh so final it made my ears ring. For a second, we just stood there, the morning suddenly too quiet, the world too small for the weight of what we’d left behind.
Izora was the first to break the silence. “Well,” she said, “that was anticlimactic.”
Courage, now free from ceremony, wriggled out of his jacket and sprinted after the neighbor’s cat, yipping with a vindictiveness that was pure Izora.
Jax turned to me. “You know it’s only a matter of time before they want us back.”
“I was thinking the same,” I said, but my voice sounded far away. I looked down at the dagger in my hand, the blade still humming with an energy that was more potential than kinetic. I thought about what Adalinda had said, “If you need me, you know how to call.” I had to try it.
I slipped away to the side of the house, into the narrow lane between our home and the fence. The air was cooler here, and the sun was still too low to reach past the eaves. I gripped the dagger tight, focused on the feel of Ayrathys, the sound of the sky in that other world, and made a slicing gesture through the air.
It didn’t just cut. It opened. The sensation wasn't unlike tearing a page from a book, only the page was made of everything, and the rip left a hole the size of a basketball. On the other side, Adalinda was already waiting, her face so close I could see the individual facets in her eyes. She looked surprised, then proud. “Well done,”she sent. The message was threaded with something deeper, a warmth that belonged more to mothers than to monarchs. I closed the hole, waited a beat, then opened it again, to be sure.
Flint caught me at it, his eyes wide. “Mama! Can I try?”
He grabbed the dagger, and with a little more force than necessary, hacked at the air. A portal opened, this time to a mid-air view of the castle, with Shimmer and Pebble both gaping at the hole.
Flint shrieked with delight. “We can visit whenever we want!”
I ruffled his hair. “Whenever we want,” I echoed.
I left the small portal open, just big enough for a message or a voice to slip through. On the other side, Shimmer stuck hertongue out at me, then winked. Solenne and Corvus sent a single pulse of mind-laughter, more like a shared memory than a joke.
Back in the kitchen, Flint bounced from chair to chair, talking over himself in his excitement.
I poured myself a mug, watched the steam curl up through a shaft of sunlight, and let myself breathe. If this was what it meant to have two worlds, I’d take it. I’d take all of it. Now, where the heck was my brother?
18
HAILEY
By the timewe’d been home for ten minutes, there were seventeen people stuffed in our living room, into a space meant for seven, a chihuahua in formalwear, and at least three bloodstains on the couch that I didn’t have the energy to acknowledge yet. The air vibrated with the thrum of my family in full, feral mode. I didn’t mind.
Flint slept on Jax’s chest, curled in his new little-boy form, his thumb caught just under his nose and the rest of his fingers clamped into a death-grip on Jax’s shirt. Every so often, his lips smacked open and closed, maybe working through some dream about dragon feasts or beating Goldie in a thumb war, and Jax, whose discipline had always fallen apart when faced with actual children, shifted him higher, then ran a hand through his hair with something like reverence. Around them, the noise pitched and rolled, but it never once touched Flint’s sleep. After everything, the kid had earned it.
The furniture situation had gone off-book somewhere around guest number ten. The girls sat cross-legged on the rug, an impromptu island of pink and purple socks and boots,passing a cell phone back and forth. The grownups, who were more supernatural than grown, had claimed every armrest, windowsill, and kitchen chair.
At the center of the storm was Luke, in rare form, holding court as he relived his greatest skip-catch story for a crowd who, by rights, had probably heard it three or four times already. But repetition only made his embellishments bolder, and the sound of his voice, sharp, relentless, always an octave above where it needed to be, provided the engine for the whole damn circus.
“So. There I am,” he said. “Ten bucks down at Catch and Release’s bingo night, a ninety-year-old banshee in the back row, and she’s cheating with a double-inked stamper. I’m supposed to quietly escort her outside, but instead she starts wailing, and not the bingo kind, the eardrum-shattering, your-blood-is-now-jello kind,”
“Pff, you’re making it up,” said Xander, who’d materialized with a drink and a scowl, both of which he nursed with equal intensity. “We would’ve heard about this from the bartender.”
“Swear!” Luke held up both hands. “She punched me!”
Cleo laughed, her voice dry and silty as always. “Who among us hasn’t been punched at least once in public?”
“What happened to the banshee?” Goldie piped up from the floor, her feet in Emily’s lap, phone angled so they could both see the screen. Ivy, perched on a footstool nearby, looked over with the wary interest of someone who had lived through four generations of supernatural drama and still found most of it exhausting.
Luke flicked an imaginary speck off his shirt and said, “What happened is, I played her game. Outwailed her, right in the middle of the sixth round.”
“That’s not physically possible,” said Xander.
“I’m a very strong vampire,” said Luke solemnly. “And I was raised by a family of competitive whiners.” That much was true, but our twin sisters always won.
Emily cackled. “Goldie’s better,” she said, and Goldie responded by attempting a wail that, for a split second, threatened to shatter glass. Flint stirred, but only enough to whimper and nestle closer to Jax’s ribs. Jax gave Goldie the parental death-glare, but she just grinned, because she knew darn well he wasn’t going to do anything except for the said glare.
Ransom, who’d kept mostly to the far corner, gave a long, theatrical sigh and muttered, “I think that’s the one part of the story you haven’t actually exaggerated.”
