"Is that your work, or just what happened naturally when the system broke?"
Wadsworth considered this, tilting his head. "Both. The universe is remarkably good at self-correction when given the opportunity. The Harbingers spent millennia preventing that from happening." He paused to examine a rosebush that was blooming three months out of season, clearly because it wanted to. "The chaos is not as catastrophic as anticipated."
"Wadsworth," I glared at him. "Were you testing me? When you came to warn me?"
He made the sound that served as his laugh, the distant thunder rumble. "Testing implies I had doubts. I was giving you information you needed to make an honest choice." His cosmic eyes fixed on mine. "A choice given from a position of false simplicity is no choice at all."
I thought about that for a moment, standing in the cool maze with the sound of the fountain somewhere ahead and the smell of cut grass and magic lingering in the air.
"Thank you. For telling me the truth."
"Thank you for not becoming insufferable about it afterward," he winked, which I was fairly certain was the highest compliment he was capable of giving. He settled his feathers and looked out over the garden. "Visit more often. The tapioca is still terrible, and I find your company preferable to most of the other residents."
"The three-hundred-year-old warlock?"
"He cheats at cards and speaks too fondly of plagues."
"I'll visit next Sunday," I promised. "I'll bring saltines."
He looked at me with those deep, galaxy-swirled eyes. "A simple act of kindness from a woman who held the fate of cosmic divinity in her hands and chose to give it back," there was something in his voice that might have been wonder. "Yes. Bring saltines."
Chapter
Sixty-Eight
Winter
The house was on a quiet street with a yard big enough for Horrace to exist in without frightening the neighbors too badly, mostly because the neighbors were used to unusual things, living where they did.
It was a proper house. Not a Bureau apartment with monitoring wards and a vending machine that had opinions about nutrition. A house with a kitchen that had seen actual cooking, a living room where five people and an interdimensional manticore had negotiated furniture placement for an entire weekend, and a garden that Milo's skeletons had claimed as their own personal project, which meant it was perfectly maintained but also occasionally had tiny bone footprints in the flower beds.
The skeletons' room in the house was exactly what it had always been, their own small domain, which had expanded slightly to accommodate new members of Jeffrey's social circle, including the six who'd delivered the Oracle's shard. They'd apparently decided that as bone-based entities, they had more incommon than not, and the tea parties had become something of a regular institution. They wanted to stay permanently.
Horrace split his time between our house and Emma's veterinary clinic with a casualness that made it clear he considered himself the bridge between two homes rather than the property of one. His memories hadn't come back, not fully, but he'd built new ones, layered on top of the empty space like ivy growing over stone. He remembered me. He remembered Emma. He remembered the way Milo's skeletons arranged themselves when they wanted attention and the specific location of every particularly comfortable sunbeam in every room.
Emma and I had drinks on her porch twice a month now. She'd cried once, quietly, when Horrace had done something he used to do, settled into her lap in the particular way that was him and said it was like remembering a word she'd been trying to think of for thirty years.
I came home to find candles one night after work.
Not romantic disaster candles, not emergency candles, not I'm-about-to-perform-a-ritual candles. These were the deliberate kind, arranged with Fenric's precise spatial awareness across the dining table that had been cleared of Milo's books and Rook's weapons maintenance equipment and whatever three-month-old Bureau document Zane had been using as a coaster.
The table was set properly, actual plates, actual napkins folded with unnecessary mathematical precision, the good wine that Zane had been keeping for what he'd described asan appropriate occasion.
Milo was grinning so wide his face looked like it was considering structural limits.
Rook was standing with his arms crossed in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, doing his absolutely unconvincing impression of someone who wasn't deeply invested in how this moment went.
Zane was pouring wine with the focused attention he usually reserved for potentially dangerous situations.
Fenric was straightening an already perfectly straight candle for the third time.
"What's the occasion?" I asked, setting down my bag.
"Sit down," Milo jumped up and down with the energy of someone who had been waiting all day to say this.
I sat down. Horrace, who had been doing something in the garden with Jeffrey, trundled inside and arranged himself beside my chair with dignified casualness.
The food was extraordinary, Zane had been cooking all afternoon. Rook had apparently handled the actual obtaining of ingredients, which meant he'd gone to three different markets and had opinions about all of them.
