She blinks.
Her eyes drop, her hand finds the blanket and grips it, and when she looks back up, I’m a stranger who broke her door.
For half a second. She knew me.
And now…
“Holy shit,” Gunnar breathes behind me. Almost a laugh. Not quite.
Leif — I don’t know where Leif went.
I look at Erik. The fucker is grinning.
“Wondered when you’d show up.”
He’s alive.
I’m going to kill him.
Chapter 15
Gunnar
I want it on the record that we crossed a realm for this.
Three years of waiting. A Vestry summons. Ezra in the actual flesh. A day on foot, too. And for what?
I was braced for a monster. Something with tentacles — I committed to tentacles somewhere around mile thirty and nobody talked me out of it, which everyone will remember the day tentacles turn out to be right. A creature big enough to hide one of ours from the oldest powers alive, that’s a thing worth kicking a door for.
Rayner kicked the door like we agreed.
He just didn’t know it.
Went through it before the scream finished. I’ve never once seen him move like that.
And now that we’re on the other side?
I’m a little disappointed.
This isnotwhat I ordered.
Instead of tentacles, I get a woman half-buried in blankets and Erik practically on top of her.
Erik. Who we mourned in every way except burying him.
I don’t think being here has been the struggle we assumed it was.
“Wondered when you’d show up,” he says. Grinning from the pile.
I open my mouth.
She beats me to it.
“Okay.” One hand comes up out of the blankets, palm flat, like she’s directing traffic only she can see. “Okay. You know them.”
“I know them,” Erik says.
“You know them. And I know you. So by— that’s how knowing works, it transfers. We basically all know each other.” The hand makes a small circle, gathering the whole room into it. “We’re friends. This is friends. Friends visit.”
