walked away, her back rigid. She didn’t seem to care if I followed her or not, and I felt a little nervous that I might wind up locked inside the detention area if I didn’t leave when I had the opportunity—so I followed her.
As we were leaving, a voice croaked, “Ha’ay.”
The sound of it hurt. I steeled myself to look calm and confident, and turned back to face my brother.
A tear was cutting a slow pale scarlet trail across the dried blood on his cheek. “Junghg. S’Jnngh.”
He couldn’t say Justine.
“It’s okay,” I said gently. “I know. I’ll look after her.”
At my words, something in him broke. He started to contract with racking sobs. The sounds he made were those of an animal dying in a bewildering amount of pain.
I closed my eyes and breathed, willing away tears before they could fall. Then I turned my back on him and left him in the grip of the people who had hurt him so badly and who had every intention of taking his life.
What choice did I have?
My brother, my only brother, had just given the gathering of the oldest and most powerful supernatural beings on the planet a surpassingly excellent reason to kill him. In an hour, he had managed to put himself into a position where he was going to get more attention and more trouble from more excessively dangerous people than I’d ever managed to do in my life.
Trust me. I do it for my day job. I know what I’m talking about.
Stars and stones, Thomas, you idiot. What have you done?
9
What’s wrong, Dad?” Maggie asked me.
We were back in the apartment, and when I asked her to, she had dutifully retrieved her bugout bag from the closet.
Yeah, I know, it sounds a little paranoid to teach a child to keep a bag full of spare clothes, snacks, basic medical and survival supplies, and water, just in case she needs to suddenly go on the run. But then, most kids didn’t have to contend with the possibility of enemies coming up through the floor and grabbing them, either.
I’m raising my daughter to survive the kind of thing she might occasionally be adjacent to because of who her father is, and for the time being her best survival strategy was almost always to be ready to run away.
“I can’t explain it right now,” I said. I slid past her into her room and snagged the bowling bag that held Bonea’s wooden skull, then secured the rest of my own limited gear, along with a bugout bag of my own. “We’re going to drive Hobbit home, and you can stay with the Carpenters for a few days. How does that sound?”
Maggie looked at me with very serious young eyes for a moment. “Are you in trouble?”
“I don’t get in trouble,” I said, and winked at her. “I get bad guys in trouble.”
“It’ll be fine, munchkin,” Hope said, and slid a sisterly arm around my daughter’s shoulders. “I totally know this drill. You can sleep in my room. I’ve got a laptop. We can Netflix some fun stuff until as late as we want.”
Maggie leaned against Hope a little, but her eyes never left me. “Dad, why are the svartalves mad at us?”
“They aren’t mad, but something gave them a scare,” I said. “They’re going to be edgy for a while. Hope, could you get some tuna out of the fridge and put it at the back of Mister’s carrier so he’ll jump in? I don’t want to leave him here alone.”
“Sure, Harry,” Hope said, and set about it.
“They’re edgy? And that’s why you’re sending me back?” Maggie asked.
I’d been all ready to march out, efficiently and quickly, because I had a hundred things to do and sleep had just become a non-possibility for the foreseeable future—and while I’d prepared to do so, I’d forgotten that my daughter was still, in some ways, very small. So I paused. I put everything else out of my head, and I turned to drop to a knee in front of her and give her a hug. She hugged me back tightly, her thin little arms around my neck. Mouse ceased his pacing and came over to settle down at Maggie’s back and lean a shoulder against her.
“Oh, punkin,” I said. “I’m not sending you away. I just need someone to look out for you until I get back.”
“Because there’s monsters?”
“It’s looking that way,” I said.
“And you fight the monsters?” she asked.
“When they need fighting,” I