Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
I kept glancing over my shoulder as we walked back to the house, half-expecting the guardians to dissolve back into the mist, for my mother and grandmother to fade like dreams upon waking.
But they remained stubbornly, wonderfully solid — my mother’s hand clasped tight in mine, my grandmother walking beside us with her usual brisk, purposeful stride, and behind us a procession of impossible people who had stepped out of legend and into the damp October night.
The trick-or-treaters had long since gone home, and now the streets were empty and quiet.
Porch lights had been extinguished, jack-o’-lanterns flickered their last guttering breaths, and the houses we passed were dark and sleeping, their occupants blissfully unaware that the fabric of reality had just been torn open in the forest behind their backyards.
Rebecca had taken point again, her tactical instincts apparently undimmed by the sudden appearance of nearly two dozen interdimensional travelers.
She moved through the shadows with her weapon at the ready, scanning for threats that seemed almost mundane now compared to what we’d just witnessed.
Finn brought up the rear, and I could practically feel how his gaze was fixed on the back of my mother’s head, heavy with all the years they’d lost.
Ben walked next to me. His hand rested on the small of my back, and his bioelectric field still flickered with residual exhaustion from holding the portal open.
We’d pushed ourselves harder than ever before, and I could feel the toll it had taken on both of us, the kind of weariness that went far beyond simple physical fatigue.
But beneath the exhaustion was something else, something bright and fierce and almost giddy.
We’d done it. We’d actually done it.
“Your town is very quiet,” Brigid Callahan commented from somewhere behind us, her Irish accent bright and almost too loud in the stillness of my hometown. “In Galway, there’d still be revelers in the streets at this hour.”
“Silver Hollow isn’t much for late nights,” I said. “Most people are in bed by ten, even on Halloween.”
“A sensible people, then.” This from Kenji Tanaka, his voice as calm and measured as it had been in the Waiting Place. “Sensible people are easier to protect.”
“They don’t know they need protecting,” my mother said softly. “That’s the point. That’s always been the point.”
The big house came into view around the bend in the road, its windows glowing warm and yellow against the darkness. Someone had left the porch light on — Rebecca, probably, before we’d left for the clearing — and moths circled the bulb in lazy spirals, oblivious to the strangeness of the night.
Home. The word felt different now, filled with a new kind of significance.
For nine months, that house had been a monument to absence, every empty room a reminder of the people who should have been there.
Now those people were walking up the gravel path beside me, their footsteps crunching in familiar rhythms, and I had to blink back tears at the simple rightness of their presence.
“It looks the same,” my mother breathed as she paused at the bottom of the porch steps.
Her voice was filled with something between wonder and grief.
“I kept imagining it, all those months in the Waiting Place. I wanted to hold on to every detail — the way the third step creaks, and the stained glass window in the dining room. I was so afraid I’d forget. ”
“You didn’t forget,” I said, squeezing her hand. “It’s still here. We’re all still here.”
She turned to look at me, her eyes bright with unshed tears, and for a moment, she looked so much like the mother I remembered from childhood — the woman who had kissed my skinned elbows and chased away nightmares and made everything feel safe — that I ached with it.
Then her gaze shifted to something over my shoulder, and her expression changed. The warmth didn’t quite disappear, but it became somehow muted, now overlaid with emotions I couldn’t quite read.
I turned to follow her gaze and found my father standing at the edge of the porch light’s reach, his dark eyes fixed on my mother’s face with an intensity that made me feel like an intruder in my own front yard.
“Josie,” he said quietly. Just her name, nothing else, but it was enough.
“Finn.” My mother’s voice was steady, but I felt her hand tighten around mine. “You came back.”
“I never really left.”
The silence that followed that brief comment was thick enough to cut.
I saw Rebecca shift uncomfortably at the edge of my vision, felt Ben’s hand press more firmly against my back, sensed the curious attention of the gathered guardians, spectators to a drama they didn’t quite understand.
This was private, I knew, a conversation that should have happened behind closed doors, not on a front lawn surrounded by strangers.
But there was no privacy anymore, not with nearly two dozen people waiting to be let inside.
My grandmother, as always, cut through the awkwardness with brisk practicality.
“This reunion is long overdue,” she said, and stepped forward to place a hand on my mother’s shoulder, “but it can wait until we’re not standing out in the cold. We need to figure out a way to accommodate all our guests.”
I blinked, pulled back from the strange tension between my parents to the practical reality of the situation. Nearly twenty guardians, plus my family, plus Rebecca and Ben. The big old house was large, but it wasn’t that large.
“We’ll come up with something,” I said. “There are spare rooms, and the living room floor if it comes to that. Let’s just…let’s get everyone inside.”
Rebecca took charge of settling the guardians, her sharp, practical mind apparently as adept at billeting arrangements as it was at combat planning.
She paired compatible families together, directed the overflow to the living room and the office, and somehow produced enough blankets and pillows from the linen closet to make the arrangements almost comfortable.
Eric Hargrove, monitoring everything from Oregon, coordinated through her earpiece, his voice a tinny counterpoint to the organized chaos.
The Quispe family claimed the guest room on the second floor, their three generations settling into the space with the ease of people accustomed to close quarters.
Brigid Callahan and Kenji Tanaka took the two armchairs in the office, neither of them apparently interested in sleep despite the late hour.
The Scandinavian twins — whose names I learned were Astrid and Stellan Lindqvist — curled up on the living room sofa like a pair of cats, their synchronized breathing the only indication that they’d fallen asleep almost immediately.
Through it all, I was acutely aware of my parents circling each other like wary animals, never quite in the same room but never far apart, either.
My mother had retreated to the kitchen to make tea — her default response to pretty much any crisis — while my father hovered in the hallway, pretending to study the crack in the plaster that the Dragon’s tremor had left behind.
“They’re going to have to talk eventually,” Ben murmured, coming up to me as I watched from the living room doorway.
“I know.” I leaned into him, drawing comfort from the warmth of his body and the steady pulse of his bioelectric field against mine. “I just don’t know if I’m ready to hear it.”
“You might not have a choice.” He nodded toward the kitchen, where my grandmother had just appeared in the doorway, her sharp gaze sweeping the scene with obvious assessment. “I think Emily has other plans.”
He was right. My grandmother went over to the place where my father stood, said something too quiet for me to hear, and then turned to fix me with a look I recognized from childhood, the one that meant I was about to be summoned for an Important Conversation whether I wanted one or not.
“Sidney,” she called. “Josie. Finn. The four of us need to talk. Now.”
It wasn’t a request.
We gathered in the kitchen, the only room in the house that wasn’t currently occupied by sleeping or resting guardians.
My mother stood at the counter with her back to the sink, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea I could tell she hadn’t touched.
My father had claimed the chair nearest the door and perched on the edge of its seat, his back rigid with tension, while I sat at the table across from him.
Ben’s absence from the room felt like a missing limb, but I understood why my grandmother had excluded him from this particular conversation.
Some things were family business. And whatever else had changed, Ben wasn’t family.
Not yet, anyway.
My grandmother remained standing, her sharp gaze moving between the three of us as if cataloging our reactions. She looked tired, I realized — really tired, in a way I’d never seen her before. Nine months in the Waiting Place had taken their toll, even if she was too stubborn to show it.
“We don’t have much time,” she said. “The guardians are here, but they won’t stay forever. Their own portals need them, and the longer they’re away, the more vulnerable those thresholds become. We have perhaps a week, maybe two, before they’ll need to return to their posts.”
“A week isn’t much time to stop Gregory and heal the ley lines,” I said.
“No, it isn’t.” My grandmother’s gaze settled on me, seeming to take stock of all the ways I was a different Sidney from the granddaughter she’d left behind all those months ago. “Which is why we need to be honest with each other about what we’re dealing with. All of us.”
Her attention shifted to my father, and I saw him stiffen.