“War,” I said, softly, and looked across Rose and Sally to Thomas, who was watching with quiet resignation. The Covenant had been sniffing around the edges of the continent when I left on my last trip, but it hadn’t been anywhere near actual war. “I swear we haven’t been at war the whole time you were gone,” I said. “Things have been pretty quiet here. I mean, there have been incidents—”

  “Like the time the Covenant shot up your windows,” said Rose casually.

  I shot her a venomous glare. “Yes, like that.”

  “Excuse me?” said Thomas. “The Covenant did what to your what?”

  Rose cackled. “Oh, Alice. You went and got the boy back, but you didn’t tell the boy what kind of naughtiness you’d been up to in the interim. You’re going to have a lot of explaining to do before you head off to do something stupid and heroic.”

  “Is it always like this?” asked Sally plaintively.

  “No, sometimes it gets weird,” said Rose.

  The doorbell rang. I turned and glared at it. I was getting real tired of interruptions.

  No one else was moving, so I sighed and said, “I’ll get it,” as I set my plate aside and pushed myself off the couch. Cynthia was waiting on the porch, a covered casserole dish in her hands. She looked past me into the house, then back to my face.

  “House properly haunted?” she asked.

  I stepped aside so she could enter. “Not the ghost I expected to start with, but the one I got. That dessert?”

  “Yup. Groceries will be here in the morning.” She moved past me, smiling at the couch—but only the one end of it, I noted. She still wasn’t allowing her eyes to settle on Thomas. “Hey, Rose. Long time no irritate.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m in town now, I can make up for it,” said Rose, and laughed. “Good beans.”

  “Thanks.” Cynthia turned as I was closing the door, passing the cobbler into my hands. “There’s no ice cream. I’d apologize, but naughty cryptozoologists barely even deserve any dessert, much less ice cream. Can you get dishes?”

  “They’re in the kitchen.” The cobbler smelled heavenly. For someone who didn’t eat much solid food, Cynthia was amazingly skilled at the sort of hearty, filling Americana that kept diners and roadside dives like hers in business. Even more impressive, most of her customers didn’t eat that sort of thing: she’d learned specifically for her rare human patrons, and to be able to convince the county health board that she was running a perfectly ordinary, if somewhat remote, dive bar.

  I went to get plates and utensils. By the time I returned, Cynthia was settled in the armchair I’d been fighting the tailypo for all afternoon, her coat folded over her lap and her tail wrapped around her ankle. Sally was doing a remarkable job of trying not to stare. Not that she was going to succeed. Sure, we all agreed that Rose was a ghost, but she hadn’t done anything ghostly yet. Cynthia was the first visibly inhuman intelligent being Sally had encountered on Earth. It was understandable for her to be a little overwhelmed.

  “Rose tells me she was getting you up to speed on recent events,” said Cynthia, without preamble. “You going to do your duty?”

  I set the plates, silverware, and cobbler down on the coffee table, frowning at her. “What duty is that?”

  “Get rid of the Covenant.”

  I laughed. “I don’t know what kind of superpowers you think I have, but Thomas is the sorcerer here, not me,” I said. “There aren’t enough knives in the world to get rid of the Covenant. I should know. I’ve tried.”

  “We’re not asking you to wipe them out, pleasant an outcome as that would be,” said Rose, scooping cobbler onto her plate. “Just get them out of North America, or at least away from the East Coast. They’ve been harassing the routewitches. The Ocean Lady doesn’t like it when things harass the routewitches.”

  I frowned at her. “I thought you were here to check in on us, as a friend.”

  “I am.”

  “But the first thing you did was tell us not to go traveling, because the anima mundi doesn’t like having holes punched in the membrane between dimensions.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” Rose popped a bite of cobbler into her mouth, swallowing before she said, “This is amazing, as always, Cyn.”

  “Always glad to delight the dead,” said Cynthia mildly.

  “And now you’re telling me the Ocean Lady wants the Covenant gone, and I didn’t give you that cobbler, so how can you taste it?”

  “Oh, that.” Rose looked at her plate like it had betrayed her, heaving a put-upon sigh. “I always forget. I’m a Fury now. Different rules. And I really did start your way because I wanted to see if you’d actually fetched Tommy home with you. I was halfway here when the anima mundi called, told me I had to make sure you were staying put for a while, and dropped me back into the daylight, where my next pickup was a routewitch with a message from the Lady. At which point this was very much a work visit.”

  “If anyone’s going to get them out of New York, it’s the two greatest traitors of the last century showing up and providing a distraction,” said Cynthia. “Just don’t lead them back here. We have enough to worry about.”

  “How are we supposed to get to New York?” I asked. “We don’t have a vehicle or legal identification for Thomas and Sally. We need to rest, recover, and head for Las Vegas, to make sure they exist on paper.”

  “The Ocean Lady is asking you for a favor,” said Rose. “You really think she won’t supply you with transport to wherever it is you need to go? You say you’ll do this for her, you’ll have a car ready first thing in the morning.”

  I looked to Thomas. He shrugged. It had been too long since he’d been a part of the playing field; he didn’t know whether this was the right thing to do or not.

  Of course not. I looked back to Rose.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked. “Right now. Our family. Where are they?”

  Rose took another bite of cobbler. “Immediate or extended?”

  “Immediate.”

  “Let’s see. Kevin and Jane are in Portland, with Evie and Ted. Elsie’s home right now, and so’s her brother.”

  “Artie being home is nothing new.”

  “Did I say his name was Artie?” Rose managed to make the question ominous and mild at the same time. “He’s home, either way. Annie’s there with Sam and James. They want to stay out of the line of fire for right now, and Portland’s far enough from the current battlefield. Alex, Shelby, and Charlotte are in Ohio with Angela, Martin, and the flock of little cuckoos Angela’s trying to rehabilitate. And Verity, Dominic, and Olivia are in New York with Sarah and Mary, trying to hold off the Covenant. I’m pretty sure Mary’s hair would be going white, if it hadn’t turned white when she died. No one likes to be a babysitter in a war zone.”

  I bit my lip, looking at Thomas again. Our family was scattered across the continent, and the ones in New York needed us most right now.

  He met my eyes and nodded. “Well, then, Rose, I believe you can tell your Ocean Lady we’ll be heading for New York in the morning.”

  “Does that mean no groceries?” asked Cynthia.

  “Yeah, for now, but we’ll still need that cake, since the colony will be mostly staying here,” I said. “There’s one more thing you could do for me?”

  Cynthia looked wary. “What’s that?”

  I indicated Sally with a sweep of my hand. “She has no clothes she’s not currently wearing, and that’s going to get unpleasant fast. Is there anyone working at the bar right now who might be able to help her out?”

  Cynthia’s wariness melted into an almost-feral grin, and Sally started to look nervous. I leaned over to scoop some cobbler onto a plate.

  So much for taking some time to rest and recover. At least it wouldn’t be boring.

  Ten

  “If family’s in trouble, I don’t care if the damn house is on fire. You get out there, and you help them. That’s what keeps us worthy of being a part of a family. Being willing to help when they need us.”

  —Enid Healy

  The old Parrish place, Buckley Township, Michigan

  FORTUNATELY, SALLY’S DEPARTURE FROM Earth had been recent enough that she knew what a Walmart was, and while Buckley is too small to have anything like that within town limits, it’s only about a forty-five-minute drive to Gaylord, where there’s a Walmart Supercenter that—best luck yet—stays open until midnight. Even more fortunately, keeping the house accounts paid for all these years has meant keeping me vaguely up to date, on a financial level. I prefer to use cash when possible, and mostly squirrel it away under the couch cushions. Sally had been handed five hundred dollars and instructions to come back with as much of a wardrobe as she could assemble, plus whatever else caught her eye, plus ice cream if they passed a drive-through.

  Cynthia was driving her. My only real regret about the evening was that I couldn’t go with them to watch the fireworks. But I was doing something much more important. I was sitting on the edge of the bed I hadn’t slept in for years, sharpening one of my knives on a small whetstone while Thomas dug through his wardrobe, studying clothing he hadn’t seen for decades. It was oddly domestic, and might even have been relaxing, if we hadn’t been gearing up to head for New York first thing in the morning.

  Rose had promised to come with whoever came to pick us up, at least to make the handoff and reassure us that we were with the right driver, which meant we’d be riding with someone who knew the situation, and not someone who’d just been drafted into driving some weirdoes to another state.

  That was nice.

  “Alice?”

  I looked up from my knife. Thomas was watching me, a tie in one hand, a kukri in the other. “Yes, dear?”

  “What was that Rose was saying before, about the windows getting shot out?”

  “Oh.” I waved my knife airily, then studied the edge as I said, “It was nothing. It happened about two years after you vanished. The Covenant didn’t know you were gone, of course, but they knew about our marriage, and they knew we’d had at least one kid. They wanted him.”

  “What in the world could they possibly have wanted with a five-year-old?” Thomas asked. “They’re sticky. All the time. It’s the purpose of five-year-olds.”

  I lowered my knife so I could stare at him. Thomas blinked, raising his eyebrows.

  “What? He was three when I disappeared, he would have been five and, hence, sticky. Why would the Covenant have wanted him?”

  “Blood charms?” I waved the knife again, before setting it beside me on the bed. “The ones keeping the Covenant out of the Price family accounts? Your banker in London passed away, by the way, although he gave his client list to his son. He’s been handling things for the last twenty years.”

  Thomas had left a banker’s key, attuned to the family account, with his man in London. If someone the blood charms recognized as a Price wrote and asked for money, the key could be used to authorize a withdrawal in the requested amount. It was a complicated piece of magic. As I lacked the ability to recreate it, and had never seen a way it could apply to my search for my missing husband, I’d left it pretty much alone. It kept the money safe from the Covenant. Kevin could make withdrawals, which meant he could give me money to pay the bills for this old place without putting a financial strain on himself or the family. That was all that really mattered.

  “We weren’t that wealthy,” Thomas objected. “Coming to America and abducting a child to get at a few pounds seems excessive, even for the Covenant.”

  I made a noncommittal sound. I’d never seen the account balances—it wasn’t allowed, even for the widow, when the key wouldn’t work on my word—but Kevin had been paying maintenance and upkeep on this place since he turned fifteen. Prior to that, I’d been burning through my own meager savings and depending on the kindness of every ally I had to keep the roof from caving in. The rent from my childhood home had helped, as had the fact that even people who’d hated my dad still thought well of my mother. Frances Brown made friends everywhere she went, from the day she was born until the day she died.

  Point was, I knew what it cost to keep the house going, and Kevin had funded it for the better part of fifty years. Whatever number we were talking about here, it was definitely more than “a few pounds.”

  “They really tried . . . Oh, Alice.” Thomas suddenly seemed to realize his response had been more analytical than was necessarily appropriate when talking about an incident that had involved armed Covenant soldiers attempting to abduct our child. “What happened?”

  “Well,” I began. “It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea that you were actually gone, even with Mary trying her best to convince me the crossroads weren’t going to give you back.” I realized midway through the sentence that I’d said Mary’s name aloud, and winced, waiting for her to appear. When she didn’t, I relaxed and continued.

  “The bills kept coming in, of course, and I didn’t know what you’d had the time to pay before you vanished, so I went through your office. I’m sorry!” I help my hands up before he could say anything. “I couldn’t risk the power being cut off while I was away, and I was just starting to experiment with ideas to get out of this dimension and look for you, and the more I could handle before it became a problem, the better.”

  Thomas took my hands as he sat on the bed, lacing our fingers together and tugging them down, until our joined hands were resting in his lap. He looked at me gravely. “I’m not your father, Alice, to protect my office from my wife the way a wolf protects its kill from scavengers.” His voice was gentle. “You know you’ve always been welcome anywhere I am. If I asked for privacy at times, it was because I was working on elemental spells that could have harmed us both if disrupted.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, looking down at our hands. “I know. You never told me to keep out. I did that on my own. Yell at a person enough times, they stop doing whatever it is that gets them yelled at, I guess. Even if the person who did the yelling is gone. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me. Not ever.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I’ll think of something I need to apologize for,” I said, and smiled, trying to look coy.

  Either I missed the mark or he was more concerned about the Covenant’s attempt to abduct Kevin than I’d realized, because his expression didn’t waver. “What happened? What does my office have to do with anything?”

  “Oh. That.” I took a deep breath. “Like I said, I wanted to make sure everything was in order, so I went through your office . . .”

  * * *

  The first six months after Thomas disappeared had been the hardest of my life. Everything reminded me of him. The house, the Red Angel, the streets of Buckley, the library, the children. Everything except the woods. The Galway was still my sanctuary, and the trees loved me the way they always had. If anything, they might be glad he was gone.

  From anyone or anything else, I would have resented that potential joy in my misery. From the Galway, which had never liked him in the first place, it was only natural, and proof that at least something was still the way it was supposed to be.

  Like Kevin, Jane had been born at home, eased into the world by Laura and Mary, with Cynthia and Basilia Kalakos assisting. Having a sanguivore on hand meant I didn’t get blood all over the rug, and Basilia was not only a trained midwife, her paralytic gaze worked remarkably well as a painkiller. Better than I would have received at the hospital, that’s for sure.

  With Basilia’s help, I was able to sleep through more than half of my labor, coming back to consciousness only when she allowed the effect to wear off so I could push. The first person to hold my shrieking, squalling little girl was Mary, the dead girl who’d practically raised me, and that seemed only right, just like the absence of my daughter’s father seemed entirely wrong.

  But it was temporary. It was only temporary. I was going to find him, I was going to bring him home, and we were going to be a family. We were.

  After Kevin was born, Laura had stayed for two weeks, giving me time to adjust and recover, while Thomas learned what was going to be expected of him and the baby figured out how to nurse. Despite not having—or wanting—children of her own, Laura seemed to have a natural gift with infants. I’d been expecting the same two weeks this time, before Laura left me with Mary and the babies and went back to the carnival to resume her own life. But it had been six months, and she hadn’t left me yet.

  Jane spent most of her time shrieking, but she stopped crying the second she was in Laura’s arms, hiccupping and looking around with huge blue eyes, or simply sliding into sleep. Either way, giving Laura the baby was sometimes the only way to make the screaming stop. Part of me wanted to be ecstatic about that, to see it as a sign Laura was going to stay forever, that I’d get to have my best friend with me while I raised my babies. She could have one of the downstairs bedrooms, and Thomas would be thrilled when he got home.

  Another, larger part of me, saw her ongoing presence as a silent criticism. Better than anyone—even better than Mary—Laura knew how close I was to falling apart. I’d gone almost three days without eating, and over a week without bathing, before she’d shown up to check on me and the progress of my pregnancy. Jane had been born the day after Laura’s arrival. The fear that I’d slide back into depression had to be enormous, and if I did that, the babies could die. Cynthia and Mary would do their best, but they both had other things to worry about.

  Which was why, six months almost to the day since a rip in the world swallowed my husband whole, I was in his office, going through the papers on his desk, looking for any financial paperwork or banking information that could help to keep us from losing the house.

  Instead, I found was a small stack of letters. One was addressed to Nicholas Cunningham at Penton Hall, in England. Others went to Australia, Hawaii, Japan—places I’d only heard of, never been, but which I knew Thomas had visited before he came to Buckley.