“We also got snacks for the road trip you’re about to leave on, since groceries would be pointless right now.” Cynthia put the cake on the coffee table before setting her share of the bags down on the floor. “We swung through McDonald’s on the way home. Your girl can put away some chicken nuggets. I think she’s half honey mustard by weight.”

  “Did you bring us any fries?” I asked.

  “No,” said Sally. “They’re no good cold, and they would have been cold by the time we got home.”

  “Fair enough. Want to see a magic trick?”

  “Sure,” said Sally dubiously.

  “That’s my cue to get out of here,” said Cynthia. “Alice, I’m keeping the change. I’ll apply it to your grocery bill. If you call the Angel when you’re on the way back, I’ll make sure everything’s stocked up and ready before you get here.”

  “Appreciate it,” I said, and watched as she walked quickly to the door and let herself out. Cynthia had seen this before. She was smart to get clear before things got loud.

  Turning back to the living room, I clapped my hands. “The Holy Bargain of For God’s Sake, Alex, Make Those Damn Mice Stop Yelling While I Have A Hangover is still in effect,” I said, loudly and sternly. “But as always within the bounds of this bargain, offerings must be made. You are invited for cake, in the living room, providing you keep the cheering to a minimum and take your portion away with haste. Is the bargain satisfactory?”

  There was a long pause, long enough to make me think maybe they were sulking and I was talking to the walls for no real reason. Then, from all sides, came a resounding cry of “HAIL!”

  Sally winced. “I thought you told them to keep the cheering to the minimum.”

  “That was the minimum,” I said, as mice streamed out of the baseboards and swarmed the cake like locusts covering a farmer’s field, ripping off chunks of sponge and frosting and racing away with them, vanishing into the baseboards. I watched with a small, indulgent smile. A full colony of Aeslin mice gathering food is an impressive sight. “Cake is a literal religious experience, and they’re very excited about it. The fact that they’re not singing a song in honor of the cake, the baker, the farmers who grew the ingredients, that’s them showing restraint.”

  Sally blinked. “They worship . . . cake.”

  “No, they worship us. The cake is just a fulfillment of the promise made to them by Great-Great-Grandma Beth when she found them in her chicken coop.”

  Sally’s expression turned dubious. “How many generations of your family am I going to be expected to memorize? Ballpark figure, if you could.”

  “Your family too now, Sally,” said Thomas with amusement. He had been watching the Ceremony of Cake without getting involved, perhaps not wanting to test the bounds of the Holy Bargain that was keeping him from being swarmed like a sheet cake himself. Now that more than half the mice were gone, it must have felt a little safer to speak. “We’ll be presenting you to the town as a cousin, and I do believe those new identities Alice mentioned arranging in Las Vegas would list you as a relation.”

  “With your permission,” I said, as Sally shot me a sharp look. “I mean, we’ve already established that you don’t want to go back to Maine, and Thomas seems pretty set on keeping you; if we can make that true on paper, we make things a lot easier on all of us in the future. So I guess you’re experiencing the adoption equivalent of getting drafted, if that makes sense.”

  “I guess I am,” said Sally. She didn’t look displeased about it. “I guess you weren’t kidding.”

  “How could we be kidding?” I asked, and picked up a few of the bags. “The mice adore you. Thomas adores you. I mostly don’t want to push you down a well. That means you’re on a par with how I feel about most of the rest of the family, and we’re keeping you as long as you want to be kept.”

  “And if you want to go to college, or go off somewhere and start a life with fewer talking rodents and random assaults by monster-hunters, we can help with that,” said Thomas. “Alice tells me the family accounts are still intact. We don’t want for money.”

  “This is so weird,” muttered Sally. She looked at me. “There a reason you’re stealing my underwear?”

  “I figured I’d put it in your room,” I said. “Unless you really wanted to haul it all yourself?”

  “. . . you can help,” Sally allowed, sounding only slightly overwhelmed. I picked up two more bags. She did the same, and we began the process of getting everything upstairs while Thomas continued to watch the mice denude their offering of cake.

  Sally set to unpacking her things, and then Thomas joined me upstairs so we could do the reverse, packing clothes and weapons for the trip ahead. He discouraged me from bringing too many grenades, saying mildly that while he was not averse to some recreational violence, he would prefer I not blow my own limbs off while I was recovering from my delusions of indestructibility. I encouraged him to bring more shirts than he thought he’d need, glad once again that I had never thrown anything away; he might be out of style, but at least he wouldn’t have to wear anything that was actively bloodstained for very long.

  All in all, it was a soothing process, and we finished and went to bed shortly before midnight, home, safe, and back in a world we almost understood.

  * * *

  That night, Thomas and I slept in our own room, together, with no refugee camp outside for us to defend and a closed door between us and his adopted adult daughter, who had still been sorting through her purchases in her room, which she seemed to be starting to believe was actually hers, when we went to bed. The mice had whisked away our dinner leftovers along with their cake, carrying them off to feed the parts of the colony who weren’t as free to scavenge on their own—the infants and the elders. The bones had been given to the tailypo. Our house was an ecosystem, as it had always been before, and while the exact balance of residents might have changed, it felt like home for the first time in decades.

  To my mild surprise, neither of us felt like being any more intimate than the inherent closeness of curling up against each other in a space that had always belonged to just the two of us, where the rest of the world had somehow managed never to truly intrude. I slept the deep, cleansing sleep that normally followed a fever, the kind of sleep that had been so common when I was a kid that I had barely noticed it slipping away.

  I woke up to early-morning light streaming around the edges of the curtains and the feeling of a hand stroking my hair. I lifted my head, which had been resting on Thomas’s chest, and looked up to find him half-propped on the pillows, smiling at me.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said, and smiled drowsily back. “Sun’s up and we’re still here.”

  “Not for long,” he said. “I believe what woke me was the sound of someone honking a horn outside. You were far too deeply asleep to notice.”

  “I felt safe,” I said, and stretched, scooting slightly away from him to do so. “Not the most common thing, so when it happens, I tend to just let myself have it.”

  “I intend to make you feel safe a great deal more often,” he said solemnly. I smiled at him. He leaned over and kissed me. “We’re home now. We’ll be safe from now on.”

  “After we go drive your former co-workers out of New York,” I said. “Not thrilled about that part. I was excited about having time and privacy.”

  “We have both right now,” he said, and reached for me. My smile grew as I let him gather me close, and for a little while, the urgency of everything else didn’t matter. We were here. We were home, and we still had each other, despite the impossibility of that fact.

  We won.

  When we finally pulled apart, I kissed him before rolling over to get my feet on the floor, stretching again in the process. “I could definitely get used to that as a way to start the morning.”

  “I intend to see to it that you do,” said Thomas, sitting up on his side of the bed. He paused then, a quizzical look on his face. “I thought the bed I had in the bottle dimension was a reasonable approximation of this one; it seems I was wrong.”

  “Wait until we get one that’s less than fifty years old,” I said.

  He smiled at me. “Temptress.”

  “Temptress calls first shower,” I said. “You can go wake Sally. Or ask the mice to do it, but realize that if you do, they may decide they’re allowed to start badgering you.”

  He was still laughing when I left the room and made my way down the hall to lock myself in the bathroom. There would be time for shared showers later, when an unfamiliar routewitch wasn’t about to be honking outside the house. We didn’t have any neighbors for them to bother, but still, if we were going to get on the road before lunch, we couldn’t get too distracted.

  It normally takes about thirteen hours to drive from Buckley to Manhattan, depending on traffic and stops. With a routewitch behind the wheel, it could take six or sixteen, depending on their current relationship to the road. Since the Ocean Lady wanted us to get our butts over there and take care of the Covenant, I was willing to bet this was going to be an unreasonably swift trip, one marked with an absence of construction zones or speed traps. But I’ve been wrong before.

  Sally was in the front room when we came downstairs, a mouse on her open palm. Her attention was focused on the tiny creature, which was earnestly reciting one of the rituals associated with Mary. There were plenty of those. “Ready to go?” I asked.

  Sally looked up, almost startled, before giving a single sharp nod and setting the mouse down on the couch. “All packed,” she said, standing. “You expect we’re coming back here?”

  “We always do,” I said, reaching back to put a hand on Thomas’s arm.

  The words felt hollow. We’d just managed to get here; leaving already felt like an admission of some kind of failure, like we should have been able to find a way to stay put at least long enough to cook a proper dinner and start falling into a routine. Sadly, the world has never been that accommodating. We’d be back. We always came back.

  We had to.

  Thomas took my hand in his, clearly seeing my discomfort, and asked, “Has either of you called the mice?”

  Sally blinked. “I was just talking to one . . .”

  “Yeah, but did you tell them we were leaving?” I asked. She shook her head, and I snorted. “Right. Clergy! Mine, and those representing the Conscripted Priestess and the God of Inconvenient Timing!”

  As I’d expected, there wasn’t even a pause before several small heads poked out of a hole in the wall. The mice might be constrained by the Holy Bargain, but they were still going to be stalking us through the house as long as we were here, soaking up every scrap of liturgy they could get.

  “We’re leaving,” I informed the mice. “Not for very long, hopefully, but we should see the Arboreal Priestess while we’re away. Please choose representatives from the appropriate clergies to accompany us.”

  The mice popped back into the wall, their disappearance followed by the sound of violent squeaking. I waited patiently, and less than thirty seconds later, five mice emerged: representatives of our four branches of the faith, and one of the senior members of the local branch of Verity’s clergy. They ran across the room and up my leg, grabbing onto my backpack and getting themselves settled.

  “To the rest of you, stay safe, and please don’t pick any fights with the tailypo before we get back,” I said.

  There was no immediate reply, but the air in the room shifted slightly as more mice ran down the walls, coming to watch us go.

  “That Holy Bargain packs a punch,” said Thomas, voice low.

  “It does, which is part of why we only invoke it when we absolutely have to,” I agreed, and made for the front door, Sally and Thomas close behind.

  I opened it to reveal a green sedan parked in the driveway. The driver was waiting inside, assuming there was a driver, and the Ocean Lady hadn’t sent us some sort of phantom coach or something. Sally and Thomas filed out behind me, and I locked the door, tucking the key into my pocket.

  “We’ll get you keys of your own cut as soon as we get home,” I promised them, and started down the steps toward the car.

  It felt odd to be taking the key with me rather than hiding it or giving it back to the tailypo. One more brick in the wall of “we are home, we are staying” that I was trying to build. I’d given up on carrying a key through adjoining dimensions after I lost the tenth one, preferring to trust that I’d be able to get inside when I got home.

  The car window rolled down as we approached, and the driver—a broad-shouldered Black man in a red flannel shirt over a white tank top, leaned over to address our group.

  “Y’all my fare?” he asked.

  “That depends on who sent you and where you think we’re going,” I replied.

  “Lady sent me, says you lot need to be tossed out in Manhattan, near the Meatpacking District,” he said, accent a blend of New Jersey twang and something broader and less defined. He’d been driving a while, then, long enough to blunt the edges of whatever he’d originally sounded like. “Sound about right?”

  “Right name, right city, although I didn’t know the neighborhood,” I said. “I thought Rose was going to be coming with you?”

  “Lady sent her on a job.”

  Which, if what she’d said before was accurate, meant she couldn’t say no. right. I leaned over to extend my hand through the open window. “Alice Price-Healy.”

  The routewitch’s eyes widened as he took my hand and shook, respectfully. “Lady said I’d be driving friends, but didn’t say she meant dangerous friends,” he said. “I’m Darius. I serve the Queen of the Routewitches in the shadow of the Ocean Lady. I’ll get you where you’re going.”

  “Good. I appreciate it.” I reclaimed my hand and straightened as Thomas stepped forward.

  “Thomas Price,” he said, then at me. “Did you want . . . ?”

  “No, sweetie,” I said. “You take the front.” He hadn’t been in a car in fifty years. If he wanted to ride shotgun, I wasn’t going to argue with him about it. It wasn’t like I could help the driver with directions or anything like that.

  Looking almost giddy, Thomas moved past me to open the front passenger door and slide into the car, settling his valise between his feet. None of us were carrying enough clothing for any sort of long stay, but we were armed, and I’ve learned that if I have the weapons I need, everything else is pretty much negotiable.

  “And you are, miss?” asked Darius, looking to Sally, who was frowning as she worked something over in her head. Sally looked back at him, a line between her eyebrows as she kept working at whatever was distracting her. Then she smiled, bright as the sun that was still inching upward in the sky.

  “Sally Price,” she said.

  Darius nodded, obviously taking this in stride. I glanced at Sally and smiled as she blushed and looked away. Too late now; she’d said it out loud. She had been acquired.

  We piled into the back, arranging our bags and road snacks between us, my pack on top to avoid squashing the mice. They were keeping low and quiet in the presence of a stranger, but that wouldn’t last once they realized he was a routewitch; the Aeslin had a tendency to reveal themselves at inopportune times when they felt like it was safe to do so.

  “We’ll need to stop for breakfast, if you don’t mind,” Thomas said apologetically to Darius. “There isn’t much food in the house as yet, and our dinner leftovers didn’t survive their encounter with the local wildlife.”

  “No trouble,” said Darius. He tilted his head back, smiling at me and Sally in the rearview mirror. “You ladies all right back there?”

  “We fit,” I said. “Sally hasn’t been in a car for about ten years, and Thomas hasn’t been in one for fifty.”

  “He looks good for his age, then,” said Darius, and laughed, a rich, rolling laugh that filled the car almost as pervasively as the smell of the pine tree air freshener hanging from the mirror. “Well, then, here we go. McDonalds all right with you?”

  “I would do crimes for a McMuffin,” said Sally, almost reverently.

  “Luckily, you won’t have to,” said Darius, and started the car.

  * * *

  Sally didn’t have to do crimes for a McMuffin, but she put four of them away so quickly that I thought she might have done crimes to a McMuffin by the time she was done. Sadly for her and fortunately for my sanity, the milkshake machine was broken. The mice had yet to show themselves, but Darius only looked at me curiously in the rearview mirror as I tucked three hash browns and two Sausage McMuffins into my bag, settling to eat my own breakfast while the mice silently devoured theirs.

  Thomas, meanwhile, had an expression of almost orgasmic relief on his face as he sipped his first cup of coffee in fifty years. It was probably a good thing it was crappy fast-food coffee; if we’d managed to get him the quality stuff, he might have expired on the spot. I hadn’t spent half a century hunting for him to lose him to a pot of Kona.

  Darius turned off the highway once we’d all been fed, sliding easily onto a frontage road, and that was where the fun of riding with a routewitch really began. He drove like he’d been following these specific roads every day of his life, steering around potholes and avoiding construction areas with a local’s learned ease. He never slowed, save for when he approached a red light or a stop sign, and he never broke any traffic laws I could see. And even with all that being true, we were halfway across Pennsylvania before it even approached lunchtime.

  Sally leaned forward. “Fun as this tour of the backroads of America has been, are we going to stop for lunch?” she asked. “I thought we’d have stopped to get gas by now.”

  “You need the bathroom?” Darius asked. “We can stop if you need the bathroom. Seemed like you had enough snacks back there, didn’t need to hit a service station. This sweet girl can run another three days on the fuel she’s got in her tank, and I don’t really feel like having steak for dinner tonight.”