We got to work. The silo’s problems were worse than the initial estimate. Wilkinson poked around the foundation for twenty minutes and the news got grimmer with every poke. He found deep cracks in the concrete base, for one thing. The upper platform where I’d planned Juniper’s workshop was structurally sound but getting to it safely required reinforcing everything below.

  “You’re looking at three, maybe four more visits,” Wilkinson said. He wrote something in a little notebook. “Plus materials. I’ll need to bring a welder next time.”

  More visits with more people meant more risk. I nodded and told him that was fine. Money wasn’t an issue. I didn’t say that second part out loud because that would be fucking stupid.

  Clementine turned out to be genuinely good at this. She held beams steady while Wilkinson measured, handed him tools before he asked for them, and had opinions about bracket placement that made the old contractor raise an eyebrow. “Welded, not bolted,” she said when he asked her preference on the support joints. “Bolts loosen over time. My aunt’s restaurant had a problem with the kitchen shelving, and she switched to welded brackets in ‘09. Never had an issue after that.”

  Wilkinson looked at her for a long second. “I like her,” he told me.

  “Yeah, well, she’s mine,” I said, slapping her butt playfully. Clementine kicked my shin under a crossbeam where Wilkinson couldn’t see it. I barely felt it, for the record.

  We hauled lumber, cleared debris, and shored up the worst of the foundation cracks with temporary bracing. Clementine and I worked well together, so well in fact that Wilkinson was starting to feel like a third wheel. She’d brace a beam and I’d nail it. I’d hold a measuring tape and she’d mark the cuts. At one point I caught the contractor watching us and humming “Kiss the Girl” from The Little Mermaid.

  My penis also noticed that Clementine in work mode was a specific kind of attractive. The denim skirt sat on her hips and made concentration difficult with her deeply sexy curves, and every time she bent over to grab something from the toolbox, the view from behind was the kind of thing that makes a man want to convert to Presbyterianism and commit to Korean cuisine for the rest of his life. I still focused on the lumber, mostly.

  Inside, the house was doing less well. I could feel Elysia through the bond all morning, a slow burn of jealousy and boredom that intensified every time she heard Clementine laugh outside. Around ten o’clock the jealousy spiked hard enough that I nearly dropped a two-by-four, which told me something was happening in there.

  I found out during Wilkinson’s lunch break what had gone down. Elysia had tried to sneak downstairs to supervise the renovation from a strategic vantage point, by which she meant the kitchen window. Juniper had blocked the hallway with a solid wall of coiled snake body, and the standoff that occurred was apparently something to behold.

  “She threatened to incinerate my tail!” Juniper reported from her doorway. “I reminded her that exposing our household to a civilian contractor would be the reason we lost our home. She called me a serpentine tyrant and a traitor to the crown and retreated.”

  “I am a princess!” Elysia’s voice came from the bedroom. “Tyrants are beneath my station. I am a benevolent monarch unjustly imprisoned by a conspiracy of reptiles and canines. All I desired was to see my true love.”

  Portia’s head popped up behind Juniper. “I tried to help by offering to let her brush my hair! She threw the brush at me! It was… fine.”

  I went in and sat on the bed next to Elysia. She had her arms crossed and her chin up in a disastrous pout, but the bond was giving me the real picture: she was lonely, jealous, and bored out of her mind. Hearing me work with Clementine all morning had made every insecurity she had light up at once.

  I squeezed her knee. “I know today sucks. Thank you for staying inside. You know why it’s important, right?”

  Her chin wobbled. “Yes. It is wretched. And you are forgiven for your absence. Now rub my feet. That is the price of my compliance.”

  I rubbed her feet for five minutes, and the noises she made were as pornographic as always. “Ohhh! Ahhh… Oh my. By the Silver Bark Tree, that—nyah!”

  At one point she let out a moan that made Josh 2: Foot Fetish Inception threaten to blow my cover in front of Portia and Juniper, both of whom were still in the room and pretending very hard not to hear. When I stopped, Elysia looked about sixty percent better and the bond had settled from screaming to a dull grumble.

  “Later tonight it’s you and me,” I promised her. “Whatever you want. Just nothing in my butt.”

  The chin came back up. “I want to be told I’m beautiful a hundred times while you make love to me in front of the dog while I spray her in the face with water.”

  “That’s… Okay, that latter part we’ll have to renegotiate later.”

  I went back outside before Wilkinson got suspicious about the long bathroom break I’d claimed.

  The afternoon was more of the same. Wilkinson worked, Clementine and I helped, and the silo slowly started looking less like a condemned grain elevator and more like the early stages of an actual living space. Wilkinson left around four with a handshake and a promise to come back next week with welding equipment. He told Clementine she was “good help, better than most guys I’ve worked with,” and she took the compliment by flipping him off and saying “Gross.” He laughed, deciding graciously that she was being playful.

  After his truck disappeared down the road, Clementine and I sat on the steps in front of the house and ate sandwiches I’d thrown together that morning. She pulled her beanie off and let her horse ears spring free, sighing loudly like a great burden had suddenly been lifted. They rotated in the cool air cutely.

  “Okay, I have a question,” she said between bites. “And don’t bullshit me because I can feel when you’re dodging.”

  I chewed and waited.

  “You’ve been tense as fuck for like three days now. The cavalier bond picks it up every night when the others are asleep, and it’s been keeping me up. So spill.”

  I almost deflected with a jaunty witticism. Old habit. But the look she gave me was the one that came right before a hoof to the shin, and I’d pushed my luck enough for one day.

  “Juniper ran the portal data,” I said. “Things are escalating, so I’m not sure we can stay here forever. And we may need to look into getting some allies.”

  Clementine stopped chewing. She looked at the half-renovated silo, then at the house, then at the field where we fought every night. She swallowed her bite and set the sandwich down.

  “So we might be pouring money into a silo we won’t even be here to use.”

  “Maybe.” I picked at the crust of my sandwich. “To be fair I’ve got a lot of money. But nothing is certain yet.”

  “And you’ve been sitting on this for three days?”

  “Juniper told me yesterday. I’ve been sitting on it for one day.” I held up a finger. “If you’ve been picking up other nerves, it might just be because Elysia asked if she could eat my ass a couple nights ago and since she has a habit of initiating things herself, I’ve been a bit on edge.”

  Clementine’s face twisted as she took that in, then she shook her head and refocused on the main issue. “Still too long, fuckface. You shouldn’t keep anything from me from now on.” She picked her sandwich back up and tore off a bite. “So what’s the plan?”

  I looked at the field. “I don’t have one yet.”

  “Then we need one.” She chewed, swallowed, and pointed what was left of her sandwich at me. “I’m not dying before I’m a mother because you didn’t have a game plan, Josh. Figure it out. And don’t feel like you need to do it alone.”

  She was right. Single-guy thinking had been working fine for me up until the point where it absolutely hadn’t.

  The girls poured out of the house once Wilkinson was gone. Elysia immediately claimed my arm like she’d been starving for it, placing dozens of kisses on my shoulder to more or less enhance the point. Portia wanted to know every detail about the renovation. Juniper asked quiet questions about the timeline, and the way she phrased them told me she was doing the same math Clementine had done on the tailgate: wondering whether any of this would matter if we had to leave.

  I didn’t bring up the escalation data with the full group. One more day of sitting on it wouldn’t hurt, and Elysia had earned her pancake night.

  Chapter 13

  Ihad three missed calls from Miller on my phone. I noticed them that morning when I checked the thing, which I rarely did because nothing good had ever come from checking my phone. The first call was from two days ago. The second was from yesterday. The third was from 6 AM today, which told me the man’s patience was starting to wear thin.

  I hadn’t picked up because I already knew what the conversation was going to be about, and I wasn’t ready to have it. Miller had left his card wedged in my gate latch about a week ago with a handwritten note on the back that said “We should talk. Privately.” I’d read it, pocketed it, stuck it in my nightstand drawer, and proceeded to pretend it didn’t exist, because avoidance is a core pillar of my personality.

  Just ask Clementine.

  The morning routine went the way it usually did. Lots of “My champion!” and “Arf, Master!” and things of that nature, of course.

  I started the breakfast because I was the only person in this house capable of operating a stove without committing a felony against food. Well, aside from Clementine, but she was often the last one awake.

  Elysia came down in a see through nightgown and nothing underneath, claiming my arm and the attention of my peepers before I’d finished plating the eggs. Portia showed up wearing only her collar for no discernible reason and immediately volunteered to be punished for sleeping past seven, which I obliged because it’s good to get the day started with a good carpet-soaking.

  Juniper dressed normally at least and ate her typical meat-and-egg plate while reading something on the tablet that made the crease between her brows deepen.

  When Clementine finally came down, Portia was Mickey-Mousing it with just a tank top and no pants or panties. She took one squinty look at that, shrugged, then took over cooking the bacon without being asked and bumped me with her hip to claim the burner. Her ears were doing that slow, contented rotation they did when she was focused and comfortable, and the flannel she’d stolen from me was open one button past decent.

  “You look like you didn’t sleep,” she said, not looking at me.

  “Elysia’s tattoo was going off like a nightlight again. Hard to sleep next to a glowing elf.”

  “How can I be expected to have pure dreams when you sleep beside me?!” Elysia huffed from the table, where she was arranging her pancakes into a tower. “I can smell your intoxicating scent all night long.”

  Clementine sorted. “Is there a word for a female simp?”

  I smirked. “Anyway—”

  That was as far as I got before the horn started.

  It wasn’t a quick honk, and it wasn’t a series of honks. It was a continuous, obnoxious blast that ripped through the quietude of the morning like someone had leaned on a car horn and then died on top of it. It came from the direction of the front gate, and it didn’t stop.

  It was a damn good thing I didn’t have any neighbors.

  Portia’s ears went flat against her skull and a growl rumbled up from her chest, low and territorial. Her hand found the handle of her massive hammer where it leaned against the wall, and her tail went rigid.

  “Rrrrrrrr. Master, there is an intruder! Arf! Arf arf arf!”

  “Such barbarism!” Elysia slammed both tiny palms on the table, rattling the syrup bottle. “Josh! Smite whoever is responsible for this affront! I was in the middle of constructing a pancake tower and there can be no joy in the task with that awful sound ringing in my ears!”

  I looked at the snake woman for her reaction and saw that Juniper had gone very still, but it was the calculating kind of still. Her coils tightened into a compact spiral under the table and her crimson eyes fixed on me. “I don’t know much about car horns, but that feels like someone is trying to get your attention,” she said, setting down her fork. “Who could it be?”

  I set down the spatula. “Everybody stays inside. I mean it. Hats, boots, the whole deal if you have to come to a window. And preferably just don’t do that.”

  “But Master—”

  “Stay, Portia. Stay! Good girl.”

  She whined, but she stayed. Juniper’s tail looped around one of Portia’s ankles as a secondary restraint, which I appreciated.

  “If the intruder harms you, Master, I shall come to your aid and see to it that you live to abuse me another day! Pah-tooey!”

  “I’ll be fine, Portia.”

  Clementine sighed and tapped her perfect jawline. “I mean, I’d love to abuse you, and I’d do it with my whole heart.”

  Portia shook her head sadly. “It’s not the same.”

  I walked down the driveway alone. The morning was cold and gray, and the horn kept blaring the entire walk. By the time I reached the front gate, I wanted to test the limits of my strength and try and flip the car as soon as I saw it.

  A county sheriff’s cruiser was parked right up against the gate. I recognized it before I could even read the plates. Miller. He was sitting behind the wheel with one hand on the horn and a paper coffee cup in the other. When he saw me approaching, he lifted his hand off the horn. The sudden quiet hit me harder than the noise had. My ears were ringing and the morning felt weirdly naked without the blaring all of a sudden.

  He got out of the car and walked up to the gate.

  Sheriff Miller looked exactly the way he always looked, which was like a man who’d been ‘tired of this shit’ since the Reagan administration. Late fifties, maybe pushing sixty, with a face that had seen more bullshit than a ranch hand and a uniform that was clean but never pressed, he moved like a man at least a decade younger and appeared to be in shape. He had a second coffee in his other hand, too.

  He held it out through the gate bars. “Brought you one,” he said. “Figured you might not invite me in, so at least we can have a polite chat here.”

  I took the coffee because turning down free coffee felt immoral, even when it came from the guy who’d been poking around my property line for the last couple of months. We stood on opposite sides of the gate and stared at each other.

  “You’ve been dodging me, Becker,” he said.

  “I’ve been busy. Such is life.”

  “Busy not answering your phone and getting pampered by unreasonably attractive cosplay nerds?” He took a sip of his own coffee. “I left you my card about a week ago. Probably handed it to you last time I saw you in town, too. Figured you’d reach out at some point. You didn’t.”

  “I’m not very stretchy.”

  He blinked in confusion, took a sip of his coffee to mull over my words, then muttered, “Pardon?”

  “Uh. Reaching. It was a reaching out joke. I should have just said I’m not great at reaching out or something. Sorry.”

  “You’re not great at a lot of things, I bet.” He leaned against his cruiser and crossed one boot over the other. “I’ll be straight with you, Becker. I’ve been sheriffing Wapa County for a while and I’ve been a cop for a lot longer. You know the deal around here as well as I do. Our nearest neighbor in common is a small town run by a teenaged vampire princess. None of that’s news, so I’m pretty open-minded about the supernatural.”

  I nodded because he was right. Wapa County’s supernatural situation was about as secret as a gas station bathroom. The rest of the world didn’t think about it much, but that didn’t mean they didn’t know about it. But we were a twenty minute drive away from a city full of monsters and people living side-by-side more easily than cats and dogs. It was a weird pocket of Wisconsin.

  “What WAS news,” he continued, “is the purple light show on your property when it first started happening. And I’ve been paying close attention to it all this time, especially after that incident with the monster attack in my town.”

  I said nothing, which felt like the right move.

  Miller went on like I knew he would. He’d been tracking the portal activity for months, though he hadn’t fully puzzled it out until recently. He saw the lights, got warned about local energy spikes, and so on.

  “I’ve been content to let you mind your own business, at least sort of. I won’t lie, though, having you here feels nerve-racking, and I can tell you’re on the Countess’s radar too. The skeleton patrols into my town have been happening more often over the past few weeks,” Miller said. “Beaumont’s people have been asking questions about your farm. I don’t know what she knows. More than me, I guess, and I know enough. Your property is ground zero for an escalating pattern the whole county can feel, and my working theory is you’re the cause of it, not the land itself.”

  “And you’re here to shut me down?” I asked, keeping my voice level.

  Miller shook his head. “I’d never tell a man what to do with his own land. You’ve been true to your word and we haven’t had any problems in town since that first kerfuffle, so I’m here as a friend. I just want to tell you that you’ve got a choice to make, and the window to make it on your own terms is closing.”

  “That doesn’t sound, like, super friendly, though.” I took a drink of the coffee he’d brought me. It was pretty good. Clementine had been on my ass about upgrading our coffee setup for weeks, and now a feisty old county sheriff was making me look bad on my own private domicile.

  Miller laid out the rest of it for me in a plain, grocery-list tone that I found kind of hypnotic in an annoying way. Eventually the federal government would figure things out, and they’d get involved. I wouldn’t have much choice about how things played out after the fact, and who was to say what would happen to my girls. If they found out about portals, too, their interest would be huge. There was talk of other portals in the area being seized by the government in recent years, too. One that apparently led to a world full of fantasy creatures like goblins and elves, but that was all rumor and conjecture as far as I knew. The only reason I’d heard the rumors at all is because it was supposedly not far from Wapa Lake.