“As long as this isn’t you plotting to burn my house down just to go outside when there are contractors here, sure. We may have to use magic to mindwipe them or something, though.”

  Juniper sighed and clicked her tongue. “That will be troublesome, but I can manage if I must.”

  “And rule four.” I made eye contact with each of them, wagging my finger. “We’re a team. That means we have each other’s backs. No sabotaging each other’s food, no hiding each other’s stuff, no bullying each other. You don’t have to be best friends, but you do have to be on friendly terms. Elysia, no!”

  The princess’s hand, which had been inching maliciously toward Clementine’s coffee mug, retreated to her lap.

  “I believe these rules are reasonable,” Juniper said from her coiled position at the table’s end. “I would add one more: all strategic decisions regarding the portals, Black Lazarus, and external threats go through a full party discussion. No unilateral action can be taken.”

  “Seconded,” I agreed. “Good add, though we have twenty years to worry about that.”

  Clementine had been quiet through most of this, jaw working as she chewed and processed the whole scene. Now she set her fork down and leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed.

  “I want my own shelf in the fridge. Top shelf, left side. Nobody touches it.”

  I nodded in agreement. “Done. I’ll get a bigger fridge soon too. This one can’t shit out those cool shredded ice cubes and that nags at me each and every day,” I confessed.

  “I get the TV for two hours every evening after dinner. My shows, my volume, nobody talks.” She looked around the table as she said it, making sure the message landed on everyone individually.

  “We can probably work around that,” I said.

  “I want a lock on my bedroom door.”

  “I’ll install one today.”

  “And I want to sleep alone with you once a week, fuckface.” She said it nice and slow that time, and with the recently added context, I understood exactly what she was getting at.

  My buttcheeks clenched defensively, and I did not dare to look at Elysia’s face at that moment. “We’ll… talk about that later.”

  “You’re goddamn right we will. And if any of you chicas touch my shit without asking, I will kick you in your coochies.” She let that one land, rotating her gaze around the table. Given that she now possessed genuine horse hooves, the threat carried some real weight.

  I rolled my shoulders. “Well, then—”

  “Also,” Clementine added, “you’re paying my phone bill. And buying out my rent contract.”

  “Already done,” I told her, smiling. “I handled that last night, don’t worry.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise, and her ears rotated forward half an inch. She picked her fork back up and stabbed at her pancakes. “These are mid, by the way.” She was blushing.

  “You’re on your third stack.”

  “Mid is still edible, and I’m hungry.” She chewed, frowning at her plate. “Look how big my tits and ass are now, dude. I think the calories know where to go.”

  “I could make you something else,” I offered. “It’s early enough that it’s also probably safe for me to quickly drive into town for groceries if you want.”

  She pointed her fork at me. “Don’t be nice right now, fuckface. I’m still processing how fucked up my life is.”

  The negotiations wound down, but the implementation phase proved that establishing rules and enforcing them were two very different beasts.

  The bathroom schedule collapsed within hours when Elysia locked herself in for fifty-three minutes and emerged smelling like a botanical garden, insisting she’d only been in there for “a few moments.” Portia backed her up, which meant nothing because Portia would have backed up a claim that the sky was green if she thought it would earn her a pat on the head.

  The kitchen rotation showed promise by way of madness. Portia volunteered for lunch duty and produced something edible, if aggressively meat-forward — the entire meal was just five different kinds of meat arranged on a plate with zero accompaniments, all cooked exactly the same. When I pointed out that vegetables existed, she tilted her head and her ears flopped sideways. “But Master, why would I put plants on a plate when meat exists?” Juniper had to explain the concept of a balanced diet, but I could tell she secretly loved Portia’s offering, so honestly? Points for Portia. The meal was perfectly fine for at least two of the party members.

  As fate had it though, the afternoon was when Portia finally collected on a debt she’d been running up since breakfast.

  She’d been angling for it all day, dropping little comments like breadcrumbs — a theatrical sigh over her “terrible posture at the table,” a mournful acknowledgment that she’d eaten three strips of Juniper’s bacon by accident. By mid-afternoon she was openly listing her offenses to anyone who would listen, including Clementine, who was trying very hard to watch her Korean drama and not engage.

  “I have been so negligent in my duties,” Portia announced to the living room. “So slovenly. So disobedient. A lesser master would have addressed this hours ago, but I fear my time is coming even so.”

  “Portia,” I warned her from the kitchen doorway.

  “I am simply saying,” she continued, tail swishing, “that a thorough and merciless corrective spanking would be entirely warranted, and that my bottom has been waiting patiently all—”

  “Portia, for the love of Jeebus Crepes,” I sighed.

  “—morning and most of the afternoon—”

  “Portia!”

  She turned to look at me with enormous amber eyes. “Yes, Master?”

  I looked at Juniper, who had set her book down and was watching. Her expression communicated her thoughts plainly: just do it or she’ll be insufferable until dinner. I looked at Elysia, who had abandoned all pretense of braiding her hair and made a small circular gesture with one finger. Get on with it.

  “Calamondin,” I said, “you may want to look away.”

  Clementine, who had paused her drama and was watching all of this with an expression of pure anthropological fascination, said: “No way. This is way too weird to look away from. Also, it’s Clementine.”

  Fair enough.

  Portia was already moving. She crossed the living room, flipped herself face-down over the arm of the couch with practiced ease, and flipped up the hem of her skirt to present what the poet would call a juicy peach of a rear end. Bare. Perfect heart shape. Tan lines. The fuckin’ works. Her tail had flicked to the side very cooperatively.

  “You may proceed, Master,” she said into the cushion, voice muffled but dignified. “I shall attempt to endure your boundless cruelty.”

  I sighed deeply as Mini Josh twitched in his cotton cave. Then I delivered one firm, flat-palmed spank.

  The sound it made was frankly louder than I’d intended.

  The worst part came next—came being the operative word. Portia made a sound that started as a yelp and evolved rapidly into something I would not describe in polite company, and then her body offered a very wet, very audible, enthusiastic response that soaked into the carpet beneath the couch — a carpet that was going to need serious attention one of these days. Her tail was wagging so hard it was basically a helicopter rotor.

  “Thank you, Master,” she said breathlessly. “I have been thoroughly corrected and will endeavor to do better from here on.”

  I had my doubts.

  Clementine was staring at the carpet, then at Portia, then at the carpet again, her face having passed through several distinct phases before landing somewhere well past disbelief and into a specific kind of empty resignation.

  “I regret my decision,” she said.

  “I tried to warn you.” I crossed back toward the kitchen.

  “You really did.” She picked up the remote and turned her drama back on. “I’m going to need, like, five minutes of quiet self-reflection.”

  Elysia was already producing the spray bottle from somewhere in the cushions and gave Portia two efficient spritzes, which accomplished nothing except making Portia giggle. “Oh, Princess, nothing could sour my mood now after such rich abuse. Spray all you—” She squirted her two more times. “Okay, that’s getting old faster than I thought! Stop! Stahp!”

  As for the cooking experiment, Elysia attempted to contribute by making grilled cheese — a simple enough task, right? Bread, butter, cheese, heat, four variables — but she managed to burn the first attempt so thoroughly that the smoke alarm went off and Portia started howling. The second attempt was somehow worse. I stepped in and walked her through the third attempt step by step, standing behind her at the stove, guiding her hands on the spatula, and when we flipped it and the bread came out golden and the cheese was actually melted, she held the plate aloft like she’d just forged a legendary weapon.

  “I have manifested sustenance!” she declared to the room. “Ba ha ha ha! Bow before my golden creation!”

  “It’s a grilled cheese,” Clementine said from the couch. “I used to make those for myself when I was like, eight.”

  Elysia gasped. “Eight years old? But you were so freshly emerged from the womb! Could you even crawl yet?”

  Clementine kept mostly to herself through the day, drifting between the living room, her bedroom, and the back porch. At one point Juniper slithered through the living room trailing her full twenty-something feet of copper-and-black tail behind her, and Clementine just closed her eyes and whispered, “I’m in a fucking fever dream.”

  Same, girl.

  She’d brought almost nothing with her when she showed up at my door — just the clothes on her back and her phone — so most of her time was spent in my borrowed clothes looking restless, and every time she caught her reflection in a window her ears would flatten and her tail would go still.

  But then she’d do a little posing if she thought I wasn’t looking. So that was kind of cute.

  She did, in any case, take over dinner without being asked. Sometime around five she wandered into the kitchen, opened the fridge, stared at the contents for thirty seconds, and started pulling things out. I watched from the doorway as she moved through the room, chopping, seasoning, and adjusting heat by instinct rather than following any recipe. She made a simple stir-fry with whatever we had on hand, and it was honestly better than anything I’d produced all week.

  “This is fucking amazing,” I said.

  “My halmoni taught me,” she said when she caught me watching. “Don’t look at me like that, fuckface.”

  “Like what?” I stayed in the doorway, hands in my pockets.

  She turned back to the pan and gave it a shake. “Like I just did something impressive.” She adjusted the heat without looking at me. “It’s stir-fry, not rocket surgery.” But her ears had rotated forward, and the tail did a little, involuntary swish.

  When her TV window rolled around, she claimed the couch and put on some Korean drama that none of the other girls understood but all of them watched from various hiding spots. Elysia stationed herself at the kitchen counter, pretending to read a magazine while obviously watching the screen. Portia crouched behind the armchair with just her ears and eyes visible over the top. Juniper didn’t even bother pretending — she coiled up at the far end of the couch and watched openly, occasionally asking Clementine questions about the plot that Clementine answered with increasing detail and decreasing hostility.

  “Why is the tall man crying?” Juniper asked during what appeared to be an emotional confrontation.

  “Because she just found out he’s been protecting her this whole time, but he can’t tell her the truth because of the promise he made to her dead mother.” Clementine didn’t look away from the screen.

  Juniper considered this, her tail coiling slowly. “That seems needlessly complicated—Oh, shit! Did he just get shot out of nowhere?!”

  “That’s Korean dramas for you. Awesome, right?”

  “In Antheria, he could simply challenge her mother’s ghost to a riddle battle and win the right to speak freely.”

  Clementine turned to look at her for a full second. “That’s metal as fuck,” she said. “I respect it.”

  During that tepid peace, I kept my mouth shut and made sure no one remembered I existed for the duration.

  After that, Juniper retreated to the guest room to study the encyclopedias she’d been working through, and Portia followed me around the house offering to help with chores, which was worse than useless. Elysia had parked herself on the couch after Clementine’s TV time ended and discovered a reality show about people building elaborate cakes, which riveted her completely.

  “This is barbarism,” she breathed, watching a contestant stack fondant layers at a precarious angle. “Magnificent, reckless barbarism. I need this level of chaos in my baked goods.” She glanced over at me. “Sir Josh. Come sit with me. I want to hold your arm while I watch.”

  “I’m cleaning up the kitchen.”

  “The kitchen will be there afterwards.” She held out one hand expectantly, chin lifted, expression arranged into its most severe configuration, and then after a beat she dropped the chin an inch and said more quietly: “Please, my love?”

  Frankly, the ‘please’ cost her something. I could tell by how carefully she said it.

  Sooo I went and sat with her.

  “Simp,” Clementine coughed into her hand.

  I deserved that one, probably.

  By the time the sun went down, I’d installed the lock on Clementine’s door, reorganized the fridge to accommodate her shelf, and drawn up a bathroom schedule that I taped to the wall. I did so with the quiet resolution of a man who knew nobody would follow it.

  The house had survived one full day with five occupants — nobody had been stabbed, kicked, or set on fire. Elysia had made grilled cheese and said please without internally bleeding. Portia had only had to be spanked once, and Juniper was not at all a problem in any way. At least I had her.

  As for Clementine, she was still kinda bitchy, but she was growing on me. A part of me wondered why I didn’t follow up with her more after our hookup. She was really cute, and her attitude sure made her memorable at the very least.

  As the evening sank into the later hours, I took a minute alone in the kitchen and pulled up the System interface. I’d been sitting on a question since last night — the bond scaling on Clementine’s stat block — and with everyone occupied, now seemed like a good time to dig in.

  I focused on her entry in the party roster and the details expanded:

  CLEMENTINE KIM — GREATER STEED

  Level: 1

  STR: 14

  DEX: 14

  CON: 14

  INT: 9

  WIS: 8

  CHA: 7

  [Bond Scaling] — All physical stats increase as bond strengthens.

  Her locked abilities told the story of the road ahead. Shared Senses unlocked at “Wary,” meaning she just had to tolerate me. Spirit Charge required “Amicable,” and Transcendent Gallop needed “Devoted,” which I wasn’t going to think too hard about for now. The Steed’s Resilience passive also sat behind “Amicable,” taunting me with its promise of enhanced durability I couldn’t access yet. Her numbers were strong, her potential was massive, and every bit of it was gated behind a relationship that currently registered as HOSTILE in bright red letters.

  Sooner rather than later I would need to address that.

  Chapter 4

  The portal opened at 12:07 AM, right on schedule. It said something profoundly bizarre that monster dropping portals were the most stable thing in my life at this point.

  I’d been standing in the field for about ten minutes, sword in hand, rolling my shoulders to work out the tension that always built before these nightly encounters. Portia bounced on the balls of her feet beside me with her war hammer resting across her shoulders like she was heading to a batting cage. Elysia had taken her ideal position on a stump about thirty yards back, wrapped in a bathrobe and blankets I’d brought her and holding a thermos of hot chocolate. Juniper had positioned herself between us and Elysia, arranging her coils in a compact spiral that allowed quick movement in any direction.

  Clementine was on the back porch.

  She’d refused to come out. When I asked when she might be willing to experiment with actually helping out, her exact words had been “Fuck you, fuckface.” Given what I learned about that nickname recently, I wasn’t able to conjure up any indignation.

  Besides, she was still more than justified in feeling overwhelmed by the situation. She’d been here two days, and only after turning into a magical sexy humanoid pony supermodel. Forcing Clementine into combat before she was ready would be stupid and cruel, and I’d learned enough about her by now to know that pushing her toward anything only made her dig her hooves in harder.

  Hmm. Accidental racism with that last observation, maybe, but the point still stands.

  The air in the field started doing that thing where it shimmered like heat off asphalt, and the purple glow intensified until it was bright enough to cast shadows across the grass. I tightened my grip on my sword and focused.

  “Incoming, ladies,” I said. No one replied in any way beyond taking more serious stances. Except for Elysia, who just sipped her cocoa more loudly to signify her acknowledgment.

  The tear ripped open with a sound like fabric being shredded. Two shapes bolted through before the portal had fully stabilized, moving so fast they were just dark blurs against the purple light.

  Not one creature tonight, but two. That was new.

  They hit the ground running and immediately split apart, one breaking left and the other right, circling our position in opposite directions. I tracked the nearer one and got my first clear look as it passed through a patch of moonlight.

  A wolf. Or what a wolf would look like if you asked someone to imagine a very evil wolf on steroids and PCP. It had jet-black fur that drank in light rather than reflecting it. Its eyes were like hot coals, burning red in the dark, and it was bigger than any wolf I’d seen on nature documentaries. It was maybe the size of a Great Dane but longer, leaner, built entirely for speed. Wisps of shadow trailed from its body like smoke.