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By the time her parents got there, the friends had already fallen asleep. Aria opened her eyes to see her mother and father rushing towards them, coming up short when Julian silently held up a hand. He glanced down at the sleeping boy in arms, then motioned for them to calm down.
They slowed their pace dramatically, approaching with gentle caution instead.
Luke and Molly were just a few steps behind. The four of them had been dining together in the city, commiserating about the rebellious nature of teenagers, when they’d gotten Julian’s call. He and Gabriel had been much closer when it happened. Angel was already at the school.
Those were the only two factors that kept them under the speed limit.
The second Devon saw Aria’s eyes were open, he lifted her into the air. Watching as James blinked slowly awake then surrendered himself into his mother’s arms.
“Are you all right?” he whispered into his daughter’s hair.
She considered a moment then shook her head, pressing it into his shoulder. His entire body seemed to sigh as he kissed the top of her hair.
“Come on. Let’s get you home.”
The others got up slowly, stretching out their stiff limbs. Rae detached from James just long enough to heal Benji’s face. But as they headed to the door, the boy stopped in his tracks.
“Don’t we have to stay?” he said tentatively, standing over a foot taller than his pint-sized mother but leaning on her all the same. “Isn’t there supposed to be a debriefing?”
Under any other circumstances, it would have been downright hilarious that Benjamin Fodder was the one advocating for the rules. But as it stood the others merely turned their eyes to their parents, too tired to speak, too deflated to anything but go along with the official verdict.
Rae’s lips thinned ever so slightly before she shook her head. “No. This day has been long enough.”
* * *
THE DRIVE BACK TO LONDON was perfectly silent.
The kids were replaying what happened in the cottage over and over in their minds, while their parents were cursing themselves for not being there sooner. Why had they ever left? After the incident with Jason they should have moved in permanently, joined the teaching staff.
James took a hot shower the moment they got inside, then went to sleep without talking to anybody. His parents watched from the base of the stairs. After declining an offer for dinner Aria followed suit, hoping the transition would be simple and sleep would take her quickly.
But five hours later, she was still awake.
Hybrids—nice. I can see why you wanted to come here.
Aside from that initial attack, he hadn’t tried to hurt any of them. In the final moments, when she and Jason were battling him together, he was only trying to get away.
You know, they pulled Lane off the ventilator this morning. Said there was no point in drawing things out any longer. She was never going to wake up.
You couldn’t fake that kind of sorrow. Death was common in the Privy Council, and Aria had seen her parents lose enough people to know how it looked. The man may have been violent, he may have been beside himself with rage. But he was grieving. It was tearing him apart.
You are not getting away with this. I promised her, I promised the rest of them I would put you in a grave.
Even buried under the covers Aria couldn’t help but shiver—playing back those final words again and again. She’d still been trying to process them when the window shattered. She and Jason and Benji had still been holding on to him, wondering why Dorian looked so shattered himself.
In a single movement she pulled herself out of bed, slipping a robe over her shoulders and ghosting down the stairs. She hadn’t heard a single sound since closing her bedroom door, but she instinctively knew her parents would still be awake. They weren’t the kind of people to take this kind of thing lightly. Especially when they’d been fighting tooth and nail for the last eighteen years to stop their children from making exactly these kinds of memories.
Guilder was supposed to be a safe place. But it hadn’t been that way for a while.
Sure enough, they were sitting across from each other at the dining room table. So engrossed in their muted conversation, they didn’t even notice her standing in the doorway.
“I figured you guys would still be up.”
Her father jumped just as dramatically as her mother—an accomplishment all by itself. In the last eighteen years, Aria had surprised him exactly twice. Both times, he’d been coming out of anesthesia. (Growing up in a supernatural house, you didn’t exactly play fair.)
“Honey, what are you doing up?” Rae answered, pushing quickly to her feet. “I’m so sorry, did we wake you?”
Aria shook her head, settling between them in her normal spot. “Couldn’t sleep. I keep playing it back in my head...like if I do it enough times something might change. I don’t know—that probably sounds stupid.”
Both parents were watching with riveted attention. Both shook their heads at the same time.
“It doesn’t sound stupid,” Devon said quietly, reaching over to squeeze her hand. “Arie, I’ve stumbled into that sort of situation more times than I care to remember. It’s impossible not to replay it. To be honest, I’d be worried if you weren’t doing exactly that.”
In an act of simple kindness, he didn’t ask what she might want to change.
“Yeah, well...I figured you guys would probably need me down here.” She tucked her hair firmly behind her ears, armed with fresh determination. “And before you try to send me back to bed, I don’t need to wait until morning. We can get this all out right now.”
Her parents shared quick glance before turning back with the same blank expression.
“What do you mean?” Rae shook her head. “Why would we need you down here?”
Aria glanced between them.
“To hear the story, find out what happened.” She rolled up the sleeve to her bathrobe, offering her wrist across the table. “Maybe you want to see it in my head—”
Rae took her hand, but didn’t slip into a power. Instead she gently curled her daughter’s fingers, holding them in her own. “Honey, we already got all that from Professor Locke.”
Professor Locke?
Oh—Dorian.
Aria dropped her eyes to the table, suddenly feeling deflated. “...of course.”
The PC might have been handling the children with velvet gloves—even allowing them a late-night escape to London—but they would be less indulgent with an adult. Especially when he actually knew the culprit, whilst the other had merely burst onto the scene.
“What did he say?” she asked quietly, eyes flashing up to study their reactions. “The boy who died...how did they know each other? And what happened after he broke in? By the time we got there, Professor Locke was already lying on the floor.”
She didn’t add that the ex-librarian was a fantastically talented warrior—one who’d been secretly training the children on the side. Even facing off against someone with a speed tatù, she couldn’t imagine him losing. There had to have been some kind of mitigating circumstance. An unknown factor that gave his attacker an advantage, or at least the element of surprise.
Devon and Rae exchanged another look before he leaned forward with a sigh.
“The boy was a former student—apparently Locke used to teach at a common world school in Sussex. That’s why...that’s why he went to the history building the first time he broke inside.”
Aria’s mouth fell open, though at this point she was hardly surprised.
We were right. Dorf was never the target. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Kid with a speed tatù—mistakes like that happen.” Rae shook her head, scrolling through similar such incidents in her mind. “He probably didn’t even realize it was Dorf until it was already over. Both men had a similar build. The boy came up from behind.”
“Whatever the reason, he didn’t make the same mistake with Locke,” Devon continued. “He didn’t even attack him outright. He broke into the cottage first—spiked the man’s coffee.”
Aria slowly leaned back her chair, reeling in shock. To anyone who knew the librarian, it was a brilliant plan. He never went anywhere without a coffee mug permanently affixed to his hand.
It would also imply he knew the guy could fight—didn’t want to risk it. Or maybe he was just drawing it out, giving them a chance to talk.
Somehow, she suspected the latter. The boy she met certainly wasn’t one to shy away from confrontation, but he also had a lot weighing on his mind. She could just picture him there, sitting in the shadows, waiting for the mug to fall. She was surprised he had the patience.
“So why did he do it?” she whispered.
Never had she seen someone so angry. Yet there were tears shining in his eyes.
“He did it for a lot of misguided reasons,” Devon said quietly. “Mostly he did it because his sister died this morning and he needed somewhere to channel his grief.”
Lane. They pulled her off a ventilator.
Aria shook her head, still numb with shock. “But what does that have to do with Dorian?”
Rae tilted her head with a frown. “...Dorian?”
Aria flushed as she realized her mistake. “I mean, Professor Locke. The guy’s super informal.”
Devon stared at her a moment, then shook his head. “I have a feeling that’s a much longer story, one you’d have to get from him. In the meantime, honey, you really should try to get some sleep. I know it feels like you have a handle on things now, but it’s going to be hard in the morning. And your little brother needs you.”
The automatic protests died on her tongue when she thought of James. She’d never seen her little brother so shaken. Not since he’d found a dead bird at five years old and tried to resuscitate it back to life. While most people rambled nervously, he got very quiet. He’d been quiet tonight.
“I should never have brought him,” she murmured. “It was my idea to go—”
“Lily had a vision and you all tried to save a life,” Rae interrupted firmly. “That’s the way these things happen, sweetie. Not a single thing that happened tonight was your fault.”
Probably best not to mention what had happened before. When the rest of the friends were trying to go inside, but she insisted they all investigate the broken gate. Only James had volunteered to go with her. And that was even after he’d been apprehended on the campus lawn—
Holy crap—I completely forgot!
“Uh, you guys?” Aria paused in the doorframe, nervous about the catastrophic effect of her next words. “Something else actually happened tonight. Right before we went to the cottage.”
She was about to say more, but Devon held up a tired hand.
“We know. Angel told us.”
Her eyebrows lifted slowly, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Maize and Windall were reassigned to Yemen,” Rae said shortly.
There it is.
“What?!” Aria asked in surprise.
Her mother’s lips twitched with the hint of a smile. “They asked to go.”
Aria let out a dry laugh, then turned around and headed up the stairs.
Yeah, I’d probably ask to go, too...
* * *
FIVE DAYS PASSED AND nothing changed.
Unlike most of their other comical attempts at ‘family time’, both Rae and Devon were glued to the house. The clock was taken down, the phones were disconnected. Any upcoming or active missions were quietly passed to someone else. Three of those days, they never left the house. The other two, they did so only to pick up Chinese food before returning to the residential block.
The other families were operating very much the same.
Benji found himself under unofficial house-arrest, stranded in the penthouse when the elevator ‘mysteriously’ stopped working. His thoughts turned with immediate concern to the safe passage of the take-out delivery men. His parents were quietly thrilled their sabotage had worked.
Lily and Jason likewise spent virtually all their time indoors. While their two families occasionally came together, they seemed to prefer the isolation. He spent endless hours playing silent games of chess with his father. She spent endless hours scribbling in her notebook—trying, though she’d never admit it to anyone, to get another vision.
Things fell into a mind-numbing pattern. But on the sixth day, things changed.
“Good morning!” Devon brightly greeted Aria the moment she came down the stairs. “How are you feeling?”
She smiled faintly, pushing back her messy hair. He’d asked the same question every day since they’d returned to London. She and James had a secret bet as to how long it could continue. “I’m fine,” she answered with sarcastic cheer. “How are you?”
His eyes twinkled as they studied her across the room. “Bored.”
She stepped back in surprise. Most days, the script was the same. He’d cheerfully interrogate, they’d share a mug of coffee, then pick out what movies they wanted to feast on for the day. When she wasn’t working, her mother had a tendency to sleep until at least eleven. Ever since the shooting, James had been doing the same. The mornings had been officially claimed by Aria and Devon. She’d thought it would go on forever. Her father was endlessly patient. But something was different today.
“Bored,” she repeated, mostly because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. “Well...we can switch things up if you like. Maybe go out and get some breakfast, or—”
“Actually, your mother and I have a little business back at Guilder,” he interrupted. On cue, Rae swept briskly down the stairs—hair curled, smartly dressed, dragging a shell-shocked James in her wake. “We thought you and the others might want to spend some time together instead.”
Aria watched in a daze as she bustled about the kitchen, wondering if they really had things to do at Guilder or if her impressive supply of sweatpants had simply come to an end.
“Uh...yeah. That would be okay.”
Truth be told, it would be a lot better than okay. In times of trouble, the friends’ default had never been isolation. Like their parents before them, the children tended to cling. The days spent in lock-down had been rehabilitating, but...unnatural. Aria found herself suddenly ready for it to end.
“When are you going to be back?” she asked quickly, sharpening up the longer she stared at them bustling around. “I could order us something for dinner.”
There was something contagious about their momentum, a sense of ‘coming back to life’ as the memory of their residential cocoon faded away. James felt it, too—straightening up and running a hand self-consciously through his sleep-tousled hair.
“Don’t worry about dinner,” Devon replied quickly, grabbing himself a mug of coffee before pouring one for his wife as well. “We’ll probably be back later than that. But you should order something for everyone else. There’s money on the counter. Or here—” He dug around in his pocket for a moment before tossing something her way. “—just use my card.”
James lifted his eyebrows slowly as she stared at the precious plastic in her hands. The siblings shared a quick look before turning slowly to the kitchen.
“Okay, what is this?” Aria asked suspiciously, slapping the card against her hand. The kids had never lacked for anything when it came to money, but that freedom came with certain rules. “I thought I wasn’t allowed to borrow this after that incident with the elephant.”
No, they weren’t a native species. And no, you couldn’t get one delivered.
Devon flashed a grin, probably remembering the same thing. “This is me being in a hurry.” He quickly kissed her on the forehead before further rumpling James’ hair. “This is me trusting that you learned your lesson about the import of exotic animals, and that card will be used to purchase dinner and nothing else.”
James nodded with comical innocence as Aria saluted and slipped it carefully into her robe.
Their father swept out the door, muttering something about having already warned the HMRC. Their mother paused in front of them, screwing the lid onto her thermos.
“Is this really okay?” she asked quietly, looking both up and down before coming to rest on her daughter. “You guys will be all right if we leave? Arie—you can watch James?”
“Aww, Mom—don’t say it like that,” he complained. “You know how she lords it over me.”
Rae pursed her lips. “Fine. James, would you mind keeping an eye on your sister?”
Arie rolled her eyes as her brother nodded soundly.
“Much better and more accurate,” he said practically. “Not to speak out of turn, but the girl’s a walking train wreck, Mom. You should really look over those pamphlets I got you.”
At this point, Rae wisely decided to excuse herself from the room. She kissed each child on the forehead, reminded them most everything in the house was flammable, then eased out the door.
Aria waited until it shut before raising her eyebrows dangerously. “...pamphlets?”
James nicked the credit card from her pocket, twirling it between his fingers. “For some of the best mental institutions around London. Only the best,” he emphasized, seeing the look on her face. “You are technically my sister.”
Her eyes narrowed with a dangerous smile. “That’s so sweet. But unless you want to spend the rest of the night locked in the basement, I sincerely suggest that you—”
At that moment, the door opened up again and three people walked inside.
All were dressed exactly the same—in slippers and pajamas, like they’d recently been pulled from bed. All were staring with the same uncaffeinated expression—blinking only when necessary.
The groups stared at each other for a moment before meeting in the middle of the room.
“You guys, too, huh?” Benji yawned loudly, stretching his arms above his head. “I guess five days is exactly how much they love us. Now we’ve been abandoned once again.”
The others laughed, still trying to wake up.
Lily was wearing a silk nightgown with a pair of neon green leggings that couldn’t possibly match anything else in her closet, while Jason was wearing sweats and a fitted white tank. He might have been sleeping, he might have been sparring with his father. It was difficult to say.
“Well, they didn’t leave us completely empty-handed.” Aria snatched the credit card back from James, holding it up with a grin. “We are to spoil ourselves while they’re away.”
Benji nodded approvingly, while Jason lifted his eyebrows in surprise.
“Guess they didn’t learn from the elephant...”
“Elephants weren’t the only animals that place had,” Lily said conspiratorially, having led the previous liberation movement. “If they’re really not checking identification, then—”
“If they’re really not checking identification, then I have a better idea.” Benji snatched the card for himself, staring around with a grin. “...you guys wanna get some beer?”
