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The woman I loved had just announced she was done hiding, marched straight toward a house that had already tried to swallow me whole once, and somehow, I was the unreasonable one for wanting to wrap her in bubble wrap and lock her in a room with no doors.

I watched her stomp up the path to Hoopingarner House in those mud-caked, bedazzled combat boots, spine straight, shoulders back, looking for all the world like a woman who'd already won whatever fight was coming. I loved her so much it was genuinely inconvenient.

It was also, at the moment, competing hard with the fact that I was terrified.

Not of the One Below. I'd faced down worse than swamp water with a grudge and lived to complain about it. This was quieter than that. This was four words, sitting in the back of my skull since Barney had read them off that damned page.

The Guardian stands between Below and the Queen.

And right underneath it, worse:

The Guardian shall fall.

Every single person in that clearing had looked at me when Barney read that line. Martha had tried to pretend she hadn't. She was a terrible liar all the time, but it was worse when it mattered most.

"Don't," I told Roy, before he could get a word in.

"I haven't said anything."

"You're thinking very loudly."

"I'm allowed to think. It's one of the few things this arrangement hasn't taken from me." Roy paused, then added more carefully, "Prophecies aren't always literal, you know. Half of what got written down about the Fae Folk over the centuries was somebody's cousin embellishing a bad night with too much tequila."

That's exactly what people say right before a prophecy turns out to be extremely literal.

Roy had no response for that. Not right away. When he finally spoke again, some of his usual bluster had gone out of his voice entirely.

"I don't know how this ends, Kai." He said it plainly, without the flourish he usually wrapped around anything that resembled fear. "I served the Danu for centuries. I have watched Guardians fall before, and I never once knew which ones would rise again until they did. Or didn't. I cannot promise you the ending. Only that I will not leave you to face it alone."

That was somehow worse than if he'd simply agreed with me.

Roy didn't run out of confidence. Not for anything. Hearing him do it now, over this, told me more than any prophecy ever could.

Martha reached the front door of Hoopingarner House and shoved it open as if it had personally wronged her, and the moment she crossed the threshold, every clock in the house stopped.

All at once.

Tick.

Tick.

Then nothing. Silence so complete that I could hear Barney's nervous breathing three feet behind me.

Martha looked around at the frozen hands on half a dozen antique clocks. Then she put her hands on her hips, entirely unimpressed, and huffed, "Oh, good. The house knows I'm here. Because apparently privacy is dead everywhere now."

The house had been repaired since the last time we'd stood in it. Well, repaired was a strong word. In reality, it had been stabilized. Crews had spent four months of careful work stabilizing what had nearly come down around our ears– but it still felt like it was holding its breath, waiting to see what we'd do next.

The dogs, of course, were not staying outside– and they said just that.

"I'm not staying outside," Chewy announced, trotting through the door directly on Martha's heels like that had ever been in question.

"Nobody asked you to."

"Good. I hate conflict."

"You create conflict," Arthur said, from somewhere behind him.