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"It's a Dragon Queen crown."

"And that's my coffee maker." I took a long, grateful sip. "I trust one of those things considerably more than the other."

The rest of the aftermath moved quickly, the way it always did once the adrenaline burned off and everybody just wanted to go home and not think for a while. Maeve had Kai stitched up and bandaged within an inch of his life, muttering the whole time about men who thought "still standing" counted as "fine."

Zelda had been checked over twice, the little silver crescent scar in her palm the only sign anything had ever tried to drag her Below. Carol confirmed the tether was gone—not faded, not weakened. Gone.

Barney looked like a man who'd aged a year in one night. However, he was upright, journal clutched to his chest like a security blanket, and that counted as a win in my book.

He caught me looking and managed a tired, crooked smile. "I told you the ink shifted for a reason," he said, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who'd nearly gotten flattened by the same events he was now taking credit for predicting.

"You told me a lot of things, Barney."

"Most of them wrong," he admitted, which was as close as he'd ever come to conceding a point in four months. He looked down at the journal like it had personally exhausted him. "I kept thinking if I read hard enough, I could get ahead of it. Stop something before it started."

"Could you have?"

"No." He said it simply, without his usual defensiveness. "But it felt better than doing nothing."

I understood that more than he probably realized. I squeezed his shoulder on my way past, and for once, Socks let me.

Arthur, Otis, Mona, and Chewy had already returned to their regularly scheduled nonsense, which was somehow the most reassuring thing in the entire house. My kids, no longer boys because, well, Mona was not, were a blessed constant in my life, and I thanked the Great Goddess for them every day.

"Since nobody died," Chewy announced, "can we get tacos?"

"You ate tacos this morning." I sighed.

"That was before trauma."

"Everything is trauma when tacos are involved," Arthur said, with the weary patience of a dog who'd had this exact argument a thousand times before.

Apparently, Chewy heard the tone of the much bigger, much older dog and decided to let the taco discussion simmer for a bit. I thought it was probably the best option.

Eventually, blessedly, the house started to empty.

"Martha needs sleep," Maeve said, herding everyone toward the door.

"Martha needs coffee," I corrected my baby sister.

"Martha needs both," Kai said, from beside the couch, where he was very obviously supposed to be sitting with his leg up, and not standing, according to the grimace on Maeve's face.

"Nobody asked you, Guardian," she grumbled.

He grinned, and I let it slide, and one by one everybody filtered out into the night. Maeve was the last to leave, giving me the kind of long look that said she had plenty more to say and was choosing, for once, to save it for tomorrow.

And then it was just us.

And the wonderful silence.

I hadn't realized how loud the last four months had been until it stopped. No prophecy screaming out of a journal. No swamp water. No One Below. No crisis waiting in the next five minutes to swallow whatever peace I'd managed to scrape together.

Just my kitchen, my dogs, my coffee, and Kai, sitting on my couch looking like a man who'd nearly died for me.

Again.

I looked at him properly for the first time all night. Bandages wrapped around one hand where the Wayfinder had burned him. Bruises blooming dark along one side of his jaw. His ankle propped up on a pillow, swollen, purple, and wrapped in an ace bandage. I had almost laughed when Maeve threatened him with a stay in the Dragoon Bootay Memorial Hospital if he didn’t stay exactly that way all night, but I was secretly happy she’d done it because I was worried about my man. Thankfully, we’d gotten all the blood cleaned away, but I could still see exactly where it had been, and it broke my heart.

Something in me that had been holding perfectly steady all night finally cracked. I had to take a few deep breaths to keep from bursting out in tears.