He held back thought of them, of his brothers and sisters, as if he were Poseidon holding back the tide. “Are you saying this because you don’t want to go away with me? Because if you don’t want it—”
In the distance, down the hall, a thin cry rose: Tavvy.
Julian was out of the bed in seconds, the floor cold against his bare feet. “I’d better go.”
Emma pushed herself up on her elbows. Her face was serious, dominated by her wide dark eyes. “I’ll go with you.”
They hurried down the hall to Tavvy’s room. The door was propped open, a dim witchlight burning inside. Tavvy was curled up half in and half out of his tent, tossing and turning in his sleep.
Emma was on her knees next to him in moments, stroking his disarrayed brown hair. “Baby,” she murmured. “Poor baby, by the Angel, what a night for you.”
She lay down on her side, facing Tavvy, and Julian lay down on the little boy’s other side. Tavvy gave a cry and curled back into Julian, his breath softening as he relaxed into sleep.
Julian looked across his little brother’s curly head at Emma. “Do you remember?” he said.
He could see in her eyes that she did remember. The years they’d taken care of the others, the nights they stayed up with Tavvy or with Dru, with Ty and Livvy. He wondered if she’d spun fantasies, as he had, that they were married and these their children.
“I remember,” she said. “That’s why I said you couldn’t ever leave them. You couldn’t stand it.” She propped her head on her hand, the scar on her forearm a white line in the dimness. “I don’t want you to do something you’ll spend your life regretting.”
“I’ve already done something I’m going to spend my life regretting,” he said, thinking of the circles of fire in the Silent City, the rune on his collarbone. “Now I’m trying to fix it.”
She lowered her head gently to the floor beside Tavvy, her pale hair making a pillow. “Like you said about my closet,” she said. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Okay?”
He nodded, watching as she closed her eyes, as her breaths evened out into sleep. He’d waited this long, after all. He could wait another day.
After the dawn, Emma woke from a nightmare, crying the names of her parents—and of Malcolm—aloud. Julian picked her up in his arms and carried her down the hallway to her own bedroom.
The last time Kit Rook ever saw his father, it was an ordinary day and they were sitting in their living room. Kit was sprawled on the floor reading a book on cons and scams. According to Johnny Rook, it was time to “learn the classics”—which for most people would have meant Hemingway and Shakespeare, but for Kit meant memorizing things like the Spanish Prisoner and the Melon Drop.
Johnny was in his favorite chair, in his usual thinking pose—fingers templed under his chin, legs crossed. It was times like this, when the sun slanted through the window and lit up the fine, sharp bones of his father’s face, that Kit wondered about all the things he didn’t know: who his mother had been, if it was true, as was whispered in the Market, that Johnny’s family was English aristocracy who’d tossed him out when he manifested his Sight. It wasn’t that Kit yearned to be aristocracy so much as he wondered what it would be like to be in a family that had more than two people in it.
The ground suddenly seized up under him. Kit’s book went flying and he slid several feet across the floor before slamming into the coffee table. He sat up, heart speeding, and saw his father already at the window.
Kit got to his feet. “Earthquake?” he said. When you lived in Southern California you got used to small shiftings of the fault lines in the earth, waking up in the night with the glasses rattling in the kitchen cupboards.
Johnny turned away from the window, his face deathly pale. “Something’s happened to the Guardian,” Johnny said. “The protection spells on the house have faded.”
“What?” Kit was bewildered. Their house had been warded for as long as he could remember. His father had always spoken of the wards as if they were the roof or the foundation: essential, necessary, built into the fabric of their home.
He remembered, then, last year, his father saying something about demon protection spells, more powerful ones—
Johnny swore, a fluent string of curses, and whirled toward the bookcase. He seized a worn spell book. “Get downstairs, Kit,” he said, moving to kick aside the rug in the middle of the room, revealing the protection circle there.
“But—”
“I said get downstairs!” Johnny took a step toward his son, as if he meant to reach out to him, to touch his shoulder perhaps. Then he dropped his arm. “Stay in the cellar and don’t come out, no matter what happens,” he barked, and turned back to the circle.
Kit began to back toward the stairs. He stumbled down one step, and then another, before pausing.