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Chapter Text

For a moment, there's no other sound but the patter of rain on the roof. It's all too unreal to believe—can Luz really be back? Who are these pointy-eared, rainbow-haired children? Why do they all look so battered, as if they've traveled here from Oz via the Tornado Express? But then the tears well up in her daughter's eyes, and the purple-haired girl stares down at her boots, and the little Black boy's lower lip trembles, and Camila Noceda remembers who she is. "¡Dios mío! You'll catch your death out there. Come in, come in, all of you!"

They filter uncertainly past her, the two strange girls first, then the boys. Then it's just Luz standing there, on her own porch. "Mom," she says. The tears are gone now, dissolved into the rain on her face. "I missed you so much."

Camila folds Luz into the embrace she's wanted for so long. My baby is back, she thinks.

And she is … but she's different. Instead of her old canela y romero shampoo, her hair smells like old earth and salt and a little bit of sulfur. She's a little taller, and a lot stronger; through her jacket, Camila can feel the muscles in her shoulders. And that fresh wound on her poor face, that will leave a mark for sure—ay, está mansa, she reminds herself. No use going crazy fretting over the things that have changed and the things that can't. She pulls back, holding Luz at arm's length for a full look at her. "Mija," she says, and picks the most innocuous of these many differences to exclaim over. "Your hair! It's gotten so long!"

Once everyone has crowded inside to drip on the rug, Luz gestures to Camila first. "Guys, this is my Mom." She nods at Vee, who's lurking uncertainly in the doorway to the kitchen. "And that's Vee. She's a basilisk from the Boiling Isles, and my not-so-evil doppelganger."

She turns, and sweeps her arm toward the two boys and the girl with glasses. "Mom, these are my friends: Gus, Hunter, and Willow." Gus and Willow smile wanly at Camila; Hunter's expression continues to flatline. Luz reaches out and takes the purple-haired girl by the elbow, tugging her ahead of the others. "And … this is my girlfriend, Amity."

Girlfriend? Luz's only 'romantic relationships' before now have involved the characters in her favorite TV shows and books. Camila half-expects Amity to deny it, to explain that Luz has once again let her imagination run embarrassingly far ahead of real social cues.

But instead the girl somberly holds out one hand, which Camila accepts for a firm handshake. "Hello, Dr. Noceda," she saves gravely. Her eyes are huge and luminous, watching Camila's whole face for a reaction. "I've heard a lot about you. It's—it's nice—to finally meet you."

The youngest boy—Gus—makes a muffled noise, and his face crumples. Hunter pulls him more tightly against his side, and Willow takes his free hand.

Camila's heart hurts for them all. "It is a delight to meet you too, Amity," she says, and squeezes the girl's fingers before she lets go. They're all just children, scratched-up and scared and with nowhere else to turn. They need to be taken care of. They need some good old-fashioned mothering, Dominicana-style. She claps her hands. "You're all soaked and probably half-starved too! I've got some nice asopao de pollo on and there's enough to go around."

As she ushers them ahead of her into the kitchen, Vee pipes up. "I'll go get the first-aid kit." She eyes the group, seeing all the same cuts and scrapes and bruises that Camila can't stop looking at either. "And some extra bandages."

"Thank you, sweetheart." She opens her mouth to say more, but Vee is already squirming upstairs toward the botiquín, and for a moment, Camila stands alone in the dark living room.

In the kitchen, Luz has already doled out seven bowls and started to ladle out identical portions of soup. "Check it out, Gus!" Willow prompts, nudging him. "Your first real human food!" He manages a tremulous smile, and scoops a spoonful into his mouth, squinting curiously as he chews.

"'at was delicious," says Hunter, at the other end of Camila's table, around a mouthful of soup—a last mouthful of soup. His bowl is already empty and he is carefully avoiding looking at everyone else's servings. "Thank you, Mrs.—uh, Luz's mom."

"It's Dr. Noceda, sweetheart. And I'm glad you enjoyed it." Though he can't have tasted much of it on the way down. She puts her hand to her forehead. "I just had a premonition of what feeding six teenagers is going to look like. Oh, my." She turns to Luz, who is leaning against the counter with her little girlfriend, letting the others use the four seats at the table. "Why don't you make some toast, or find some crackers in the cupboard—I'm going to run to Bargain Barn before they close and stock up on … everything."

"Does that mean …" Luz swallows an oversized gulp of soup instead of trying to talk around it. "Does that mean it's okay if they stay?"

At the back of the kitchen, Vee has started to unpack the first aid kit onto the counter. She looks up, waiting for Camila's answer.

Which can only be one thing, of course. "What!" Camila puts her fists on her hips in mock outrage. "You think I'm going to put my daughter's tired, hungry friends out, and in a downpour no less? You've been gone too long, mija, no te acuerdas cómo es una madre dominicana." She puts her hands on Luz's shoulders and plants a big embarrassing mom-kiss on that sulfur-smelling hair of hers. "You and Vee are in charge while I'm gone, okay?"

"Yes, Mom. Thanks." She gives a joke-y little salute. "We'll be fine."

Not one of these children looks in the least bit fine, but that's a conversation for another time. "I'll be back soon," she promises, and it's the single hardest thing she's ever done, to let go of Luz, to put her back to her and walk out of the room and trust that she'll still be there when Camila returns.

#

Vee follows Mom into the front of the house. She hands Mom her purse and keys, once she's picked her own sneakers out of the new jumble of kids' shoes. Mom pats her cheek fondly. "You know this doesn't change anything for you and me, right? You are mine too now. You'll always have a place here, babosita."

Vee tilts her head into Mom's palm, and blinks twice, lids sliding sideways over her big eyes. "I know," she says. "But it makes me happy to hear you say it, too."

When Vee slithers back into the kitchen, most of the other kids have already finished eating. She glances at her own full bowl, still cooling on the counter, and at the equally full table. Willow is idly tracing her spoon around the empty bottom of her bowl, staring at nothing. "I've been thinking so much about my dads," she says. "I just realized … we don't even know if our palismen made it out of Belos's castle when the Collector destroyed it."

Emperor Belos. The sound of his name is enough to freeze Vee in place. Luz has the opposite reaction. Her head, which is stuck deep into the cupboard over the dishwasher, cracks against a shelf as she straightens up too fast. As she ruefully rubs the back of her head, Vee sees her eyes drift to the backpack shoved into the far corner of the kitchen. "I'm sure they're okay. Clover's so brave, and Ghost is so smart. And Emmiline is so resourceful—just like you, Gus—and Flapjack is so loyal—"

Hunter's chair pushes back from the table with an angry squeal. "'Scuse me," he mumbles, to the roomful of stares, and squeezes past Vee where she stands in the doorway.

Willow and Gus exchange glances, then turn to Luz, who shrugs helplessly. Amity is the one to notice Vee lurking there in the dark living room. She lifts a hand in quiet greeting. Vee waves shyly back, and squirms over to her waiting dinner. It would be sad to let Mom's asopao go to waste, anyway.

Luz has emptied most of the cupboard by now, and she's on her knees on the counter digging as far as she can reach into the next set of shelves. Sitting on the counter is against Mom's rules, but Vee presses her lips shut instead of scolding. It's not the time for that.

"I know they're here somewhere!" Luz insists to Amity, who doesn't look like she knows whether to be reassured or concerned. "We always kept them here."

"Are you—" Vee forgets her voice for a moment, when everyone in the kitchen turns her way. "Are you looking for the crackers? Mom—your mom and I rearranged everything this winter. They're in the pantry now, next to the croutons." She wrings her hands and looks down. "Um. Because they both start with C."

"Oh! Oh. Right, that's a good way to do it. I, uh." Luz slides off the counter and throws the pantry open with operatic enthusiasm. "Hello, crackers, nice to see you again. Gus, do you want soda crackers, or, ooh the fancy sweet potato ones?"

Gus looks as if he's been asked to calculate the square root of eleven million (which, Vee knows, is 3,316.6). "…Yes?" he squeaks, and the bag of sweet potato chips lands on the table in front of him. He leans forward to give the package a curious, crinkling poke.

"You can explore the whole kitchen later if you want." Luz has plastered an enthusiastic grin on her face. Vee recognizes its desperation; she's mustered similar expressions on her own version of Luz's face a time or two before. "There's so much human stuff! Obviously, I guess. I mean, all of it is human stuff, right? The blender … the food processor … my mom's coffeepot …"

"She got rid of the coffeepot." Vee clears her throat; everyone's staring at her again. "She … she said too much caffeine was bad for her blood pressure."

"Blood pressure!" Luz exclaims, too loudly. She claps her hands on Amity's shoulders. "Another cool thing that humans have!"

Amity tugs gently on her sleeve. "Luz. Are you okay?"

Vee squirms backward. "I should go."

"No, wait!" Luz reaches out a hand. "It must be weird having all of us in—your house." She lowers her voice. "Listen. If you're going to leave, I should tell you … Belos is dead. He can't hurt you anymore." Her eyes flick to the dark living room, then snap back to Vee. "But also: don't leave! You must be hungry too. Hang out with us and eat?"

Belos is gone? Finally gone? Vee lets herself edge a little farther, back into the room with all the light and noise and people. The bowl of soup in her hands is cheerfully warm. She's really not supposed to eat anything messy outside of the kitchen, and the asopao smells so good. "If you really don't mind," she whispers.

Gus leans over in his kitchen chair, just far enough to poke her elbow. "Hey," he says. "Your soup is getting cold." His eyes widen. "Is human soup supposed to be eaten cold? Am I doing it wrong?"

Vee looks at Luz again, who smiles nervously at her. She smiles nervously back. "Um," she says, and takes her bowl off the table, retreating to one corner of the kitchen. "Mostly not. But there are some kinds that are. Like, um, vichyssoise. And gazpacho."

"Gazpacho," repeats Gus, savoring the syllables. He cracks a smile: forced, but so earnest it makes Vee's lips quirk up in answer, too. "Cool. Literally. If—if I'm gonna be stuck here—" There's a moment of shattering silence in the kitchen, that Gus stumbles to fill with an easy joke. "Then I want to try every human food there is."

#

Camila has crammed the grocery cart full of what seems like every kind of food there is. Every kind sold at Bargain Barn, at least. Milk and cereal—Monster Munch is Luz's favorite, but is the fanged cartoon on the front offensive to pointy-eared, pink eyed witch children? Better through in some cornflakes too—bread and jam and peanut butter—what if one of them has a peanut allergy? Are allergies a thing that witches can have?—bananas and apples and carrots and cookies. Before she checks out, she throws four sleeping bags underneath the cart, and then fishes a few likely-looking sizes out of the clearance T-shirt bin, some baggy basketball shorts too. Luz should still fit in her old clothes, Amity can probably borrow some too, but the rest of those poor kids can't possibly sleep in those soaking-wet clothes. They'll need more things to wear, too; some of what they arrived in looks like she can fix it up on her sewing machine, but most of it is going straight into the trash. Well, that's what thrift stores are for, isn't it?

When the tired-looking cashier reports the total, Camila stoically crams her credit card into the reader. She's always been careful with money, and minded her savings account. The last year has been helpful for that; Vee has broken far fewer windows and torn through far few fewer pairs of pants than Luz would have in the same amount of time. Still … who knows how long she'll have so many mouths to feed? Those kids didn't have the bearing of people who expected to make it back home tomorrow after a good rest and a good meal. Well … she'll talk to the folks at the other veterinary hospital across town, the one with the 24-hour emergency room. Maybe they're looking for help with the occasional overnight shift.

There's only one other car parked in the store's lot; her car sits alone underneath one of the big lights. Camila runs to it in the rain, the cart bouncing over missing chunks in the pavement. She crams the shopping bags into the trunk, stows the cart in the return chute, sits behind the wheel—and bursts into sobs. Adrenaline has been in the driver's seat this long, but it's wearing off fast and the comedown crash is rough.

"My baby is back," she says to herself, between shuddering breaths. "My baby is back and I don't know her at all."

Luz has returned from a realm of demons with a sure-to-scar cut on her face and horrors in her eyes. Things Camila doesn't have the vocabulary to even ask about. And her house must not even feel like home anymore, not the way it used to. Her room was divested of most of her things, before Camila knew about Vee; and she has to share her home with a sort-of-sister who took her place. Taking Vee in was the right thing to do, but even so, Camila's heart hurts for Luz, a pain with no recourse or remedy.

Practicality wins out in the end, and it doesn't take long for Camila to cry herself out of tears. She blots her eyes with a Kleenex from her purse and checks herself in the rearview mirror. A little puffy, maybe, but that will wear off on the drive. She shouldn't keep those poor things waiting any longer as it is. The rain has finally stopped, too. She buckles her seat belt, straightens up, settles her hands on the wheel at a precise three o'clock and nine o'clock position.

She might not recognize the person her daughter has become, but that's not going to keep her from loving and protecting and caring for her the very best that she can. At least she's not in the horrible demon realm anymore, and none of its horrors can hurt her, never again.

#

When Camila pulls into the driveway, she can see, through the front window, that the lights are still on in the kitchen. ¡Ay, Dios! Those kids really are going to eat her out of house and home.

A stirring of movement from the porch startles her as she steps out of the car—pero no, es solo la chula jevita de Luz, coming down the steps toward her. "Hi, Dr. Noceda. Can I help you carry something?"

"Amity!" Camila almost drops her keys before she can fumble them into the lock on the trunk. "You surprised me. Yes, please, come grab a few things if you don't mind. What are you doing out here?"

"I just needed some air." Is the girl always this pale, Camila wonders? She needs to get more air in the near future, and some sunshine, too. "Here, I can take that." She bends down and scoops up an oversized armful of shopping. Her skinny little arms start shaking immediately.

Camila takes three of the bags back, leaving Amity with the bulky but lightweight sleeping bags. "You don't have to impress me, sweetheart." She tweaks the girl's nose, and smiles when her cheeks turn pink. "But I like that you're trying. Will you take those upstairs for me?"

"Yes, ma'am!" blurts Amity, and the pink darkens to a tomato-red. "I mean, sure. Yes. Of course."

Camila loads herself up with shopping bags—it's going to take a few trips—and quietly slips into the house behind Amity. Her eyes adjust quickly to the darkness in the living room. Three of the children are in here, already asleep: Hunter, with his arm around Willow, Gus sandwiched tightly in between them. Ay, should she wake them up to change into dry clothes, or just let them be?

No, on second thought, two of them are sleeping. Hunter is just pretending, and not doing a very good job of it: eyes squeezed too tight, fingers pulling ridges into Willow's blouse. They've all been crying again, pobrecitos. She tiptoes past them into the kitchen. Let him pretend to be asleep; she can pretend to believe him.

She hears the girls in the kitchen before she slips through. "But just think of all the Freaky Friday shenanigans we could do!" Luz was saying. Beneath her voice, water rushes and bubbles. "Switching places. Pranking Mom with the ol' doppelganger special. I never thought about how cool it would be to have an almost-identical twin!"

"Well … I'm out of magic again now. Mom's been calling me—I mean, you—well, she's been calling us out sick for the past two weeks. School's out for the summer soon anyway."

Camila creeps a little closer to the kitchen doorway. To her surprise, Luz is elbows deep in the soap-frothed sink, washing up the dinner dishes. Vee stands behind her, drying and putting things away as she goes.

"Aww," Luz grumbles affably. "Well, that's okay. It's still cool to have a surprise not-very-identical twin. And, Vee … I'm really glad you were here to take care of Mom while I was gone."

Vee sniffles a little. "I'm glad, too."

Camila thinks that maybe she isn't all cried out, after all.

#

After the groceries are put away, and Vee quietly excuses herself, it's just Luz and Camila alone in the kitchen, dancing awkwardly around the space between them. "I'll put on some tea," Camila says, "some nice chamomile, it'll help you sleep." While she fusses with the kettle, the teabags, the cups, she glances over her shoulder. "And while we're waiting … ¿quizá dime que pasó?"

Luz sets the sugar bowl on the counter beside Camila. Her forehead wrinkles, squishing the band-aid pasted over that nasty cut on her face. "You … want to hear about the Boiling Isles?"

"Of course! Of course I want to know: where you've been, what brought you back to me, why your friends are all so sad." She has a few guesses, of course, the obvious blanks filled in; but she would rather hear the whole thing from Luz, in her own words. See it the way she sees it, and maybe know and understand her a little better, along the way. "Tell me, baby. Please tell me everything."

She watches Luz make a decision, and feels her own heart break, and knows there's nothing she can do to stop any of it. Even as Luz nods, Camila can see her shutter a part of herself away, silence a chapter of the story. "Sure, Mom. I don't think I'm ready to sleep yet anyway."

Before long, they are sitting over cups of tea long since gone cold. "And when I tried the door again," Luz is saying, "the portal was gone. It was just us, here, in the human realm. Stranded. And that's when we found you." She leans back in her chair, plucking idly at the dirty letter jacket she's wearing. "Belos is dead. But this Collector kid, he's so powerful. The Boiling Isles are just his playset now, and my—my friends' parents and siblings are his toys."

"Luz, it's all so …" Terrifying. Shocking. Heartbreaking. "So much. None of it is own your shoulders, you know that? You're a kid. You should be worrying about pimples and homework and learning how to drive. Not—not the end of the world!"

Luz stares at the floor.

Telling Luz not to think about something she's fixated on is about as useful as nailing gelatin to the wall, and about as long-lasting. Camila sighs. "Okay, mija. I can see that brain of yours working. What are you planning?"

Luz looks up at her. There's a spark of something from behind those closed-off eyes—maybe it's love, maybe it's hope—and she gives Camila a fragile smile. "It's up to me now, Mom. It's my world, and my fault they're stuck here. I'm gonna figure out how to make a portal and I'm gonna get all of them home."

#

When Luz starts yawning, Camila declares it Actual Bed Bedtime, and shoos her off to round up her friends. One by one, they make their drowsy way into the bathroom to change into the makeshift pajamas Camila has acquired, and then shuffle into Luz and Vee's room. "Just this one night," Camila informs them strictly, though inside, she feels soft when she how they all cling to each other. There is a zero percent chance of, ejem, romantic overtures happening under her roof right now. For one night, they can just be frightened children together.

Luz parts reluctantly with the stained letter jacket when Camila promises to take good care of it in the laundry. "What if demon realm clothes have a chemical reaction to human realm soap?" she frets. "It's not mine, Mom, I can't let anything happen to it."

"I promise it will come back to you in pristine condition." Camila kisses her forehead as Luz surrenders the jacket to the laundry basket. "Now get some sleep, mi amor."

Hunter and Willow usher Gus into his sleeping bag first, practically tucking him in, as if he's much younger than his twelve years. He deserves to be babied a little, poor sweet thing. Hunter throws his own sleeping bag down next to Gus and simply falls on top of it, face-down, not even unzipping it first. Willow wriggles into her own bag and plops down beside Hunter, opposite Gus. When Hunter lifts his head to look at her, his expression is full of surprise and wonder that paints him pink all the way out to the tips of those funny ears of his, and ay guau, okay, they're holding hands and Camila suspects she'll be having to keep an eye on those two as well as her daughter and her girlfriend.

Speaking of Luz and Amity, there's an empty sleeping bag on the ground, two girls in the top bunk, one of whom is Luz making puppy eyes down at her dubious mother. "Just this once," Camila sighs. "And you'd better go right to sleep, all of you!"

She nods approvingly at the round of yes, Mom and yes, Dr. Noceda. But when she flicks the wall switch off, she still sees one pair of eyes softly reflecting the faint light from the hall: Luz's, of course, staring wearily but sleeplessly up at the ceiling.

Camila closes the door softly behind her. The laundry basket fits familiarly against her hip, and she makes her way down to the washing machine. There are no care labels on any of the demon-realm clothing, of course; she decides on a gentle wash cycle. It's been a while since she's had to carefully sort through the pockets of dirty clothing—Vee was considerably more conscientious about that, back when she still wore clothes—but she pauses to do so now, just in case. There's nothing but a pencil stub and a few crumbs … until she gets to Luz's jacket.

Those pockets are crammed full of papers, all of which have been scrawled over in strange, incomprehensible patterns. Some of the motifs repeat each other; is this some kind of witchy demon language? The pictographs might not mean anything to Camila, but they clearly mean something important to Luz. She sets them carefully aside, on top of the dryer, to return to her daughter tomorrow.

When she starts the wash cycle, though, the pile of papers shifts, cascading to one side. Near the bottom is a glossier sheet: a photograph, or its demon-realm equivalent. Luz is in it, grinning broadly. Behind her stands a pale-skinned, grayed haired woman with one gold fang and one yellow eye, her arm proudly and protectively around Luz's shoulder. The strange woman's other hand rests on a little … raccoon … dog … thing with a skull on its head, whose bright, beady red eyes are cast adoringly up at Luz.

There's nothing hidden behind Luz's smile here. There's nothing held back. She's so happy there. She's so different.

Camila thought she didn't know Luz before she saw this picture. Now she doesn't know anything anymore.

This is a family photo.

She sits down hard against the laundry room wall, pressing the picture to her chest. "I don't know who you are," she says, to a woman who can't hear her. Who may even now be the play-thing of a tyrant child-god. "But I think you gave my girl something I couldn't. And I'm glad. And I'm jealous. And you loved her too. Didn't you?" She peels the photo back for one more look. Her eyes are too dry to cry anymore, even though this last thing she needs to say hurts most of all. "I hope—I hope she feels like she can tell me about you, someday."

###

Chapter Text

A lot of the human realm is covered in something called 'grass', which is a terrible waste in Willow's opinion. It's all right to walk on, she supposes; a bit tickly if you try to sit down in it. But it just doesn't do anything besides sit there, which it's also bad at, because apparently it just up and dies if a passing human-realm dog goes to the bathroom on it. Gus says that certain human-realm animals can actually eat the stuff (ideally the non-peed-on version, Willow hopes) but that humans themselves can't digest it. All the witches had tried a bite (despite Luz and Vee's warnings to the contrary) just to see if it wasn't a match for their otherworldly metabolisms; they were, on the whole, supremely unimpressed.

"But that just means this is a perfect opportunity!" Willow exclaims, surveying the Nocedas' backyard. She wiggles her toes, digging into the ground a little. Okay, she concedes, the one thing grass has going for it is that it does feel pretty nice first thing in the morning on bare feet. "If all this grass isn't doing anything now, then it doesn't matter if I replace it with the best garden the human realm has ever seen."

"Please, Mom?" Luz turns a laser-focus puppy-dog expression onto her mother. "Willow is the best plant witch in the world. In both worlds. And it would really help to have extra food, wouldn't it?"

"Well …" Dr. Noceda scratches the back of her neck, considering. She takes a drink from her travel mug of tea, to buy herself some more time to think. "I suppose I have been meaning to start a garden the last few years. But I never seem to have enough time to get around to it."

"Oh!" Willow pulls the seed catalog she'd found on the coffee table from the back pocket of her comfy thrift store dungarees. "Is that why you have this plant encyclopedia?" She rifles through it, admiring the fruits and vegetables in their weird, knobbly, striped, colorful glory. "Do you have a favorite? What should I put in?"

Dr. Noceda looks thoughtful. "Hmm … string beans don't take so long to produce, and those are pretty easy to grow. There are some fun varieties too, yellow, and purple, and dragon-tongue—"

"Ooh, Willow, look." Gus stabs a finger into a page. "I want one of these! Please!"

Vee leans over Willow's shoulder to see where he's pointing. "Oh, Gus, that's a potted banana plant. Connecticut isn't really the—"

"A little delicate compared to my usual, but I'm always up for a new challenge." Willow stretches her arms overhead, then draws a small circle in the air with one finger. For a moment, a glow of green hangs in the air; then a full-grown banana plant shoots up through the space where it was. Bananas unfurl as it goes, ripening from green to gold even as the plant finishes growing. Hunter is the first to reach up and break one free, handing it to Gus.

Gus holds the banana reverently on both palms. "Wow," he breathes, eyes shining. "It looks so cool!" He grabs it and bites into it with a resounding crunch. His expression shifts rapidly from 'awed' to 'alarmed'.

"Not like that!" Vee can't help but giggle. She takes the banana from Gus and shows him how to take off the peel.

Willow turns, beaming, to Luz's mom. "I'll do string beans, too, of course. Any other requests?"

"I really like celery," ventures Vee.

"Celery?!" Luz makes a dramatic gagging noise, and takes the banana that Hunter passes her. "How did you ever manage to pass for me?"

"You know, Willow, I think I'm glad I waited on putting in that garden." Dr. Noceda grins at her, and Willow can't help but grin back. "Put in whatever fruits and veggies you think sound good. I trust your judgment. And thanks for being such a big help." She takes one more drink of her tea, then jangles her car keys. "All right, I have to get to work. I'll see you tonight—be good!"

As the car engine turns over in the driveway, the kids crowd around the seed catalog. "I want to know more about these so-called 'dragon tongue' beans," says Hunter skeptically, and Willow flips through the pages once more.

#

They spend a busy morning in the backyard harvesting the literal fruits of Willow's labor. "Only one actual tree," Luz insists—peach, Willow decides, because Vee says that those are kind of fuzzy and that sounds cute—just in case the neighbors notice something strange is up. By lunchtime, the kitchen is well stocked with the just-as-cute-as-they-sound peaches, as well as potatoes and string beans, sweet corn on the cob, melons, kabocha squash, and of course a paper grocery bag crammed full of bananas. They immediately put a sizeable dent into this new inventory, along with a tall stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Then it's time for them to cycle one at a time through the single shower in the Noceda household. Willow's the last, towel still wrapped around her wet hair; by the time she joins the gathered circle of kids in Luz and Vee's bedroom, Luz is so impatient she's ready to burst. "Okay," she says. "I've been thinking a bunch about getting back to the demon realm, and I think I might have an idea."

Everyone's eyes widen, looking up at her. For a moment, their hope is hot enough to burn, and Luz winces away from it. "Well. I mean. An idea on how to get an idea. I did say 'might', didn't I?" She pulls a battered paperback from her back pocket. "Look!"

Everyone squints at the cover. "Luz," says Vee warily. "Danger in a Dangerous Land is science fantasy."

"Focus on the 'science' part!" Luz taps the front cover, where a spaceship is being swallowed up by a malevolent, swirling tear in space. "There's no Titan blood in the human realm, and no way to predict when—or if—a rift might open up from the other side. So what if we could science our way through instead?"

Everyone digests this notion at different paces. Gus is nodding eagerly before Luz is even done talking; Willow and Amity look at each other, raising their eyebrows, daring each other to believe. Vee never quite clears a look of deep skepticism, and Hunter scowls at the copy of Danger in a Dangerous Land as if its existence has personally offended him.

"Okay," ventures Amity. She smiles up at Luz, and Luz resists the urge to smush her adorable little face. It's important-science-plan-meeting time, she tells herself strictly, not thinking-about-how-cute-her-girlfriend-is time. "If there's a chance we could … science ourselves back home, I think we should try it. But, Luz … how do we do that?" She pokes one finger at the spaceship on the paperback cover, her smile slipping a little. "Do we need one of these things?"

"No—we need research!" Luz declares. "There's a big library in town, and it's close enough for us to walk to. We can see what kind of books they have about physics, and math, and, um … more physics?"

"Astrophysics." Vee still ducks a little whenever everyone looks at her, but she recovers quickly this time. "For theories about wormholes, and, um, multidimensional models. Stuff like that."

"Astrophysics!" Luz agrees, pumping her fist. She probably should have thought of that; it is, after all, the most spaceship-adjacent kind of physics. "The library must have some books that we can use; or they might be able to get us some, from other branches in the system."

"I still have your library card." Vee hurries over to the desk in the corner and comes back with a small plastic-coated rectangle. The top left corner has a deep crease in it, and on the back there's a purplish stain that has somehow gotten inside the coating. "I found it stuck between the box spring and the wall when I was cleaning, a while back."

"Perfect! Thank you, Vee." Luz spreads her arms, looking around at her friends. Begging them, perhaps not as subtly as she'd like to, to go along with this. "So who's up for a little library trip? Anyone?"

"Me!" Gus waves his hand in the air like he's waiting to be called on in class. "I can't wait to see a real human library with a card catalog and everything."

"About thirty years too late for that last bit, buddy." Luz shrugs helplessly. "But it's still a library and it's still full of real honest-to-goodness human books!"

"You know I'm in," Amity says. "But we'll have to do something about …" She tugs at one of her distinctly non-human ears. "Gus, can you disguise us?"

"Um," Willow interjects politely. "Remember when you found that giraffe t-shirt at the thrift store and we had to convince the clerk that he'd just hallucinated us turning from humans to witches and back?" She climbs to her feet and opens the chest of drawers. "I think we should go with a more local option, just in case you see a book about giraffes."

"I also don't trust me not to get distracted by a book about giraffes," Gus admits. He catches the gray sweatshirt Willow tosses to him, shrugging it over his head and pulling the hood up over his ears. "I'm going to warn everyone in advance: this is going to be a very sweaty library trip."

Willow finds a slouchy cap to cover her own ears, and a little more rooting around in the drawers produces a cat-ear beanie that Luz used to wear in her more … kawaii-themed middle school days. Looking resigned, Amity yanks it over her head. "How do I look?" she asks, plainly dreading the answer.

"Dawww." Luz can't help it. She squishes Amity's cheeks. "How are you so cute?"

"Hmm … Luz doesn't have any more hats." Willow considers a pair of sparkle-spangled rainbow antenna attached to a headband before discarding them. "Hunter, maybe you could wear her headphones instead?"

"I'm not going." Hunter picks at the corner of the rug. "My ears aren't the only thing people would have questions about."

"I have some sunglasses?" Luz suggests, and immediately realizes that isn't what he's talking about. "Oh. Um … probably no one will be rude enough to ask about your face, but if they are, we can just tell them you fell off your bike. Or you were in a terrible car accident. Or you had to fight a grizzly bear when you were just a little kid!"

"I could have fought at least three grizzly bears. Whatever those are." He musters a smile that doesn't last. "I just don't feel like being stared at right now."

"Don't worry." Willow pokes him in the side with one foot. "We'll bring you back something fun to read. Or something physics-y. Or both!"

Luz notices the tips of his ears go pink as he mumbles his thanks, and makes a mental note to ask Amity later if she caught that, too, or if Luz is just seeing things with shipping-tinted glasses. For now, she spins to Vee. "We'll bring you something, too! What do you like to read?"

"Oh, I'm sure I'd enjoy any physics books you bring back," says Vee diffidently. The blue gill-like fringes on her ears flutter. "And, well. If they also have Hooves of Fire #8 and you happen to see it, that would be okay too."

"A horse girl phase!" says Luz, with immense satisfaction. "We really were destined to be sisters."

"Ready, Luz?" Amity tucks her arm through Luz's elbow. "Let's do this."

Even as Amity tugs her through the bedroom door, a thread of guilt winds through Luz's happiness. Everything she's done wrong, everything she's messed up. She feels like she needs to earn the right to call herself Amity's girlfriend all over again—to be the kind of person who deserves to be cared about by someone as amazing as Amity Blight.

But that's not how relationships are supposed to work, right? No one's perfect, not even Amity. And affection isn't meant to be owed or earned.

So why does Luz feel that way?

#

The Gravesfield library is a grand old brick building, more than two hundred years old. Gus pauses to read the historical marker outside, a big dark blue plaque engraved with silver letters. When Willow pauses on the library's steps to wait for him, he waves her ahead. "Go on! I'll be right in." As soon as he slurps up every delicious human-historical detail.

But as soon as he reaches the bottom of the sign, all the minutiae of dates and names and events fly straight out of his head. Disbelievingly, he reaches up to touch the symbol carved beneath the inscription.

He's seen that same symbol before. In the demon realm. On Hunter's old Golden Guard cloak.

There's been time for other history to pile up on top here in Luz's world. But Gus has been inside Emperor Belos's head, and he's seen so much more than he should have, and he knows now with a deep, stomach-dropping pang that, behind all those accumulated years, this town was once Belos's. Or rather, it was Philip Wittebane's.

And maybe his brother's, too.

He retreats from the sign, almost tripping on the first step as he hurries into the library after the others. Maybe he should tell them? But so much of it just isn't his to tell.

The others have already turned up a huge pile of physics books: some big and square and heavy, "textbooks", Luz says; others with eye-catching covers and clever titles, "popular science". The four of them sit around a table in a quiet nook, thumbing through, taking notes. For a solid hour, there's no noise but the peel of pages and the scratch of pencils. It's Willow who breaks first, pushing back from the table with a groan. "So … does anyone understand what they're reading, or is it just me who's a big hollow-head?"

Around the table, pencils clatter to the tabletop. "Oh, thank goodness," says Amity, and buries her head in her hands. "You all looked so studious."

Luz tweaks an unopened book out from the bottom of a pile. It's different from the others, its cover a twist of neon-splashed drama. The title, Gus reads upside-down, is An Underwater Wizard of Sea-Earth. "I feel so useless," she says. "It turns out this is all I was ever good at. Fairy tales and make-believe and made-up nonsense."

"Wrong." Amity elbows her. "You're a great girlfriend! That's not made-up or make-believe."

"And an awesome friend," adds Gus.

"Very awesome," agrees Willow. "And don't forget, a kick-butt witch, too."

Gus has never seen anyone look so happy and so heartbroken at the same time as Luz looks now. "Thanks, guys." She takes a deep, shuddering breath, and looks around at the stacks of books around them. "A couple of these don't read like total gibberish. Let's check out some of the ones that seem the most promising, and go home. Okay?"

On their way up to the counter at the front, Gus passes a display of books labeled as Local Interest. His eyes glide straight over books they normally would have clung to; glossy, illustrated covers describing autumn foliage, apple orchards, and something called "chowder". Instead, he snatches up a thick book with an unobtrusive brown-and-gold cover. The Devil's Involvement, proclaims the title, and beneath it: A History of the Connecticut Witch Hunters.

Willow stops to look back for him. "Coming, Gus?"

"Yeah, just a second!" He grabs the history book and shoves it in with the others in his pile, in between The Real-Life Science of Star Quest and a book of African wildlife facts, before hurrying to catch up with the others.

#

It's not that Hunter is trying to avoid Vee, exactly; it's that he assumes she would just as soon avoid him. While she cleans up the remnants of lunch in the kitchen, he skulks to the laundry room to fold the morning's load; when she settles onto the couch to read, he retreats upstairs to spin awkward, idle circles in the chair at Luz and Vee's desk.

Maybe he should have been honest with the others about his reasons for not going to the library. It's not that he doesn't want them to find a way back; he knows how much they miss their families, how badly they need to know that everyone back in the Boiling Isles is alive and well and as safe as anyone can possibly be with the Collector on the loose. They deserve to go home, and if they figure out how to do that, he should help them get there.

It's just the idea of him going back that makes him sick to his stomach. And Amity and Luz and Gus and—and Willow going back without him isn't much better.

Everything in the human realm is so quiet and soft and easy, compared to the way things were back at home. Sure, he can't do magic here, but he could barely do that back in the Boiling Isles anyway. He can sleep in as late as he wants—6:30, usually, but once, he stayed in bed almost till seven! (Though somehow, lately, he feels more tired than ever. Maybe sleeping too much is as tiring as not sleeping enough?)

He's not in charge of anyone, he doesn't have to hurt people. He misses Flapjack, but that's a halfway sort of hurt; Flapjack, he thinks, isn't missing him back. The person the palisman misses is someone whose face Hunter just happens to be wearing. And he doesn't need a wooden bird friend here, anyway. He doesn't even have any real responsibilities beyond taking care of his own stuff—though he does like being able to help Luz's mother around the house. And she likes having extra help too, he thinks. What nice friends Luz has, she says proudly.

He knows he's not her kid. She's got two already, one of whom is already more than she bargained for. But if this is what being a kid is like … he's grateful for the chance. It feels almost like he belongs here. Maybe part of him is more human than he thinks.

So don't his friends deserve a chance to be where they belong, too? He's being so selfish. He shoves up from the desk chair and makes it as far as the door before pausing. It really would feel awkward, being stared at in the library. And what if his friends ask why he changed his mind?

But maybe the library isn't the only place worth investigating. That creepy house in the woods, the one where the portal opened up; maybe there's some clue, some helpful artifact there that will point them to the answers they need?

It's worth a try, at least. He flings open the door, barrels down the stairs—and almost crashes into Vee on her way up.

"Sorry!" She squirms back down a few stops, even as he stumbles back onto the upstairs landing. "I know you're avoiding me, I didn't mean to, um, not avoid you so hard."

"I'm not avoiding you." His face gets hot as soon as the obvious lie leaves his mouth. "I mean, okay, yeah, I am. But only because I thought you wouldn't want to be around me!"

Her head tilts quizzically. "Oh. You mean because you were the Golden Guard? I recognized your voice."

"Yeah, people seem to do that." He casts around for what to say next. "I worked for Belos. You—you must hate me."

She glances at his scar, so quickly he could almost have imagined it. So much for avoiding weird looks by not going to the library. "Belos hurt a lot of people," she says carefully. She wriggles up the rest of the steps, giving him lots of space as the landing as she glides past. "Are you done in the bedroom? I'm going to practice some Spanish on the computer, if that's okay."

"It's okay," he echoes, and when she shuts the bedroom door he flees downstairs and outside into the hot summer day.

The woods offer some measure of protection from the sun, with long damp shadows cast by the old trees. The dilapidated cottage looks different by day; less sinister. Like it's politely expecting someone to come home and take care of it; not like it's lying in wait.

The door opens when he tests it, but of course all that's lying on the other side is a litter-strewn living room, not a doorway back to the Boiling Isles. He knows Luz has tried the door more than once since they arrived here; sneaking off in the middle of the night or feigning a trip to the bathroom. If there was a ready-to-go portal in this house, she would already know.

But maybe his eyes will spot something she's missed. Secret glyphs, or an unseen source of magic seeping through from the other side …

The house smells a little weird, and not the generic human-realm kind of weird. Musty, and a little sickly-sweet. Every now and then, there's a wet, dripping noise, though Hunter doesn't see any leaks. In a house this old, there might just be water running down in secret places behind the walls, rotting everything away. Someday this whole place is going to come down, and he just hopes it's not on top of his head. He kicks through the garbage on the floor, scattering papers and plastic bottles. Maybe it really is just a bunch of worthless muck and mildew, and maybe coming here was a stupid waste of time.

One of the damp pieces of paper sticks to his boot. When he peels it loose, it proclaims in bold letters SECRETS OF GRAVESFIELD! The illustration depicts two men standing side by side. On one of their shoulders, a familiar-looking cardinal is perched.

Hunter crushes the paper into a ball and throws it into the corner. A very stupid waste of time indeed. It's just a house full of discards. Maybe he should move his sleeping bag in here.

No, no! He doesn't have to think like that anymore. He can move his sleeping bag in here after Dr. Noceda gets tired of having a whole flyer derby team's worth of extra kids in her house.

A shadow sweeps over the window. Just a shadow, but for a moment, the whole room is pitch-dark. Hunter's stomach drops. He sways on his feet, even as dull sunlight streams back in. "He's dead," he whispers. His imagination is playing an ugly little trick on him. It must have been a bird, or a tree shifting in the wind. "We all saw it. He's dead."

He doesn't wait for the old house to make an argument to the contrary. He crashes through the door and puts it behind him, running back to the Nocedas' house as fast as he can.

#

The kids have just turned down Luz's street when Willow lets out a cry of horror and takes off at a dead run. "Willow!" Luz cries. "What's wrong?" But there's nothing to do but follow her. As they run down the street, Camila drives past them, mouthing out the window as she goes. ¿Qué pasó? Luz shrugs and banks left, bypassing the driveway to catch up to Willow in the backyard.

Willow has fallen on her knees in the garden, where the peach tree has crumbled into a pile of dry sticks and dead leaves. The banana plant has wilted, its thick stem folding nearly in half, and the happy little plants full of berries and beans have all shriveled away.

Hunter comes puffing up from the opposite direction, his face red with the day's heat. "Where were you?" asks Amity, as Gus paws through the fading banana plant in search of survivors.

"I went for a walk." Hunter shrugs defensively. "I heard Willow shout, and I thought something might be wrong."

"Something is wrong. Look." Willow traces a shape in the air, but the green light that follows her finger flickers before the circle can be formed. One scraggly shoot pushes its way up out of the soil at her knees, then gives up and surrenders to gravity. "My magic. It's gone."

Amity and Gus immediately try to draw circles of their own. Gus's ears blur for a moment, but then they extend to a sharp point again, and adamantly remain that way; Amity conjures a single dollop of purple abomination goo that splatters wetly onto Luz's white shoe. They all stare at the lingering and obviously inanimate stain.

Willow's fists pound into the dirt, sending dry soil flying. She's trying hard not to cry, but when she squeezes her eyes shut, tiny tears glimmer in the corners. "I'm useless."

Hunter plops into the dirt next to her. "That's not true." He glances up as Camila comes around the garage, her hand covering her mouth at the sight of the botanical carnage. "You're not useless."

"I am. I'm half a witch, just like I was before I met Luz. Less than half!"

"Is that the worst thing you could be?" asks Hunter quietly. Willow looks at him, taken aback, then looks back at her dirt-streaked hands.

"Hey, now. Don't worry." Camila lays a hand on Willow's shoulder. "Humans have been growing potatoes the long way around for thousands of years, you know? We'll enjoy them in a few months, the old-fashioned no-magic way."

Willow's shoulders only slump farther under the weight of that comment. Luz bites her lip as her mom looks stricken. None of her friends want to imagine the very real possibility that they'll still be stuck in Gravesfield months from now.

Their punishment, for Luz's mistake: she treated their world like a fantasy plaything, and now they're stuck in her boring, utterly unmagical human world, stripped of all their magical abilities. She acted like she was the main character of a story that never really belonged to her. Underneath it all, she's not that different from the Collector, is she? It's just that while he's got apparently omnipotent powers…without her glyphs, she's about as ordinary as old socks.

It only takes a moment for Camila to recovers from her misstep. "Well," she says brightly, "the girls and I will be stocked up for the fall, and if there's too many for us to eat on our own, we'll take some to the food bank in town, they never get enough fresh produce." She gestures around at the bare dirt left behind in the wake of Willow's dying garden. "It would be a shame to waste all your hard work. Wouldn't it?"

"I'll help you start over," Hunter says, before Willow can respond. "I've got lots of experience with, uh. Digging? If you want."

"I do want," Willow says, and smiles at him. Luz rises up from her spiral enough to turn to Amity with a hopeful eh? eh? look. Her girlfriend responds in kind with a subtle how about a tiny bit of chill, please? gesture.

"We'll all help," Camila says firmly. "It takes a team to do something this big right." She sighs. "Though I will mostly help another time, because I need to put dinner on soon if we want to eat tonight. Luz, baby, you can show them where the yardwork equipment is?"

"Of course, Mom." She stands on tiptoe to give her mother a peck on the cheek. "Sorry about the yard. But it'll be good as new soon, I promise."

"Oh my gosh," says Willow suddenly. Her hand goes to her mouth. "I've been missing Clover so much, but I just realized—thank goodness she's not here! Palismen are creatures of wild magic. Would she just stop existing if she'd been here and run out of magic?"

Luz thinks of the lovingly-carved egg sleeping secretly in a backpack-nest in the corner of her bedroom. Sleeping forever, perhaps. Her stomach churns, and she tastes acid in the back of her mouth. Is she an accidental palisman-murderer now, too, on top of everything else? At minimum, it's palismanslaughter.

"Ah, kiddos, don't worry. Everything will be fine." Camila winks at Amity, then reaches out to ruffle Luz's hair. Luz's mom has always trusted her daughter, but never really entrusted her, not with the kind of responsibility that will cause big problems if left undone. She tries to be proud of that, but right now she feels too hollow inside to hold up anything as heavy as pride. "These are some good friends you've got, mija. I think together, you can do anything you set your minds to."

#

"You've seen with your own eyes now how much trouble these wild witches can unleash upon our world. The good green things of the earth, bled of all their vitality with a single swipe of their unholy magic. Do you believe me now, Jacob?"

"I see it." Jacob Hopkins peers out from the shelter of the woods at the clot of weird, otherworldly children as they putter around a dead, brown patch of yard. "But I can see you, too. And you look a lot more like magic than man to me."

"As I explained to you—they reduced me to this. Beneath their foul curse, I am as human as you."

"A real cursed human would let me show him off on my MewTube channel."

"I know nothing about this MewTube of yours, but I do know I can't risk alerting these witchlings to my presence. They would surely try to finish what they started, and ensure permanently that I cannot expose the threat they pose to the world of humanity."

"All right." Jacob stows his binoculars inside his vest and cranks his neck to the side, for a better look at his shoulder. "As long as you promise I can interview you for the channel when this is all over."

"Of course." The green, sluglike twist of slime on his shoulder slides smoothly beneath the fold of his collar, away from cruel sunlight and unwanted eyes. "From one witch hunter to another, I promise you that much and more."

###

Chapter Text

Morning comes, and with it, chaos arrives in the Noceda household.

Usually Camila packs her lunch in the evening, but she was so weary last night she'd put it off; now she's competing with Amity for kitchen space. "Sorry," Amity apologizes, for the tenth time. She's got both hands busy, stirring two pots of oatmeal on the stove: one big one, roiling with milk bubbles, with a smaller saucepan on the side—a separate, water-only portion for Willow, with whom human-realm milk violently disagrees. "I wouldn't have started breakfast for everyone yet if I knew you needed the kitchen too!"

"No big deal," Camila reassures her; also for the tenth time. She pushes aside the oatmeal tub and the canister of brown sugar and the jar of cinnamon and a spilled bag of chocolate chips, clearing off just enough countertop to lay out two pieces of bread.

"Dr. Noceda?" Hunter pops up by her elbow. "Can I talk to you?"

"Just a second!" When she fumbles for the squeeze-bottle of mustard, she knocks the cinnamon into the sink, and a cloud of orange spice puffs up into the air. "… On second thought, maybe I'll just take the sobras de espagueti."

"Good morning, Dr. Noceda! How are you?" Willow has already been out in the garden long enough to get herself thoroughly, even spectacularly, muddy. She always takes her shoes off at the door—her papas raised her right, it seems—but that still leaves plenty of soil, which she's currently shedding from every other inch of her clothes.

"Dr. Noceda—"

"Hang on, Hunter. Willow! The floor!" Camila slips behind Amity, careful not to bump her while she's at the stove, and cracks open the refrigerator door. The leftover spaghetti is all the way at the back; she wrestles it out from behind a box of salad mix and a family-size tub of yogurt. "Can you sweep that up, please, before it gets tracked anywhere else?"

"Oh, no." Willow looks back on her dirt trail with obvious embarrassment. "I'll clean that up right away. Or maybe I should clean me up right away, and then the floor?"

"On it!" announces Gus proudly. He jams a plug into the electrical outlet, and the vacuum bellows to life. "I'll have it cleaned up in a jiffy." He pauses, putting his weight against the vacuum to force it forward. "How long is a jiffy, anyway? Human measurement systems are so confusing."

"Mostly that's American measurement systems." Camila steps over the cord as Gus vigorously vacuums up Willow's mess. "Okay. Leftovers acquired. House mostly under control. Has anyone seen Luz this morning?"

Amity looks up from the stovetop. "I think she's out on the—"

She's interrupted by a screech of alarm from the vacuum. If animate objects could be in pain, this one needed to be put out of its misery. A wisp of smoke rises warningly from the back of the canister. "Gus, ¿qué cuernos haces? Turn it off!"

"Sorry! Sorry!" He fumbles around the vacuum, trying to find the power switch. "It was just one sock!"

"Just unplug it, Gus!" Amity cries. "Look, here!" She runs across the room and yanks the plug out of the socket, which, mercifully, kills the keening noise from the vacuum. As soon as she turns her back to the stove, though, her watched pot boils, and milk cascades over the side to scald itself on the burner.

Behind Camila, Hunter clears his throat. "Um. Maybe this is a bad time, but—"

"Ay, Hunter, not now, please!" She pushes past him to snatch the pot off the stove. By the time she wrangles a potholder out of the cupboard to set it safely down, Amity and Willow have fanned away the smoke from the overheated vacuum, and Gus is poking mournfully at the clogged canister. She doesn't even want to think about what a new vacuum's going to cost; maybe she can find a repair shop that'll take a look at it. There's no sign of Hunter, and Camila feels a stab of guilt about that—but she's already going to be late to work if she doesn't leave now, and she hasn't even found Luz yet. "Are you kids going to be okay if I leave you alone?" she says, with a sigh.

"Yes, Dr. Noceda," all three of them chorus meekly. She gives Gus a sound pat on the head—the old I'm not mad, just tired special—and sticks the container of spaghetti under her arm as she heads out the door.

Luz is out in the yard, of all places, in a sunny patch surrounded by books. She's busily filling a notebook with scrawled notes and questions and sketchy little diagrams—she's working so hard, Camila knows, and her heart squeezes, too full of pride to fit properly inside her chest. "Buenos días, mija. What are you doing out here all by yourself?"

"Morning, Mom. I needed a little quiet, that's all." Luz glances up with a smile, then focuses immediately back down on her paper. Who is this child, Camila wonders? Math has never come easily to Luz, and she almost had to take eighth-grade physical science twice, barely scraping through with a D+ and a strongly-worded note from the teacher.

But then, making friends had always been a struggle for her too, and Camila has seen firsthand how that has changed. She's heard Willow talk about how Luz believed in her, before she believed in herself; she's seen Gus and her daughter sprawled out on opposite sides of a board game, playing without rules and whacking each other joyfully with stuffed burritos. She's seen Luz and Hunter sit quietly at the opposite end of a couch, idly making faces at each other over the turn of a page, both trying not to be the first to break out laughing. And she's seen Amity gaze across the room with that perfect, pure sort of fourteen-year-old adoration, as if there's no one else there to see—or maybe just no one else that matters, when you're as smitten as all that.

She crouches down beside Luz. The car keys jingle in her pocket, reminding her of all the other places she's supposed to be and people she owes time to. "I still need you to pick out classes for this fall," she says gently. "Tenth grade is a big year! Creative writing, maybe? You always liked making little stories."

"Sure. Classes." Luz smiles vaguely without looking up from her page. "Creative writing sounds fine. You can pick out the ones you think are best, I guess."

Camila lingers a moment longer. "Did you think about that other thing we talked about? My colleague at work said that that therapist is great with—"

"I'm sorry, Mom," Luz interrupts. Her pencil tip snaps on the notebook; she tosses it aside and picks up another, already freshly sharpened. "These library books are due back today, and I really need to finish with them before that. And I don't even know what, like, half of these words mean. Can we talk about it later?"

Camila is so shocked that Luz knows when library books are due that she doesn't know what to say at first. "… Sure. Of course. Have a good day, baby; I'll see you tonight."

#

Amity peeks through the living room curtains as unobtrusively as she can manage. Luz doesn't look up from the patch of shade she's moved to—she's still frowning furiously at what looks like a complicated diagram of a deconstructed sandwich cookie. "She's still out there," she says, to nobody in particular. "I've never seen her like this. I mean, we all know she's always been—"

"Stubborn," suggests Gus.

"Determined," Amity says, tidily correcting course. "But I feel like she's forgetting how to smile! I'm worried about her."

"We are, too." Willow sets aside her book and tucks her pencil behind her ear. When she glances at Gus, he nods his agreement. "Sometimes it seems like she's taking this harder than any of us."

"Eda was front and Center at the Day of Unity," Gus points out. "And we know King's getting a whole lot of unwanted one-on-one time with the Collector." He draws his legs up to his chest, pressing himself into the corner of the couch. "At least our families might've had a chance to get away from the Boiling Isles."

It's a big 'might', and they all sit silently in its shadow for a moment. Then Amity squares her shoulders and stands up straighter. "I can't do anything about Eda and King right now. But I can do something nice for my girlfriend! Operation Make Luz Smile is officially on." She rubs her cheek thoughtfully. "I think ... I think I should take her on the nicest, most mundane, human-realm-style date that has ever been dated."

"That's a great idea." Willow leans forward. Besides just making Luz happy, the idea of such a side mission has to be a welcome distraction for her friends as well as her girlfriend. "What do you think you'll do?"

"I'm not sure." A stealthy flicker of movement catches Amity's eye; it's Vee, on her way into the kitchen. "Vee! You've been in the human realm a long time. What can you tell me about human dates?"

"The fruit, or the social interaction?" Vee's cheeks blush a pale blue. "You probably mean the social interaction. I dunno, I've never been super interested in the whole idea—I'm not sure what other kids at school do for dates. Sorry."

"I just want to plan the most perfect human date night ever. Something Luz will love." Amity folds her hands, a pleading gesture. "Please. What do humans like? What do they have fun doing, that we don't have in the Boiling Isles?"

Vee considers this. "Well … you could watch a human movie together? I've recorded some really cool documentaries on the DVR. There's one about Greco-Roman architecture, and one about the history of different plants used to dye clothes—"

"I want to watch that one," says Willow. "Watch the architecture one on your date."

"You can rewatch movies," Vee assures her. "Let's see … playing board games is fun? My favorite is Mangled Math Torment."

Amity's forehead creases. "Yes. Okay. This is good! I bet Luz would really enjoy mangling."

"I could help you make some snacks and stuff, too." Vee ducks her head shyly. "Luz has been way cooler about me ... sort of stealing her life than I could have asked for. I'd like to help do something nice for her too. If—if that's okay."

Willow grins. "Me and Gus too! We can help you set up—and run interference on anyone who tries to interrupt you." She smacks her fist into her open palm.

"Who's going to interfere?" Gus asks. "It's just us, and Hunter, and Luz's mom. And I think she's probably allowed to interfere if she wants to. It's her house, after all."

Amity looks around, frowning. "Where is Hunter? I haven't seen him all morning."

"He's in the garage." Gus shrugs. "He said he wanted to be alone?"

"Yeah, but is this the kind of wanting to be alone where someone actually wants to be alone?" Amity asks. "Or the kind where what he really wants is for someone to go ask him why he wants to be alone?"

She and Gus both turn to Willow. "Why are you looking at me?" Willow asks.

"You know why." Amity raises her eyebrows. "Do you want me to say it out loud?"

Willow narrows her eyes at Amity before she scoots herself off the couch and out of the room. Amity and Gus manage to keep a straight face until the garage door closes behind, and then both shoot each other a wide, knowing grin. "What?" Vee asks, looking back and forth between them. "What's so funny?" 

The front door bangs open, forestalling Amity's feeble attempt to explain that it's not funny, exactly, it's just cute, and charmingly awkward, and a welcome reminder that Amity isn't the only one who turns into a super-dork around a specific someone. "I'm going to take these books back to the library," Luz announces, from the open doorway. "Anyone want to come along?"

"No!" blurts Amity. Oh, no. Her face is doing that thing again, isn't it? She can't see it, but it feels like tomatoes look. If Willow and Hunter are also super-dorks about each other, Amity remains the Super-Dork Queen. "I, uh. I promised I'd help Vee with the, um, with the—"

"Scrubbing out the dishwasher," Vee says promptly. "We have to use a toothbrush to get all the fussy bits in the back. If you want, we could wait till you get home so I can show you, too!"

Luz blinks once. "Uhhh that's okay see you later have fun bye!" The door crashes shut behind her before she even gets the last syllable out.

#

By the time Luz is walking back up her own street, the straps of her laden library bag have practically bruised her shoulder. At least it's not too hot, today: a tropical storm that was threatening to make its way as far north as Connecticut petered out somewhere around New Jersey, sending one last pouty gust of air-cooling rain ahead of it, instead.

She wonders what kind of day it is in the Boiling Isles. Sunny, probably. That's the best weather for playing in, and she's more than certain the Collector has the power to flip the whole world's thermoset to whatever he most prefers.

Vee is sitting on the porch when she returns, wearing Luz's kitty-ears cap, sunglasses, a t-shirt, and a big knit throw over her lap. (Does it still count as a "lap", Luz wonders, if it's just one big tail instead of two legs?) It's the sort of disguise that could only fool the most disinterested neighbors; but then again, most of the other houses on this street are occupied by middle-aged white people who do that vague tight-lipped smile whenever they pass Luz on the street. Vee is probably fine. "Kinda hot for a hat like that, isn't it?" she calls.

Vee looks up from her book, stretching awkwardly at Luz's approach—so far that her knuckles rap on the front door. "Hey, Luz. I know it's warm, but I just really like this hat." She leans forward, peering and Luz's overstuff bag. "Ooh, can I see your library haul before you go in?"

"Oh—sure!" Luz plops down next to her, leaning against the railing. She upends her bag, and library books cascade out onto the blanket that's pooled up around the end of Vee's tail. "I never did this much reading for school," she says, and rubs her neck. It's a little sore, from being bent over a book all day. And several preceding days. And a few nights when she was supposed to be sleeping. "Speaking of school … I'm sorry you don't get to go back, because of me."

Vee shrugs, picking up Quantum Sheep: The Science of Treating Barnyard Animals As Spheres for Optimal Mathematical Calculations and thumbing through the first few pages. Sometimes Luz feels like she's trying to read in a language she's never learned when she looks at these books, but it seems to come so naturally to Vee. "It's okay. Mom thinks we can fudge up enough of the paperwork for me to, um, exist in the human realm. That way should be able to get into Connecticut Cadet Academy in the fall! It's an all-virtual school, so I'll just have to pretend our WiFi is too crummy for me to turn on my camera all year."

"But you're the one who really likes going to school. Ugh!" Luz twists her fingers into her hair. "Me having to go, and you not being able to—it's just so stupid and unfair."

"Unfair?" repeats Vee, cocking her head to the side. One of the cat ears on her hat flops adorably to the side. "What does fairness have to do with anything? It's not fair that I stole being you. It's not fair that the Emperor destroyed my family. It's not fair that everyone is trapped here without a portal. Nothing's ever fair, Luz." She taps the cover of Quantum Sheep. "The world is just math, and math doesn't care about anyone's feelings. That's up to decent people to do. Like Camila." Her smile wrinkles her cute little snubby nose. "And you. 'Mana."

"Aww, you called me 'mana, 'mana!" Luz crushes Vee into a hug, which squeezes an embarrassed laugh out of her. "You know a lot about math—don't you?"

Vee blinks, looking uncertain. "I guess so? If you're asking me to help you with your algebra homework next year, I'm happy to explain concepts, but I don't think it would be ethical for me to actually—"

The porch door creaks open an inch. "Oh, hi, Luz," Gus says. He glances down at Vee, and gives what looks like a miniscule nod. "Amity's been looking for you."

"She is?" Luz jumps up and starts grabbing for the books. "Tell her I'll be right there!"

"You can leave these here," Vee says. She holds Quantum Sheep against her chest. "I need new reading material. I'll bring them inside with me later."

"Ooh, new books!" Gus squeezes out the door to start pawing through the pile of library treasures. "I'll join you, Vee. Willow and Hunter are in the garage, if you need them for anything. Not that you'll need them for anything." He coughs. "She's trying to help Hunter try to fix the vacuum. There's a lot of trying happening, anyway; I'm not sure how much fixing, though."

"Cool." Luz stands and dusts herself off. "What does Amity need me for, anyway?"

"Kitchen!" Vee blurts. Gus elbows her in the side and she smiles an awkward, gummy, basilisk smile.

Well, that's at least an adjacent answer to the one Luz asked. "…Okay. Thanks!" She opens the door and hollers as she steps inside. "Amity! I'm home!"

#

Even though she's been forewarned that her girlfriend's arrival was imminent, Luz's shout is still enough to make Amity almost throw the tray of snacks into the air. It's ridiculous to be nervous, she tells herself; she and Luz have been dating for months now! But telling herself something and believing it are two totally different skills. She hurries out to the living room, setting the tray on the coffee table and giving her hair one last fluff as she straightens up. "Hola, batata. How was the library?"

"Gooooood." Luz squints around, taking in the tray of snacks, the stack of board games, the cute woody-smelling candle pilfered from the bathroom because, well, candles are romantic, right—even if they used to be sitting next to a toilet? Then her narrow eyes snap wide open, gleaming bright with delight. "Amity. Is this a date?"

"I decided that you needed a break." Amity takes Luz's hand in both of her own. "You've been working harder than any of us! I talked to Vee, and she told about this math board game that we can play, and a documentary about how ancient human buildings were built, and some yummy … raisins …"

Amity trails off, looking over all of her careful staging. "Oh, my titan," she says. She smacks herself in the forehead with her free hand. "This—this is all terrible! I accidentally made the most un-Luz date of all time!" Her face is tomato-ing already. She drags her knuckles across her eyes. "This is so stupid! I don't know if my dad and the twins are okay, or my mom, even though I'm so mad at her, and we don't know what happened to Eda or King, and I just wanted one dumb little thing to go right, and I couldn't even do that!"

"Hey. Hey!" Luz grabs her hand back. "One thing did go right. We're still together." She swipes away a stray tear from Amity's cheek. "And besides, didn't I tell you back in the demon realm that we needed to go on the most mundane date of all time? I couldn't imagine anything in the world that could out-mundane this."

"So … you don't hate it?"

Luz squeezes Amity's fingers. "Aww, batata! There is nothing you could do that I would hate." She side-eyes the tray of snacks. "But I am going to add chocolate chips and mini-marshmallows to that bowl of gorp. Oh, and we're playing Mangled Math Torment by my version of the rules, not the standard set."

"Yeah?" Amity manages a smile, which coaxes a matching one onto Luz's face, too. "And how does that work?"

"The objective of the game is now to generate three hexagons and awaken the Ancient Cthonic Beast, at which point all surviving players are devoured in the seas of lava and ash. Also, 6's are wild, no multivariable algebra, and the first person to reach the Pythagorean Corner has the best girlfriend." Luz leans forward to give Amity a peck on the cheek. "I'm gonna be the first to reach the Pythagorean Corner, just so you know."

"Not if I get there first," Amity says, and lets go of Luz's hands to give her own knuckles a mock-threatening crack that sends them both into peals of giggles.

#

When Camila opens the garage door, she finds her usual parking spot occupied by a sixteen-year-old and what looks like every tool the Noceda household has ever owned. She parks on the driveway and approaches cautiously to see what, exactly, the current situation on the ground is. "Hunter, what are you doing in the garage? Last I checked, you don't have a car." She has a sudden premonition of what it would be like teaching driving skills to six children, one of whom has no feet, and feels a little dizzy. "… Is that the vacuum?"

"Dr. Noceda! Look." Hunter sets the vacuum upright; it's plugged into an orange extension cord, whose opposite end disappears under the door into the house. "I think I've got it working again. See?"

He flips the switch on the side. The vacuum shudders once, then kicks to life—its roar might be a little louder than it used to be, but there's no smoke, and she can see dirt spinning up into the empty canister. He turns the vacuum off again, beaming, then deflates a little. "I don't think the sock is salvageable, though." From his back pocket, he produces the offending garment, which now resembles the bottom of a well-used mop.

"Hunter! You did this?"

"Not all by myself." He ducks his head, color rising in his face. "Willow helped, too; she just left to go water the garden now that it's cooling off outside. Oh, and Vee found the book for me; I think she called it a manual? About how the vacuum works, and its pieces, and stuff."

"Well, thank you! This is wonderful." She reaches for his shoulder—and he flinches away from her.

Just a little movement, but Camila pulls her hand back anyway. "You didn't have to do all this," she says out loud, but in her head, she is thinking: it's a good thing this uncle of his is dead or I would be going to jail today and then who's going to make the pastelón for dinner? "But I appreciate that you did. You had something you were trying to tell me this morning; what was it?"

"Oh! Um." He looks down at his feet. "I, um, got a job at Burger Queen. But then I lost it. I'm sorry! I kept mixing up the dickels and nimes." He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and thrusts it at Camila. She takes it and reads: a paycheck. "It says I get forty-seven, uh … of the big money, and twelve of the small ones. If that helps at all."

Camila hasn't even glanced at the numbers. All she notices is that, at the top, the printout reads HUNTER NOCEDA. And what, she scolds herself; is he going to name himself after that horrible man? But he could have just made something up, grabbed any random name off the huge stack of books in Luz and Vee's bedroom. But he didn't. "Hunter," she says. She folds the paycheck back up. "You never have to earn your keep here. You know that?" She smiles, and taps him on the forehead with the folded paper. "But my goodness, yes, what a big help! In fact, I think it's worth celebrating. Why don't I bring home ice cream tomorrow night?"

"Really?" His face lights up. "That sounds great."

"One more thing. Before you clean up in here—is it okay if I give you a hug?" She raises a finger to cut him off before he can answer. "You say no if you're not feeling it. You can always say no, and I won't be upset, okay?"

"Okay," he says hoarsely, and then: "I mean, yes. That would be okay."

Camila Noceda has fifteen years of expertise in offering hugs—proud ones, comforting ones, sad ones, even embarrassing-a-teenager ones—all of which she puts to use now. She wraps him up tight, even lifts him up onto his toes. It takes a second for him to hug her back, and his arms are loose and uncertain. Well, he's going to need some more practice being hugged, that's all.

#

When Camila goes into the house, the TV is on, the camera panning slowly over a gray-stone façade; some old European city, where the history has had a lot more time to stack up than anywhere in the US. Luz is sprawled in the corner of the couch, with Amity dozing curled up against her side. So sweet, they are! Camila's heart gives a happy little twist in her chest.

Luz glances over and waves at her mother. She hesitates, then, with a deft movement, she slides out from under Amity's head and stuffs a big cushy pillow into the place where she'd been. Amity mutters in her sleep, but doesn't wake.

"Shh!" whispers Luz conspiratorially. She sweeps up the tray of half-eaten snacks and carries it past Camila into the kitchen. Camila follows. "Vee told Amity a good treat for a date would be raisins and rice crackers. Bleh! At least you have someone to share snacks with now, Mom."

"Luz, I wish you would stop this." Camila winces at Luz's sudden wary look. "I would rather you be sad, or worried, or—or angry at me! Whatever you're really feeling. Not this acting normal all the time, like there's nothing wrong. Please, mija, won't you let me call that therapist for you?"

"And what am I supposed to tell them, Mom?" Luz slams the tray of snacks to the counter. "Hi, Dr. Whatsyourface, I'm feeling kind of bad because I miiight have sort of helped destroy my friends' entire home, and maybe gotten all of their families hurt, or worse, and now they're stuck in the wrong dimension because I tried to take on a goopy magical monster man all by myself?"

Camila bites her lip. "I mean. We could fudge the details a little, couldn't we?"

"I don't want to talk to a therapist!" Luz says, through clenched teeth. "I just want to be able to talk to my mom!"

The words knock all the breath from Camila's body. Luz stands there for a moment longer, tears brimming in her eyes, then puts her head down and flees.

Camila listens to her daughter's footfalls on the stairs. She blinks back tears of her own, putting her hurt away. That's what a mother does, sometimes, to make room for her child's hurt instead. Will there be a moment to sit with her own sadness later? Yes, of course, but only on her own time, not her daughter's. She gives herself a moment, and when she's ready, when she knows she can do the work she needs to, to keep that precious space open between them, she follows and knocks on the bedroom door. "Luz. Can I come in?"

"… Sure."

Luz is lying on her bottom bunk, the one where Vee usually sleeps, as if she didn't have the energy to make it all the way up to the top. Her backpack is cradled against her, her chin resting on top. She doesn't look up when the door opens.

Camila closes the door behind her and sets her purse beside it. She sits in the chair at the desk, which is designed for a fourteen-year-old backside but which will have to deal with a forty-year-old one for the time being. "I always want to be someone you feel like you can talk to, baby."

"The last time—the first time—I told you about the Boiling Isles, what you heard was, Luz hates me and never wants to see me again. You thought I didn't love you!" Luz rolls a little farther onto her side, away from Camila. "I love you more than anything and I never wanted to hurt you. I just—I just—"

Camila tugs a piece of paper from her pocket. Carefully, like she would approach a frightened kitten at the veterinary hospital, she crosses the room to her daughter, and kneels beside the bed. "I know all about Amity's family," she says quietly. "And Gus's dad, and both of Willow's. Even Hunter's uncle, ese bastardo." She coughs. "Don't repeat that word. But Luz, I know you had people there too, and you loved them, and they loved you." She slides the paper over Luz's shoulder. "Who are they?"

Luz sits up enough to take the paper: the photo that Camila rescued from a trip through the washing machine in her jacket pocket. "This … This is Eda. And King." She wipes her nose on her sleeve; Camila knows better than to correct her on that just now. "They were my family in the Boiling Isles."

It's such a small push—but being a parent is all about learning exactly how hard to push, and when, and why, and this one is enough to unlock the terrible logjam that Luz has been carrying in her heart. She starts talking, about magical mentoring and titans and griffin eggs and a house with an owl that lives in its door. Once she gets going, she doesn't need Camila's prompting to continue, and she slowly drifts over to her mother's side of the bed until she's close enough for Camila to stroke her hair, like she used to do when Luz woke up from a bad dream or came home crying from school. "He was my little brother," she says thickly. "I was supposed to take care of him. But instead, he saved all of us. He saved us from everything I caused by trying to stop Belos on my own, like some big dumb fantasy hero." She hesitates, then looks up at her mom. Her eyes, which had dried up, film over against with tears. "And the palisman that Eda taught me to carve …" She draws back the flap of her backpack. "It's here, too."

"You made this?" Camila takes the beautiful blue wood sculpture, feeling the careful marks of the carving-knife under her fingertips. "One of those living magic creatures, like your friends talk about? What is it going to be, when it hatches?"

"It was supposed to be whatever it wanted to be." Luz shrugs, a tiny jerk of her shoulders. "But now it's never going to be anything at all."

Camila clucks. "Well, says who?"

"Says reality, Mom!" Luz pushes back and sits up on her knees. "There's no magic in the human realm. A wild magic creature can't survive here."

"Claro, obviamente.  But you don't know that that's for good." She lifts the egg once more, to catch a bit more of the room's sparse light, then puts it back in Luz's hands. It really is beautiful, and it really is Luz's: how very like her daughter, to look at a piece of wood and long to let it choose its own destiny. "I think it's just hibernating. Waiting until it can go back."

Luz looks at the egg with a hope so sharp that it cuts Camila to the quick. "You really think I can get them back home?"

"Mija." She cups Luz's cheek with one hand. "I believe in you. More than I've ever believed in anything. I can't make it not hard. I would, if I could. And I can't do magic, or open a portal for you. But I can listen. I will always listen, when you need someone to hear you. I'm sorry I let you feel like I wouldn't. I was so scared, Luz. Not knowing where you were. Not being able to hold you." She's still scared. Scared all the time that she'll peek in one night and find an empty bed, that she'll come home from work to a silent house. "Let me try to do better. Okay?"

Luz crawls up onto Camila's lap like she used to do when she was little, her teenage arms and legs jutting out at awkward, lanky angles. "Thanks, Mom," she says, into the little hollow space under Camila's chin. "I really did miss you so much."

#

Later, after Luz has cried herself out for a second and what seems to be more permanent time, and after the downstairs fills with the voices of the other kids, and Vee hollers up the stairs if she should make sandwiches for dinner because everyone's getting hungry and she can make sandwiches herself and the Swiss cheese is going to expire if they don't use it this week anyway—later, Camila slips to her own room and takes off her glasses and gives her nose a good, thorough blow.

Her purse is on the bed beside her; she reaches into the pocket on the front and gropes around until she comes up with the card she was looking for. She needs her glasses again, to read the numbers, por el amor de Dios, why do people use such small print, then takes out her phone and carefully dials.

"Hello, yes, I'm so glad I caught you before you closed. This is Dr. Gerrold's office, isn't it? … Oh, not a doctor, of course, I see. But she has experience working with kids? … Good, good. Yes, I'd like to make an intake appointment, if that's okay."

She sighs in relief at the affirmative answer. "Wonderful. Yes, yes, of course, let me give you some details. I don't want to overstep my bounds, you know, but just to give you a little bit of background for Ms. Gerrold's notes. I have a young man staying with me who's come from—well, not a very good family situation. Phone visits would be best, if we could arrange that, he's, ah, very shy in person …"

###

Chapter Text

On Tuesday nights, Camila works late, which means that the kids are officially charged with starting dinner before she gets home. This particular Tuesday, they stand before the formidably-stocked Noceda pantry, surveying the possibilities. This is called the tyranny of choice, Vee has explained before—having too many options can actually be worse than not having any, making a person more likely to feel stressed by knowing what they're missing out on.

Or, occasionally, by starting an argument. "Sandwiches," suggests Gus. "There's plenty of bread. We could do ham and cheese, or turkey."

Vee shakes her head. "We're out of lunchmeat again. What about macaroni and cheese?"

"I object to the and cheese part." Willow pulls a face, one hand on her stomach. "We could make it Taco Tuesday?"

"We had tacos last week," Luz counters. "Waffles!"

"We would have waffles every night if you had your way," teases Amity. "How about spaghetti?"

They look back and forth, awaiting an objection. When none is forthcoming, Willow nods decisively. "Spaghetti it is! Luz, get the meatballs out of the freezer. Vee, preheat the oven. Amity, boil the water. I'll cut up some vegetables we can eat on the side, and Gus—"

"Tomato sauce!" He grabs the big can off the shelf and carries it to the counter, then roots around in the utensil drawer until he comes up with the can opener. The sharp edge of the wheel bites satisfyingly into the top lip of the can, and Gus crows in triumph. He cranks the opener the rest of the way around, and brandishes the freed lid like a medal. "There is not a single human kitchen doo-dad that I can't figure out! I can't wait to tell my dad how much I—"

He cuts himself off there, head dropping, and takes out a pot to heat the sauce in without another word. Behind his back, Luz and Willow exchange a worried glance. It's been a struggle for everyone, but Gus is only twelve—for a few more weeks, at least—and moments like these seem to hit him more and more the longer they stay in the human realm. They're doing everything they can to find a way home. But what if that's not enough? If wanting something was enough to make it real, Luz's life would look very different right now. Every day that she has to go to bed again still not knowing what's happened to Eda and King and the others is like pulling her own skin off one inch at a time—an analogy that no one else seems to appreciate as much as Luz does.

As much as everyone needs to get home, they also need, in the immediate interim, to eat dinner. Before long, the pot of water is merrily bubbling, and the meatballs sizzle and hiss on their tray in the oven. When her mom enters through the garage, she immediately takes a deep breath. "Oh, it smells wonderfully garlicky in here. You've all been very industrious this evening, I see!"

"¡Hola mama!" Luz abandons her station by the stove to give her mom a welcome-home hug. "Dinner is almost ready. ¿Cómo te fué en el trabajo?"

"A long day, but fine. Someone brought in a pet potbelly pig this morning—so sweet! I took pictures for you." She hands her phone to Luz, who squeals over the first image that comes up. "Hunter's appointment isn't done yet?"

Luz shrugs. "Probably, but he hasn't come downstairs yet. I thought maybe he'd want a little space?"

"Sometimes it's good to leave space for people, and sometimes it's good to close it. We all need to know where we fit, right?" She plants a kiss on Luz's forehead. "Go tell him it's time to eat."

"Okay, Mom." Luz trots out of the kitchen, feeling Willow and Gus's eyes on her as she goes. Upstairs, she listens for a moment outside her mother's bedroom door. No voices from inside, so she gives the door a testing rap. "Hunter? Are you still in there? It's okay if you climbed out a window to go hide in the woods, we've all done that before. Well—I've done that before."

"If I wanted to hide in the woods, I'd just go out the front door instead of jumping off the roof." Hunter opens the door with a scowl that quickly softens. "But I don't want to. I think dinner will be harder to get out there."

She moves aside, so that he can follow her out into the hallway. "Did everything … go okay?"

"Better than I thought. You were right; I didn't have to lie, exactly. It was fine to just give a really vague version of the truth. Like we practiced."

"Yeah!" Luz pumps a victorious fist, then sobers to a more appropriate mood for this conversation. "Belos was a pretty horrible guy. It doesn't matter that he was a ball of corrupted magical goo while he was doing his horrible-ness."

"I guess not." He puts his foot on the first step, then stops. "By the way … I don't think I ever said thank you."

"For helping you make up a fake backstory about your scummy jerk-o-tron uncle? Hunter, making up stories is what I do best."

"No, I mean—" His mouth scrunches up around whatever thought he's trying to get out. "I mean—before that. Thank you for not giving up on me. Even when I was kind of a jerk-o-tron myself. I don't know where I'd be, otherwise." He rubs the back of his head, and goes on, unnecessarily: "Well, no, I would definitely be in a pile of bones at the bottom of an abyss—"

"I'm glad you're not a pile of bones, too." With him on the first step and her on the landing, they're almost the same height—exactly the right set-up for a sisterly hug that he can't escape from. She lets go and grins at him with Cheshire-cat mischief. "Now come eat dinner! I'll save you the seat next to Willow."

"Luz!" He flails at her to push her away, stomping down the rest of the stairs.

"I'm just saying, I'm in the market for a little brother!" she calls after him.

"I don't know if I'm actually older than you, but I'm definitely not littler."

As Luz comes back into the kitchen, her mother sets down the gallon of milk (one of three currently in the fridge) and pulls her into yet another hug. "What's this about?" Luz asks, squirming a little.

"Just proud of you. That's all. You've grown up so much in the last year." She sighs, ruffling Luz's hair with her breath. "Too much, I feel like sometimes. Or too fast, at least."

"Sounds like someone was eavesdropping, Mom."

"I’m sorry, mija, it's a small house!"

#

After dinner, when the heat of the day has ebbed a little, Willow heads out to the garden. The others have gone back to hitting the books for a while longer, except for Hunter, who excuses himself to an early bedtime. Being able to go to sleep and get up whenever he wants, Willow supposes, must feel sort of like rebellion for a kid who's spent his whole life in rhythm with someone else's enforced routine.

Still, she would have been glad of the company. Human-realm weeds are relentless, she's learned; trying to steal water and sunlight from her frilly carrot-tops and twining pea-shoots and leafy bean plants. It's impossible to catch every single invader that pokes its green head out from the layer of compost she's laid out on top—but that doesn't mean she isn't going to try. Trying is all she has right now. To her, there's never been any such thing as 'trying too hard'; not as long as hope remains. And she certainly has hope, so very much hope. She can spare a little of that for her coming harvest.

A foot in a plastic flip-flop scuffs the dirt next to her. "You look awfully lonely all by yourself out here." Amity waves a trowel in greeting when Willow looks up. "Think you'd mind a little help?"

"I would be delighted," Willow says sincerely, and Amity wastes no time in ferociously attacking a clump of crabgrass.

They work mostly in silence, exchanging the occasional bit of weed-loosening wisdom. Finally Amity sits back on her heels and tilts her hat back to wipe her forehead. "What do you think they're doing right now?" She gestures vaguely skyward, where the human-realm moon skulks around the edges of the still-bright sky. Luz told them once about the tale of the man in the moon, and now Willow can't look at the stupid thing without seeing the Collector's face up there, looking back. "Back home, I mean."

"I don't know." Willow tugs on a particularly stubborn dandelion stem. If she breaks it, it'll just come back in a few days, and she'll have to dig it up all over again. She's afraid to turn her thoughts toward what might be happening back home without them; she's afraid, if she imagines the worst, that she won't be able to smile at Gus and say everything's going to be all right anymore. Not in a way that he'll believe. It's harder and harder every day to wrench her worries out of that particular rut. It's like a scab that she just can't stop picking at; the best thing to do is to at least keep it out of anyone else's awareness. "There's no way to even guess."

"I don't want you to guess." Amity gives her a wistful smile. "I want you to make something up. Something optimistic. No, not just optimistic. Tooth-rottingly cute and comforting."

"This is more Luz's department, isn't it?" Willow digs around the dandelion root with the weed fork, loosening the soil. "But if you're going to make me … hmm. Then I think your dad probably stole a working airship as soon as the draining spell stopped, and went off to find your brother and sister and escape with them to, um. The Freezing Isles, which are like the Boiling Isles, but on the other side of the world and way too far for the Collector to bother with."

"He went straight for Em and Ed, huh?" Amity shakes the trowel playfully. "Not his youngest daughter who was flying straight into the gaping maw of danger?"

"Oh, he knew you'd be all right," said Willow, and tosses one braid over her shoulder. A few specks of dirt fly off her soil-crusted gloves, pelting Amity. "After all, he knew you were with me." They exchange grins. "Now, what about my dads?"

"Well, I know they weren't big on celebrating the Day of Unity in the first place. They probably planned a family vacation to visit every flyer-derby arena in the world—and they were going to take you, of course, but then when they couldn't find you in time, they decided to just leave a note and make it a romantic getaway instead."

"And Gus's dad got a tip for a breaking news story in the Toes. Obviously everyone else was too busy covering the Day of Unity, so it had to be him who followed up on the lead." Willow forces the weed fork a little deeper, and the dandelion root finally comes loose in her hand. "And that's everyone's families! Except…"

"Except King and Eda, and Lilith," Amity finishes for her. And Belos, neither of them says. But he neither gets nor deserves to have a happy ending dreamed up for him.

Both girls look up at the bedroom window. The blinds are closed, but behind them, the shadow of Luz's shaggy-haired head bent over a desk is unmistakable. "They'll be okay," Amity vows. "Everyone. We're going to get back there, and fix everything. I don't know how yet, but I know we will. Because I believe in Luz."

Willow nods. "And Luz believes in us."

A cleared throat startles them as they bump their muddy knuckles together. "Sorry, girls," says Camila, stepping over the chicken-wire fence into the garden. She holds up two iced-over glass bottles. "It's so hot out here, I thought you might some refrescos."

The girls chorus a hearty thank-you, and Camila hands over the soda. As they trade sips of frambuesa and naranja, Camila looks up at the well-lit bedroom window too, and her face slips into the sort of smile that's too complicated to hold onto for very long.

#

On a tabletop in the back room of the Gravesfield Historical Society, polaroid photographs flutter down one by one to join a growing pile. Some are of buildings: a cozy family home, a library, a crumbling house in the woods. But most show people, show faces. Almost always the same seven faces, in fact, repeated over and over in varying combinations.

"Just look at them!" Jacob mutters. His finger stabs out, pointing at a photo of the youngest of the witchlings, scrawling on the sidewalk with a piece of white chalk; a second picture documents the drawing itself: a line of sequential squares, occasionally doubled up, and numbered one through nine. "Arcane symbolism!" Another photograph, this one showing Camila Noceda and that little purple-haired witch girl, stirring a tall silver pot on the stovetop. "Magic potions!" A third picture, all six of the children, even that inhuman freak that got away from him once before. They're all sitting around a makeshift fire pit, and Noceda's real kid, not the slug-thing version of her, has a flashlight pointed up under her chin as she pulls a hideous face. "Satanic rituals!"

"Their specific actions are irrelevant." The green-goo slug that calls itself 'Philip' slides across the tabletop, leaving a faint iridescent trail across the glossy photographs. "They are witches, and witches are beings of evil. Thus, anything they do has evil at its heart."

Philip pauses on at the face of that creepy-eyed blond kid, the one Jacob took through the window of the cottage in the woods. The kids is frozen in time by the camera as he stares, wide-eyed, over his shoulder, as if expecting to find Jacob and Philip looking back at him. "These photographs," Philip goes on, "are useful not in documenting their misdeeds, but in allowing us to look for observable patterns of movement."

Jacob picks up the stubby bit of pencil that Philip nudges toward him. It's faintly sticky; he tries not to shudder. Shuddering would be rude, and it's not Philip's fault that a bunch of weird witch kids cursed him into his current state of being. "What kind of patterns are we looking for, exactly?"

"Weak points," Philip answers promptly. "Moments of separation. Chaos. Isolation."

"Isolation? They're just kids; I could take them."

"There are six of them, and only one of you. In my current state, I am of little help." The slug ripples; is it smaller than it used to be? Jacob can't tell for certain. "A mere human woman and a basilisk stripped of her magic were enough to overpower you before. Better not to risk unnecessary confrontation with the lot of them; wouldn't you agree?" The slug writhes onto Jacob's wrist. "Though their powers wane the longer they remain in this realm, they are crafty, guileful children."

"Are you waning too?" Jacob blurts, and knows it must be true even before the slug tenses unpleasantly around the side of his thumb. Whatever those kids did to Philip, this form he's in must be magical too, in some way. And it doesn't seem likely that a regular-guy-shaped version of Philip is going to hatch happily out of this little green blob when whatever magic is left withers away.

"I'm afraid so," Philip says, after a moment. "Unless I can return to the demon realm, I have no chance to break this curse and permanently restore my true form. I fear I will remain—this—until I ebb from existence altogether. If I am fated to end my life in this dreadful form, I only hope to end the scourge of witchcraft before I do."

"It won't come to that," Jacob says uncertainly. If Philip really does fade away, so does Jacob's only ally in his long, tireless fight against evil. Philip is the only person who really understands him. And besides, with as much as he knows about witchcraft, he's also the only person who might be able to help him get his MewTube account verified.

"Unless, perhaps …" Philip muses. The slug squirms a little higher along the ridge of Jacob's knuckles. "Is it possible that you have any artifacts that might have originated in the demon realm?"

"Most of what I had got stolen by—" He's embarrassed to admit that Camila Noceda and her monster-kid are also responsible for that little humiliation. "Uh, hooligans. But not everything." He shoots to his feet, mindful of the slug still clinging to his hand. "I'll show you what I've got."

Philip shows no interest whatsoever in most of Jacob's relics, not even the Genuine Witch Talisman he bought on Buy-Bay. But the last thing, a little purple stick of something that doesn't feel quite like plastic—that's the one piece that he takes the time to explore at length. "Funny," Jacob says. "I'd always sort of thought that one might be a fake. It looks more like a kid's toy than, you know … witchcraftery."

"Yet you never disposed of it," Philip reminds him. "You must have sensed that it was too dangerous to let go of." Even as Jacob preens—he probably did realize exactly that, subconsciously, now that Philip mentions it—Philip's stubby, sluggy tail curls around the artifact. "Now stand back, please. I wouldn't like to step on your toes."

"I—"

The wand moves ever so slightly, its tip sketching a circle on the air. A flash of light forces Jacob to shield his eyes. When he opens them again, the green slug is gone, and a normal-looking human man stands before him: older, long brown hair fading to gray, an ugly scar across the bridge of his nose. He's dressed sort of like one of those goofy colonial cosplayers from Williamsburg or the Plimouth Plantation. "A temporary solution, I'm afraid," he says with a sigh, and the voice is still Philip's. "The curse that they put on me persists; I've only contained it, for the time being. A training wand such as this is a limited source of magic." He stretches his shoulders back and stands a little taller. "But I must say it's nice to enjoy some of my old stature for now."

"Nice to finally meet you face to face, Philip." Jacob thrusts out his hand, and Philip returns a sturdy shake. "Let's figure out how we're going to pick these kids off so we can get you permanently back to your real body—buddy."

#

A quiet Saturday afternoon at the Noceda house still manages not to be too quiet. On the front porch, Amity and Luz sit side by side, hunched over a couple of textbooks, poking each other occasionally, asking to see what the other is working on. Camila has discovered a fat-bellied toad in the tall grass at the corner of the garden fence, and, carefully rubber-gloved in consideration of its delicate skin, she's cooing at it, trying to coax it into a cardboard box so that she can show Gus before she delivers it to a more amphibian-friendly stream in the woods. Hunter and Willow had gone into the garage in search of tomato fertilizer, but instead, they came back out with Luz's old rollerblades; Hunter's wearing the left one and Willow has the right, and they're currently engaged in some sort of shrieking, wheeled version of a three-legged race up and down the sidewalk.

Those two are ridiculous, Amity thinks. Adorably ridiculous, on occasion. But mostly just the regular, unflavored variety. She wasn't that bad about Luz before they started dating … was she?

She feels herself tomato-ing slightly and props her face in her hands to cover her red cheeks. Okay, maybe these dorks are a little understandable. In the space between 'friend' and 'girlfriend', there's a horrible howling chasm, and there's no way to know until you try to cross it whether it's a single step wide or miles across. Too bad Hooty isn't here, she thinks, and then cringes, imagining what kind of damage a house demon could unleash on the Noceda basement.

"All right, batata." Luz snaps Amity out of her reverie by planting a kiss on her girlfriend's still-pink nose. "I'm going inside. Bugs may not like the taste of witch blood, but I'm still a delicious treat to Gravesfield mosquitos."

Amity grabs her hand, not letting her go yet. "I know that look. You're close to something. Aren't you?"

"I'd say it's more like Vee is close to something." Luz smiles, a genuine grin that Amity treasures up to think of again later. "I'm glad we asked her to help. We make a pretty awesome team! She's super good at all of the math stuff, and I'm not bad myself at, hmm, let's call it the big ideas side of things—"

"Well, whenever the two of you are ready to share, I can't wait to hear all about it." She lets go of Luz's fingers, a little reluctantly. "I'll be in soon, too." After the door closes behind Luz, Amity plays idly with the pages of her book, staring off into the middle distance. The wheels in her head are turning; she's just not sure which direction they're rolling, yet.

She doesn't even notice the figure plopping down beside her on the front stoop until Willow elbows her. "Whatcha thinking about, Blight?"

"Oh!" Amity jumps. "Hi, Willow. Hunter." He nods at her from the yard. "Nothing, really. Just remembering Grom, for some reason."

"Grom!" Willow claps her hands to her face. "Wow. That feels like it happened a thousand years ago now."

"What's Grom?" asks Hunter suspiciously.

"It's a big party where everyone dresses up in fancy outfits and dances and also one specially-chosen student has to fight Grometheus the Fear Bringer and keep him from escaping to turn all of the Boiling Isles into a terrifying realm of nightmares." Amity feels herself blushing again, but she's powerless to do anything about it. At least it's getting darker outside; maybe no one can tell? "It was pretty fun, outside of the facing-your-worst-fear-from-a-telepathic-demon part."

Hunter squints at her. "Sometimes it's really hard to tell when you're being honest, and when you're just making it up to see what I'll believe."

"Grom is real," Willow assures him. "And it was a lot of fun … after we knew that Luz and Amity were okay, that is." She purses her lips, looking thoughtful. "We might not be able to choose a Grom King or Queen here in the human realm—which is more than okay with me, by the way—but I do have an idea about a different kind of party."

"Am I invited?" Hunter blurts. Through sheer willpower, Amity manages to neither roll her eyes nor laugh out loud.

"Not only are you invited," Willow says. She leans forward, a fading flash of sunlight glimmering on her glasses. "But also, I'm going to need your help. Well, I mean—I want your help, if you don't mind, I'm sure that on my own, I could—" She gives up on trying to get that sentence under control and turns to Amity with an over-polished enthusiasm. "Oh, and you too, Amity!"

No. No, she absolutely couldn't have been this bad with Luz. Could she? Amity carefully avoids examining her memories too closely. She flips her book closed and breathes a sigh of fervent relief. "Just promise me that it's something easier to understand than human science, and I'll help you with whatever you want."

#

Philip looks a lot more likely to pass for an average citizen of Gravesfield after Jacob gives him an official Historical Society T-shirt to wear. "The fabric quality is exquisite," Philip says, examining the eagle emblem printed on the front. Jacob opens his mouth to say something about paying extra to order the tri-cotton blend, but Philip is still talking. "This building has been here quite some time, hasn't it?"

"Since a fire in the 1600s, yeah. About sixty years ago, the owners decide to restore the original—"

"It reminds me of someplace I've been, that's all." Philip brushes the front of the shirt once more, then glides back across the room to the pile of photographs. "And of someone I once knew. Jacob, I shudder to even mention this, but … one of those witches has committed truly horrific crimes against my family." He fingers one picture and pulls it loose from the pile. It's that weird blond kid again, a cap pulled snugly over his head, holding an ice cream cone like he's never seen one before. Who wears gloves to an ice cream shop in the middle of June, anyway? Someone with something to hide, that's who. "He stole the voice and the face of my long-dead brother, and to this day, he wears them both. To torment me, I can only assume."

"What a little monster." Jacob scratches one eyebrow, looking at the picture. "How, uh. How old is he? Since your brother is long-dead, I mean."

"He's not at all the age he appears," Belos answers smoothly, and crushes the photograph in his fist. "It doesn't matter. Now that I bear my own true form for a short while, I believe that we are strong enough to take on the wickedness that infests Gravesfield—and to triumph over it. Indeed, I believe that I have devised a way for us to open a doorway to the demon realm, so that together, we can destroy it once and for all."

"I would be proud to help you do exactly that." Jacob hesitates, then adds in a rush: "As long as you consent to be recorded by video and audio for use on my MewTube channel."

"That is of no concern to me. The only thing that matters right now finding a reservoir of magic large enough to open the doorway that has been closed to me." Belos opens his fingers, and the crumpled photograph flutters down to the tabletop. "Fortunately, I know precisely where such a thing can be found."

#

Hunter squares his shoulders. It's time. He is up to the mission laid in front of him. He's got to be. Everyone is relying on him, and he can't let them down. He won't. He will do this right if it kills him.

Deceit would be a mistake. He doesn't have the skills in stealth to pull this off correctly—he has no choice but to march right up to his target and declare his intent dead-on, flat-out, no holds barred. 

"Gus!" he says sharply, and his target drops the book he's been reading and falls out of his lawn chair. "Everyone is waiting for you inside!"

"Waiting for me?" Gus accepts the hand Hunter extends to help him up. "Why? It's too early for dinner, and too late for lunch. Did I miss my turn to clean the bathroom? I thought that was your job this weekend."

"It's not a meal—well, there is something to eat—uh—" Does cake count as a meal? Hunter catches himself fidgeting with his hands; this is already going off the rails. There was a time when it would have been second nature to grab Gus by the back of the neck and force-march him into the house, no questions asked; but that was a time when Hunter had had a golden mask to hide behind. There was a certain simplicity to those days, but there was never anything truly easy about them. "And cleaning the bathroom is irrelevant! We've put together a human ritual for you and you're supposed to be the guest of honor, so just … go inside already? Please?"

"'Please' goes a long way." Gus rights the tumbled lawn chair, but looks back at the house with something like apprehension. "What is this human ritual, anyway?"

"You'll see when you go inside." Being someone's friend isn't always easy, either, but it's a happy kind of work to find himself entrusted with. "But I think you're going to like it."

And Gus does seem to like it, despite his surprised yelp when the lights go on in the dark living room and everyone jumps out from behind the furniture, yelling "Surprise!" in unison. Dr. Noceda reveals a beautiful bouquet of flowers, while Vee and Amity hold up a hand-decorated banner that reads, in elaborate letters, Happy Birthday Gus!

"Hang on!" Gus protests, both confused and laughing. "It's not even my birthday, you guys."

"It wouldn't be a very good surprise if we waited until your actual birthday." Luz hands him a small, newspaper-wrapped parcel. "Now, usually at a human birthday party, you don't open presents first thing. But if you open it, I think you'll see why we have to do things a little bit backward."

He gives her a curious look, then turns his attention to the wrapping paper, which he parts neatly at one end. Out slides a slim notebook with a bright blue cover. When Gus flips it open, the pages are blank. "For research notes?" he asks.

"More like field notes." Willow hands him a new ballpoint pen, still capped. "It's so you can write down everything you want to remember about your time in the human realm." Her smile wavers a little around the edges. Hunter twitches. He wants to run across the room and make her smile again—no, no, that's not quite it, he doesn't think. He does want to see her smile, but more than that, he wants to be someone she lets herself be sad with, when she needs to. That's something that this therapist-person that Camila has him talk to likes to say, that feelings aren't wrong to have—that what really matters is what you choose to do with them. "So you can tell your dad all about it, when we get home."

Now Gus's eyes are welling up, and Hunter has to grab the back of the couch to keep himself from trying to do something about that, too; especially since he doesn't know what he could even do, which almost certainly means that doing it would be a bad idea. "Thanks, Willow," Gus says, his voice a little wobbly. But he's smiling behind those tears in his eyes, because—and this is something Hunter still doesn't understand in the least—sometimes being really happy can make people sad. He flings his arms around her and Luz. "Thanks, everyone. This is already an awesome birthday."

"Then you should write that down!" urges Luz. "But do it fast, so we can have cake."

The cake is white with flecks of bright colors on the inside, and Luz's mother lights each of thirteen candles on top before adding a fourteenth, unlit. "One to grow on," she says, smiling. Gus blows all the candles out in one breath, and no one needs to ask what he might have wished for.

The first slice of cake goes to the birthday boy, Dr. Noceda insists. She hands Hunter the next piece and shoos him along. But his stomach has been on the unruly side the last few days; he's just not hungry, and especially not hungry for a conglomeration of pure, unadulterated sugar. He hands the untouched cake to Vee instead and finds a corner of the couch to watch from, as Gus mows through his cake and immediately flips the notebook open to its first page, insisting on writing everything down before anyone can move on to party games.

"Nothing different has even happened yet!" Amity objects. "We have cake and candles in the Boiling Isles, too."

Gus uncaps his pen with immense dignity. "But we don't have Funfetti cake. And we don't put an extra candle on the birthday cake, either!"

"That's not a human thing, specifically," Vee interjects. "That's just a weird thing that Mom does."

Dr. Noceda slides a thin slice of cake onto the last plate and picks up a fork. "It's for good luck!"

"Hmm." Amity still looks skeptical. "Well, Gus? Do you feel any luckier?"

Gus lowers the notebook, looking around the room. He catches Hunter's eye last of all, and smiles a less-wobbly version of the wobbly smile from before. "You know what? Yeah. I do feel pretty lucky, actually."

###

Chapter Text

In Luz and Vee's bedroom, Luz hovers over her doppelganger-slash-sister's shoulder as Vee scrolls through the brightly-colored, neatly-labeled images of a slideshow on their shared computer. "It looks great!" she proclaims, as Vee taps into the final slide: an annotated list of references for the information used. "And you were right; a slideshow is a better choice than a dramatic presentation."

"I think your presentation would have turned out cool, too! And probably more memorable." Vee leaves the slideshow and returns it to the first page. "But, um, maybe not worth the fire risk."

"A trade-off for sure." Luz reads the slideshow title once more. A Scientific Proposal for an Interdimensional Breach of Unknown Duration. "But how about if we change the name to 'How We're Going to Get You All Home With the Power of Science'?"

"Hmm …" Vee wrinkles her nose, then concedes. "Okay. Since I won about the slideshow in the first place." She deletes the existing title and types in Luz's new version, adding italics, and then a muscle-arm and heart emoji for a flourish at the end. "How does that look?"

"So perfect." Luz admires it for a moment more—she might have added a couple more heart emojis and definitely a lightning bolt, but that's okay—before looking down at Vee's face. "And, um, Vee; hopefully you already know this, but … you don't have to go through the portal. You belong here with Mom. And me! I'm getting used to having a squishy, math-loving sister around. Especially one that I couldn't have done all of this without." She gestures to the computer screen.

"Thanks, Luz." Vee's nose wrinkles again, this time with her smile. "I'd like that. Maybe, if we can keep this portal open, I'll be able to recharge my magic enough that I can go to school with you this fall."

"That would be amazing," Luz says. She tries to keep the happy expression plastered to her face, but from the inside, it feels like a plastic Halloween mask covering her real feelings. Going to school with Vee certainly sounds more fun than going to school alone. But she'd much rather be studying potions and illusions than chemistry and Connecticut history.

At least she can make sure some people end up where they're supposed to be. And maybe Vee is right, and they'll figure out how to make a portal that sticks around; her friends can come visit her, when they're able. Eda and King can come over for empanaditas and mangu, Willow and Gus and Hunter can come camp out over the summer, or during Blister Break in the spring. She and Amity can have gloriously boring human-realm date nights every Friday …

She catches her fantasies drifting too far off-course and pulls her thoughts back to the present moment. "Okay," she says. "I'm going to go get everyone. It's time."

Soon all the kids are crowding into the room: Amity still flour-speckled from a morning baking spree, Willow covered in her customary level of garden crust. "If you smell rotten plants, that's me," she says apologetically. "I meant to shower after I mulched the garden, but Luz said it was urgent."

Gus pinches his nose. "Um. How urgent, exactly?"

Luz and Vee agree that they can probably wait twenty minutes while Willow takes a much-needed shower. When she returns, hair still towel-wrapped and glasses still steamy, Luz ushers her quickly to a seat with the others on the floor, as Vee sets the computer screen at an angle where they can all see it. Luz gives them a moment to read the title and feels her heart trying to bang its way out of her chest while she waits for them to say something.

Amity speaks up first. "Do you really mean it?" Her eyes are on Luz, not the cued-up slideshow. "You've got a way to get us home?"

"Mostly she does." Luz nods at her sister, who shrugs modestly and blushes a bluish color. "But yes! We hope so. Why don't you explain it, Vee?"

Vee taps the keyboard, advancing to the next slide. "So, we know that the human realm and the demon realm are different worlds—not just planets, of course, but, scientifically speaking, dimensions. Alternate versions of the universe, a whole new version of reality." Her eyes are shining as she pages forward again; she's in her element here, delighting in the opportunity to share her hard-earned learning with her friends. Luz had to get her to cut back on the number of slides that just had equations on them. "So between those universes, obviously, there has to be some kind of boundary. A membrane too tough to breach, so that you'd never know there was a whole new world on the other side … Unless someone punched through it first. Which, of course, takes a lot of power to do."

"Power like what's in titan's blood," Willow volunteers.

"Yes! Exactly!" Vee leans forward, nodding vigorously. Another new slide, this one a diagram hand-drawn by Luz and carefully scanned into a digital format by Vee. "But look at this. Once you punch that hole through the first time, you start to change the structure of the membrane, mathematically speaking."

"You make it crumbly," Luz says, with immense satisfaction. She jabs a finger at the computer screen, highlighting her Swiss-cheese-like representation of an interdimensional boundary. A tiny Amity-drawing reaches her hand through one of the gaps, and on the other side, a little Eda reaches back. "Porous! So it doesn't necessarily take something as powerful as Titan's blood to get through the next time—although that would still work, and boy I do wish we had some on hand."

"Okay, but … how is any of that going to work?" asks Gus. "We don't even have the parts to make a door. Don't we need those, at least? Besides, our bile sacs are drained, and glyphs don't work here at all. That means no magic to power our way through."

"We have two options." Vee holds up two slimy fingers. "One; maybe we can power a glyph if we find some outside source of magic that slipped into the human realm sometime in the past, one that hasn't been used up yet. I don't think we need a door, if we're breaking through in the right spot; assuming we have the right glyph and enough magic to fuel it. It's a long shot, I know. But we might be able to find something good on Buy-Bay, or even the thrift store in town."

"Otherwise …" Luz leans forward to tap onto the final slide. This one shows a diagram of Vee's devising, one that Luz doesn't understand in the least. But she doesn't have to understand it; she trusts that Vee does. "We can try doing things the human way. Enough power, and we should be able to break through—that power doesn't need to be magical."

"The electrical grid," Vee explains, highlighting part of her diagram. "Based on my calculations, we won't be able to get enough power from Mom's house alone. Not, uh, without exploding it. Which would make Mom sad. Also me, because I live here. But if we could access it from multiple sources …"

"Then we just explode our way back into the demon realm!" Luz finishes. "So … yeah. Vee will need help getting plans from city hall, to see where the electrical lines are laid around here. Someone's going to have to take charge of scoping out Buy-Bay and visiting the thrift store. And I will be busy trying to figure out the right glyph combo to open a portal." She produces a sheaf of papers, each one scribbled over with various combinations of glyphs. "It's, uh. Complicated. But it's a plan! What do you guys think?"

She's answered by a spectacular snore.

"Sorry," Willow says. She shifts a little, careful not to jostle Hunter, whose head has drifted down to her shoulder. Luz was so immersed in the presentation that she didn't even notice the developing cuteness of the whole situation. She makes up for lost time by flashing Willow a heart-eyes look, which Willow pointedly ignores. "I think he's feeling a little off today. He didn't even get up until 7:30."

"Yikes." Luz crouches over them. "He looks kind of pasty, too. Like, more than usual."

"Do you think he's coming down with something?" Amity asks. She scoots a little farther away. "Can witches even catch human-realm germs?"

"Well … I had the Common Mold last year, remember? It could work the other way too." Luz doesn't need to tell Amity why Hunter might be more likely to come down with human-realm flu than the others. "Hey! Hunter! Wake up and tell me if you're sick."

"Luz," objects Willow.

But Hunter jerks upright, glaring blearily at everyone. "What are you guys looking at?"

"Are you sick? Have you ever been sick? Would you know if you were sick? Hmm." Luz grabs his head and smashes her lips against his forehead. "Bleh!"

"Ugh!" He falls over backward, swatting at her. "Why did you do that?!"

"What? That's how Mom takes my temperature." Luz holds out her hands, mystified by his overreaction to routine health care. "And, okay, I don't actually know what temperature a face is supposed to be, but I know they're not supposed to be that soggy."

Willow lays her hand on Hunter's forehead instead, then discreetly wipes her fingers off on her shorts. "You are kind of sweaty," she admits. "It's not that warm in here."

"Should I call my mom?" Luz asks uncertainly. "I guess she'll be home before too much longer." Luz doesn't know what a veterinarian can do for someone who falls somewhere in the nebulous area between 'human being' and 'clone' and 'golem' and 'Frankenstein's monster' and 'other: fill in the blank'. Still, the idea of abdicating responsibility for someone else's potential illness to good old Doctor Mom is appealing. She makes a bid to her own personal knowledge of accessible medication. "… I could get you a Popsicle? Or some soup? Or both? No, probably not both. They would just cancel out."

Gus has also come closer to peer at Hunter, who does not appear to be enjoying all this extra attention. "He can't go to a doctor," he says worriedly. "They'll definitely notice something weird is up."

"I don't need a doctor!" Hunter shoves to his feet and immediately sways—but stays upright, at least. "Not even if she's Luz's mom. I'm fine."

"You are not fine." Willow stands up. "There's a drugstore on the corner of Sycamore Street. I'll walk down there and bring you some cold medicine." She glances at Luz. "Is that what he has? A human cold?"

"I don't know." It's not like he's been vaccinated for the usual litany of human childhood diseases. Luz ought to be able to tell if he had chickenpox or measles. Or smallpox? You can't just get that from thin air or undercooked sausage or something; Luz is almost 100% sure of that. "Is your nose stuffy? Can you smell anything? Cough? Chills? Muscle aches? Stomach upset? When you go to the bathroom, is it—?"

Willow puts one hand over Luz's mouth. "Great, okay, thank you, Luz. I'll walk him to the drugstore and he can find something that matches his symptoms. We'll be back in an hour. Okay?"

But she's asking Hunter, not Luz. "Um," he says, and the frustrated lines in his face soften. "… Fine."

Once their footsteps fade on the stairs, and the front door closes behind them, Luz turns to Amity, who smiles and nods, giving her permission for a prolonged squeak of delight before they all get down to business: this portal glyph, after all, isn't going to draw itself.

#

This is exactly what Willow has wanted for a very long time, and also, it is not what she wants at all.

Why is this so hard? Luz and Amity make it look so easy … though Willow knows that mostly, she just wasn't privy to the hard parts that they've been through together. Still; at Luz's house, there are always people around, so many people. People she loves, some of her favorite people in either realm—and yet, there are some things, however obvious they may seem to say or do, that become absolutely impossible when you don't know whether you'll be interrupted any moment by someone looking for a book or a shovel or a bowl of cereal.

So a quiet moment alone, with this very weird and very kind and, well, very cute boy should have been perfect. Too bad he looks like he's about to crumble to dust in the next stiff breeze; sweeping him into a dustpan is not exactly her idea of romance.

Well, so what? Opportunities are made, not waited for (or that's what her dads always say, anyway). She sets her jaw, squares her shoulders, and rounds on her extra-sickly-looking friend. "Hunter, I like you a lot, and I think you like me, too." A hint of mischief creeps up on her, and it feels right. Some moments demand a bit of mischief. "Blush if you agree."

Despite his current pallor, his ears still achieve an impressively bright red. She shouldn't poke him like this, especially when he's feeling a little off, but it does make her smile. (And, honestly, it's way too easy to do.) "Willow—" he begins.

She folds her arms, daring him to gainsay her. "Am I wrong?"

He ducks his head. "… No. But, Willow, you don't understand."

"I know you've never done this before. Neither have I, so that's okay. We'll figure it out together." She offers him her hand. "I'm up for the challenge."

"You're strong, and smart, and brave—a lot braver than me, which is why we're even talking about this in the first place. Of course I like you a lot! And I'm glad you do too. Like me, I mean. Although you should like you, too. Because of all the strongness, and smartness, and—I mean—" The blush has not faded in the least yet. Is that a good sign? Is it even a sign at all? He does blush awfully easily. "I just don't want you to stop liking me. Once you know more about who I am."

She lets her hand fall back to her side. "We've fought evil emperor-uncles, traveled between dimensions, and learned how to ride human bikes together. I think I know you pretty well."

"That's not—" He glares ferociously down at his sneakers. "Maybe you don't know me as much as you think you do."

"Maybe I don't." Well. This is exactly why she didn't want to have this conversation back at the house. She's not ready for the sight of Luz bearing down on her with a teary, sympathetic expression. "I'm sorry for pushing. I can just turn around and head back home, if you'd rather. Or I can go on to the drugstore without you if you tell me what you think you—"

He snatches her hand from her side and holds it too tightly, so tightly that the leather of his gloves squeaks in protest. The blush has spread from his ears across his whole face now; all he needs is a purple wig and he could pull off a pretty good impression of Amity. "The drugstore isn't that far away," he says, a little desperately; "it—it would be silly to turn around now."

"It would be, wouldn't it?" She wriggles her fingers, so that he loosens his death-grip on her hand.

"And—and also, I'd like the company."

"Hopefully they have something that'll help."

"Hopefully," he echoes. "I'm starting to feel a little queasy. And my legs are all, uh. Goobery."

She laughs and gives him a gentle nudge as they start moving down the sidewalk again. "Maybe you're still just sick, but I've been told that all that can be part of the process."

#

The house is quiet when Camila comes in. She settles her keys into their bowl and her purse onto its hook as she tilts her head to listen. Once upon a time, a quiet house was a distinct signal to find Luz immediately and stop her from, say, parachuting off the roof, or tie-dyeing the bathroom towels. It's nice not to have to immediately jump to the worst conclusion.

More than just nice, isn't it? She treads quietly up the stairs. Murmured voices drift through the girls' open bedroom door, and the scritch-scratch of pens on paper. She pauses outside before she announces herself, just watching the kids hard at work. Only four of them; perhaps Hunter and Willow have gone out to the garden? She makes a mental note to take a supervisory glance through the bathroom blinds at what exactly they're up to, after she checks in with her girls.

Before she can knock, though, Luz sighs noisily and slaps another piece of paper onto one of the stacks in front of her. "I'm still not even sure which glyph to use as the foundation for the others. I was thinking ice, because it's so sturdy; but it's almost too rigid to shape the rest of the magic around. I have the opposite problem with light, and anything I shape around fire seems like it might just damage the boundary between dimensions even more." She draws an open, empty circle on a new sheet. "Do you think—maybe this is a stupid idea, but if I start from the plant glyph, it's almost like—almost like growing a path from place to place?"

"I don't think that sounds stupid at all." Camila leans on the doorjamb, smiling at her daughter. "¡Qué chica tan lista! Who knew you could be so studious?"

Luz sits back on her heels, offering her mother a wan smile. "Not my ninth-grade math teacher, that's for sure."

"Can I see?" Camila holds out one hand, and Luz passes her one of the drawn-on papers.

She doesn't recognize, of course, any of the strange symbols marked on it (and every single one of them would have made Luz's poor grandma, que descanse in paz, have a Satanic-panic heart attack). But she can read the careful annotation in Luz's messy handwriting: arrows drawn to a combination of symbols, to reveal what is unseen?; a highlighted circle, possible anchor for portal endpoint.

It's a funny thing, to feel so confused and so proud at the same time. And not just because her famously school-challenged daughter seems to have made herself into an academic (albeit one devoted to a very specific and peculiar subject matter). It's not the differences in Luz that burn so brightly in Camila's heart; it's the differences she's made to all these other children. The broken friendship she's restored, the confidence she's lent, the unflagging belief in the goodness of someone else's heart. It's going to hurt all of them, to live without Luz. And that's a pain Camila knows all too well.

Her daughter has gone and grown up, and Camila wishes she'd been there, to witness more of that in the moments where it happened. And to shield her from some of it, if she could have. She suspects Luz would have made that difficult; no doubt has made that difficult, for her loved ones back in these Boiling Isles.

She hands the paper back to Luz with a wry smile. "I stand by what I said. A very clever girl, with a very simple mama. I don't know what it means, but I do know you're going to figure it out."

Luz smooths out the sheet and adds it back to the pile with rest. Her face is soft, open. Happy. Proud. "Thanks, Mom."

When Luz bends her head back to her work, Camila clears her throat. The other children, Amity and Gus and Vee, blink up at her. "I know you're all very busy, but I'd love a little company in the kitchen. Vee, can I borrow you for a while?"

#

The sun has inched a little lower in the sky by the time Willow and Hunter are on their way back from the store. It always sets so late here, though Luz says the time varies with the season, which seems, to Willow, like an excessively complicated way of organizing things. A plastic bag swings from her free hand: a box of cold-and-flu medicine, and a bottle of some goopy pink stomach-calming stuff. They'd had to leave the anti-allergy pills at the counter, since neither of them has a driver's license. A strange requirement, isn't it? Willow has no idea how the clerk expected her to drive a plastic pill bottle, but she's learned not to ask humans these things if she doesn't want weird looks.

It took them a fairly long time to make their selections and check out. Hunter had just stared helplessly at the aisles upon aisles of choices. "What do you think would help?" Willow had prompted him. "How exactly do you feel?"

"Like my whole body is trying to go on strike." Which sounded a lot like the way Luz had described the flu before, so cold-and-flu capsules it was.

They walk slowly back home, partly because Hunter must be getting tired, and partly because Willow is enjoying the swing of their hands between them, forward and back, an easy sort of rhythm. Being late for dinner isn't the worst thing in the world.

"Is this a date?" Hunter asks, out of the blue.

Willow almost trips on a crack in the sidewalk, but managers to recover herself with a little dignity. "Well … I think it's mostly just a walk. I'm not exactly speaking from experience, but I'm pretty sure both participants in a date have to be on this side of death's door." That cracks a smile out of him, and Willow's belly does a little do-I-need-the-pink-stomach-medicine? flip of its own. "But we could probably figure out an actual date at some point, if you want."

"Yes!" he says loudly, and then in a more normal tone, "I'd like that—I think. I'm not sure, because I've never done a date before? But I do like you."

She smiles. "As previously established. I know."

"So I—I want to go on a date with you, and do nice things for you, and … it wouldn't actually be very nice at all, to act like that, and let you think—and then not be able to—" He stops so hard that her arm jerks, and she almost drops the bag. "Willow, what if I stayed in the human realm with Dr. Noceda? If she wanted me to stay, that is. She probably doesn't."

Willow feels her heart break. Not Hunter's fault; there are so many old fault lines in there, barely papered over with glue and tape. She picks up the pieces and puts them back together gently, minding not to leave any out. "Well," she says. Brave, he called her brave. Sometimes being brave is recognizing the thing you absolutely don't want to do, and doing it anyway. "Well. Okay. What if you did? You deserve to have someone care about you. And I do! But it's not the same thing as having a mom or a dad." His expression is unreadable; she presses on. "Luz and Vee think that maybe someday, or maybe soon, we might be able to make a more permanent kind of portal anyway, like the door Eda used to have. Especially if we can find some titan's blood back in the Boiling Isles. So we could visit each other sometimes, and send letters. And—and if we can't, well, that's okay too." And sometimes brave is just accepting the things you can't change alongside the things you really want. "I like spending time with you, and I wouldn't like it less just because it was only a few days or weeks or months. It's not like I'm asking you to marry me."

Hunter drops to both knees, pulling her down with him.

"Ow!" Willow yelps, and wrenches her wrist out of his grasp. "Hunter, no one is asking anyone to marry anyone else right now." She pauses, and peers more closely at his face, pushing his hair back for a better look. "Are you okay? You look … kind of grayish."

"N-no. I don't feel right." He sways and puts his hand over his eyes. "Worse than before."

"I knew we should have bought a soda so you could take those pills right away!" She fumbles for the plastic bag. "Can you swallow them dry?"

"Don't know. I guess I—" His eyes go wide, pupils vanishing to a tiny dot. "Willow, run!"

Later, she'll blame herself. Back home, she would have been on alert; back home, she would have been ready. But things are so easy in the human realm! There aren't threats lurking around every cornerhere. No Coven Scouts patrolling her neighborhood, no Adrian Graye turning her school upside down. No Abomatons. No airships. No deranged child-gods tearing apart the earth and sky.

But she should have known. She should have known better from the second Hunter's expression changed. There's only one person in any realm who has ever made him look like that.

#

Luz is definitely narrowing in on a portal glyph, she's sure of it. Her current draft is definitely not likely to explode or turn anyone's body inside out, which is a serious improvement on the previous versions. It might even be … correct? Or close to it? The word 'might' is definitely the load-bearing part of that sentence.

She leans over the edge of the bottom bunk so that she can plop her chin onto Amity's shoulder. Her girlfriend is sitting on the floor, poring over a printed-off copy of the electrical grid of the neighborhood. She's busily taking measurements, converting the distance on the map from each neighbor's house to the disintegrating cottage in the woods, then converting those numbers into a specific quantity of extension cords. The next step after that, Luz supposes, will be converting that quantity into a price; there are only two electrical cords in the garage here. Maybe they can creatively borrow a few from the same neighbors whose electricity they also plan to, um, creatively borrow? "I'm going to take such good notes while I'm in school here," she mumbles, against Amity's cheek. "Then I'm going to send them all to you and you're going to be the best, coolest abomination-mad-scientist-girlfriend that has ever lived."

"You're just saying that because you don't know any other abomination-mad-scientist-girlfriends." Amity cranes her neck to give Luz an awkward, sweet, extremely perfect side-of-the-mouth kiss. "Although I do agree that I'd at least be a pretty good one."

"I'd better get those notes when she's done," says Gus, looking up from the computer that Vee has left to him while she sorts laundry. He's a good thousand entries deep into Buy-Bay by now, without any viable leads. "Maybe I want to do some mad science of my own."

"You can cover all the mad science bases. Abomination mad science. Illusion mad science. Plant mad science—"

Downstairs, the front door crashes open. "Luz!" cries Willow. "Gus? Amity?"

They scramble to their feet in a tangle of limbs, Gus making it out of the bedroom and down the stairs just ahead of the others. But Luz's mom has already beat them all, shooing Willow into the house and making her sit on the sofa while she looks at the scrapes and bruises on Willow's face and knees.

"I'm fine," Willow insists, though she is clearly anything but that. Her whole body is shaking, her fists clenched on her knees. There's a set of scratches across the lenses of her glasses that weren't there when she left the house. Her knees are scraped, and her palms, too, when she lifts her hands, pushing Luz's mother back. "Dr. Noceda, please! We have to—"

"Where's Hunter?" Luz asks, and the look on Willow's face makes her nauseous. Gus climbs over the back of the couch and squeezes in beside Willow, his arms going around her in a hug that obviously doesn't reassure her at all.

"They surprised me," she says hoarsely. "I didn't—I was being stupid. I am less than half a witch here, but—but somehow he wasn't? But I still should have stopped them—I could have fought harder." She touches her hair, and her fingertips come away bloody. "He told me to run away, but it was already too late …"

"Willow." Luz's mom takes her by the hands, gentle with all the little cuts and marks. "Slow down. What happened? Did someone realize Hunter wasn't human?"

"They already knew." Willow's eyes spill over with tears. "It was Belos. Belos is here, and he's not dead. I don't know how, but he—he pulled a chunk of concrete out of the road and hit me with it, and I don't know what happened next. I think they thought I was…" She stares at the ground. "Belos isn't alone, either. He's got some human helping him; Jacob, he called him?"

"Jacob?" repeats Luz's mom, in a dangerous tone of voice. "Jacob, you said?"

But Jacob isn't the name that sticks with Luz. She shakes her head, dizzy, trying to toss the words out of her ears, as if unhearing them would make them untrue. "That's impossible," she whispers. Amity's arm is around her waist, and that might be the only thing keeping her up. "We saw him die. Didn't we all see him die?"

"He's here," Gus says slowly, as if he's trying to make himself understand this impossible thing, too. "And he has Hunter."

No, no, no. Luz failed, facing him before. She wasn't supposed to have to do it again. It's not fair, she thinks, and remembers Vee's words, days ago: The world is just math, and math doesn't care about anyone's feelings. That's up to decent people to do.

But not alone, she thinks, squeezing Amity's clammy fingers. Not this time. She has her friends. She has her funky little basilisk-sister. And she has—

"¡Oye!" Mom is by the door, one hand clutching her car keys and the other by the doorknob. "I know what's going to happen if I try to tell you to stay here while I go give Jacob Hopkins a piece of my mind so: I am pulling out of this driveway in fifteen seconds and anyone who's not in the car by then is going to be walking their butts to the historical society. Got it? Let's go."

###

Chapter Text

It's probably weird that Hunter isn't scared.

Or if not scared, then angry, at least? He stumbles as this 'Jacob' guy yanks him deeper into the woods. Are they heading toward Luz's house, or away from it? Hunter has lost all sense of orientation, and the dark shadows of the trees melt into one another, no way to tell east from west or home from away. He's run off twice now, in spite of his lack of directional awareness—once by headbutting Jacob and ducking off through the thicket, once by stomping on the guy's foot as hard as he could (which is still pretty hard, despite his current condition). But both times he failed to get far enough away to hide before his rubbery legs gave out.

This, all of this, was supposed to be over. His uncle—no, not his 'uncle', just Belos—shouldn't have been able to hurt him or his friends ever again. But he did hurt Willow. At least hurting was all he'd actually managed to do, though he certainly seemed to think he'd done more than that (assisted by a possibly over-the-top melodramatic performance from Hunter). Belos underestimated her; she's so much tougher than other people think. Still, maybe Hunter should summon some up worry? As strong as Willow is, Belos hit her hard with that chunk of blacktop that he tore out of the road.

Which brings to mind that 'confused' would also be a valid option for how to feel right now. How was Belos able to do magic, enough magic to rip a hole in the pavement, if he came over to the human realm at the same time as everyone else? His ill-gotten magical gains should have long since evaporated. And moreover, why isn't he just a smear of goo on the floor of the Collector's new owl house?

Alarmed. Furious. Devastated. Curious. There have even been days when a tiny, traitorous corner of his thoughts would have been relieved to find Belos still alive and kicking. But all those emotions float out of his reach, like they're waiting for someone else to find and feel them. He's left with nothing but a cold, tired emptiness.

If nothing else, maybe he can fill it with noise. "You're just a gross old slug," he says, raising his voice for Belos's ears. Assuming Belos even has ears now? His human shape gave way almost as soon as he'd taken out Willow. A green pile of goo now rides blithely on Jacob's shoulder, on the opposite side from Hunter. For good reason; Hunter would have much preferred to crush this slimy thing under his sneaker sole than Jacob's dumb toes. "I could step on you and finish this once and for all."

"You see, Jacob?" Belos's voice is mild, eminently reasonable. It's a tone Hunter knows well. "The first resort of a witch always turns to violence."

"I'm not the one who—" He trips on a tree root, and Jacob drags him across the grass on his knees for a few yards, before he manages to regain his feet again. "What are you doing to me, anyway? Is this a—a miniature draining spell?" It doesn't hurt the same way that the draining spell did, back in the Boiling Isles, and his sigil doesn't seem affected. But it does feel like he's losing … something. "I'm not afraid of you."

"It's not me you need to fear." The slug's silky voice makes Hunter shudder. "It's simply a fact of nature, I'm afraid. Your utility is running out, now that you've remained so long in the human realm."

Hunter almost falls again. "W-what?"

"Previously you'd seemed well aware that you were an artificial magical construct. Had you forgotten?" The slug twists, peering at him from under Jacob's chin. "The longer you stay here, the more magic drains away from the galdorstone that provides you the energy you require to appear as a real, living thing."

"I am a real living thing!" Isn't he? His breath comes faster, and he can't get it back under control. He tries to count, to slow himself down, without success.

"Oh, Hunter." Belos's voice is amusement, disappointment, all cut through with a sharp edge of genuine pleasure. "You are not long for this world, I'm afraid—but you may yet be of some use in opening a door to another."

#

The Historical Society door is locked, of course. While Gus and Amity wrench on the unturning knob, Willow runs around to check for a back door. Luz, meanwhile, puts her hands up to the front window to peer inside. It's after five o'clock, and the lights overhead are dead and dark. No tourists; if Jacob Hopkins is there, he's in his secret back room.

There's an ugly scraping noise, and Luz looks over to see her mother coaxing a loose brick from a weak spot in the old façade. "Look out, mija," she says calmly, and heaves the brick through the window.

"Mom!" gasps Luz, shocked and a little starstruck. "I always knew you were cool but I didn't know you were that cool."

Her mother shrugs modestly as she knocks the remaining glass out of the pane with a broken branch from the nearest tree. "People who throw stones shouldn't live in glass houses, you know? Especially the ones who throw stones at my daughter's friends. All of you wait here for a second." And she ducks through the jagged opening.

A moment later the front door swings open. "Okay, come on in." Camila beckons them like she's calling them into the house for dinner. "But watch out for the broken glass!"

They all spread out, treading carefully through the quiet, empty museum. Luz half expects booby traps to jump out at her: poison-tipped darts shooting from an air vent, anvils dropping from the ceiling. But nothing happens. Even the security camera whose red light blinks at them from the corner proves to be a cheap fake, when Luz clambers up on a table for a closer look. Something about the lack of response tickles the back of Luz's thoughts, but it's like a feather in the wind, impossible to grab hold of for any closer examination.

There's not even anyone or anything to surprise them when they force the door on the back room open: no Jacob, no Belos. No Hunter. "Does this place have a basement?" Willow asks desperately, kicking at the dead-end wall as if there might be a secret tunnel somewhere beyond the drywall. Amity glances up from the drawers she's rifling through, as if she wants to say something comforting, but can't quite figure out what or even how. "Had they invented basements yet, whenever this was built? They've got to be here somewhere!"

"Don't panic." Camila squeezes her arm reassuringly. "Deep breath, okay? We'll find them. See if you can find a—a checkbook, or some mail, or something? Something with Jacob's home address, in case that's where they've gone. We just need to keep level heads and we'll figure this out."

"… Mom?" Luz holds up a fistful of photographs from a cluttered tabletop. Her own sad, thoughtful face stares through her from the picture on the top of the pile; the sight of it sends a shock of rage through her. How long have these creeps been spying on them? "I'm not sure we need to figure out where Jacob lives. I think he might be closer to where we live." She holds up a series of photographs that all show the rotting cabin in the woods. On one of these, the cabin's front door is circled in green highlighter, with an illegible note penned next to it. "I think Belos wants the same thing we do. To open the portal."

"That doesn't make any sense!" Frustrated tears cluster in the corners of Willow's eyes, and she blinks them quickly away. "Why would they take Hunter? He would never help Belos now. So why drag him along? They don't need him—all they need is a power source, the same as us."

Gus drops the binder of Jacob's notes that he was holding, and Post-it notes and paper clips go flying across the floor. "We need to go," he says, his voice cracking. "We need to go right now."

Camila doesn't ask questions, and neither, mercifully, does anyone else. Moments later, they're back in the car, seatbelts snapping into place even as Camila throws the transmission into drive.

Luz makes sure that she's sandwiched in the middle of the backseat, next to Gus, so that now, under the roar of the engine, she can lean over to him and whisper: "He told you?"

"No." Gus stares down at his hands. "I wish he had. I got into Belos's head, trying to grab something I could use for an illusion, back on the Day of Unity. I saw … more than I should have. I feel bad knowing, but I can't not know. You know?"

She puts her arm around him. "Yeah. I know. I really, really know."

On her other side, she feels a gentle tug on her sleeve. When she looks over, Amity is plainly trying to communicate solely via aggressive eyebrow movements. What? Luz mouths at her.

Amity lifts the hem of her shirt and withdraws a small golden object on a chain, which she surreptitiously slips into Luz's palm. A ball? No, a bell, and not gold at all; some sort of brass, maybe. She takes care to hold the clapper in place so that it doesn't chime as she shrugs helplessly at Amity. Whatever this thing is, it's just another question, not any kind of an answer.

"It's a Beastkeeper's Bell," Amity whispers against her ear. Vee, smashed up against the car door on Amity's other side, glances over at them curiously, but doesn't seem to be able to hear what Amity's saying. "Any beast that wears it becomes more docile. At least initially; a really stubborn beast can shake off the effects eventually. Viney had one for Puddles, but she ate it. Puddles did, I mean, not Viney."

"… Okay? I don't think Belos is going to have a defensive griffon squad set up to square off with us."

"It's magic," Amity whispers, and closes Luz's fingers around it. Suddenly Luz's hands are sweating, and she almost lets the clapper slip. "But do you think it's enough magic for what we need? How crumbly is that interdimensional wall?"

"I don't know." Luz's heart squeezes in her chest. She recognizes that feeling; it's a whole lot of hope, trying to get loose. And a whole lot of sadness, right beside it, clawing its way through. "Honestly, I—I'm not even sure I have the glyph combo locked down yet!" Is it really time to say goodbye to her friends, her girlfriend, this huge sprawling adopted family of hers already? She's not ready, not ready at all.

But clearly Amity is ready. She must miss her father and Ed and Em so badly; the same way Luz misses Eda and King. It's not fair for Luz to hang onto her. She belongs over there, and Luz belongs here. End of story, or at least end of chapter.

Amity's fingers twist tighter around hers. "But maybe soon?"

"… Maybe," Luz concedes, and Amity's smile both breaks her heart and heals it at the same time.

#

Hunter realizes where they are, exactly, when the ruined cottage looms out of the shadowy underbrush. Stupid, stupid, not to have guessed sooner—but not, perhaps, too late. When Jacob pauses to take a picture of the house on his phone, Hunter turns his head and bites the unwitting human on the wrist.

Jacob howls and lets go, dropping his phone in the process; exactly Hunter's goal, as this human seems unable to function without that little glass-and-plastic rectangle in his hand. Hunter makes a break for it … but he only makes it halfway across the clearing before his legs turn into jelly and send him sprawling. At least this time he catches himself with his hands before faceplanting.

"Well, that was weird." Jacob hauls Hunter up by the back of his collar this time, and keeps him in front as he marches him up the stairs. "And gross. Is it common for witches to carry infectious diseases in their saliva? I have a theory that rabies actually originated in the—"

"I assure you, no lasting harm is done," Belos says briskly. "Let's keep things moving along, shall we?"

"Sure." Jacob gives Hunter a shove, which is enough to send him sprawling. In the moment that he strikes the floor, he hears a sickening crack. Did he … break something? Ribs? He tries to get his elbows under himself, to push himself up to his knees, but he can't muster the strength. Nothing hurts, at least. Shouldn't something hurt?

"All right, there we go." Jacob steps from the window ledge where he's set up his phone, and nods in satisfaction. "Hope I don't run out of battery life. Hey, Philip, is there time for me to run back to the Historical Society and grab an external—"

"There is not." The Belos-slug on Jacob's shoulder nods at Hunter. "The galdorstone inside him is already failing. I need you to crack him open and remove it before its power is fully drained."

Jacob hesitates. "… Crack him open?"

"He may look like a child, but in reality, he's nothing more than an abomination."

"No, yeah, I know." Jacob raises his hands in a placating gesture. "It's just that the lighting in here is kind of iffy, and if I'm standing over him the shadows are going to be dense. Just wish I'd brought the ring-light, that's all. I'm sure the shot will turn out anyway, it's fine." He sighs wistfully. "Yeah, it's fine."

A desperate army-crawl only buys Hunter a few inches. If there's anything about this whole situation that he understands clearly, it's that he does not want to be 'cracked open'. But Jacob grabs him by one arm and flips him onto his back. "Come here, kid. Let's see what you—whoa!"

Thin, watery blue light shines through the fabric of Hunter's t-shirt. He grabs at his own chest, and finds the crack he heard a few moments ago: not the breaking of bones, but of bad wood. Inside it, he can feel just a sliver of the galdorstone's smooth surface.

"Well! This makes things even easier." Belos dribbles down the length of Jacob's arm, and when the little pile of goo hits the floor, a man-shaped shadow flows upward in its place. After a moment, its features resolve into those of a human-looking Philip Wittebane. "It's time to prepare the portal."

"The portal? Slow down, Philip. I need to make sure I've gotten a decent shot of this blue glowing galdor-thing first." Jacob fumbles with his phone, squinting at the image under his thumbs. "If the footage doesn't look believable, all of this was for nothing!"

Philip's shoulders draw back and his eyes narrow. That's a look Hunter knows all too well. "I have been hunting witches longer than you've been alive," he snaps, in the tone of someone used to be quickly obeyed. "Leave that infernal device alone and do as you're told."

"Like I used to?" Hunter says bitterly, but both men are already moving toward the cabin door, and no one pays him the least attention.

#

Even before they reach the cabin, a faint blue glow tells them they're on the right track. "That's definitely a galdorstone," Gus says quietly. Luz spins to him with a pang in her chest. He's clinging to Willow's arm like that's the only thing keeping him up, and he says the thing that Luz is thinking. "What if we're already too late?"

Amity gives him a confused look. "What are you talking about? How could they have gotten a galdorstone here in the human realm? Those things are rare enough in the demon realm. I don't think one would have fallen out of Eda's pocket during one of her visits without her noticing."

Gus looks at Luz, clearly unsure of how much to say. Not that Luz has any more ideas than he does, but she tries to wrangle herself back into the role of leader. "Everyone just—just be quiet for a second! We need a plan." Luz puts her hands on her head, trying to concentrate. "We need to work together, we need to stay calm, and … where is my mom?"

#

Hunter has to force himself to stay awake while he waits for Philip and Jacob to do their work. Philip has begun to draw out a complicated rune on the floor behind the front door, muttering to himself—he's never drawn a glyph of this kind, Hunter suspects. Jacob, meanwhile, continues to fuss with the camera and occasionally ask Philip to move so that he can get a better shot—a request that Philip only ever ignores.

What an undignified way to go. Maybe it would be easier if Hunter did fall asleep; if he just didn't have to know what was happening to him. Better still, maybe if he drifted off now, it would be because the galdorstone had finally rolled past its expiration date, and Belos would never be able to use it.

How incredibly stupid and terrible and pointless, to finally find a place where he belongs, only to learn that living in that place is literally sucking the life out of him. One last unkindness from the universe; no surprise there, knowing who the creator of Hunter's particular corner of the universe was. He closes his eyes on that thought.

A split second later, he startles awake again as the door crashes open into Philip's face and knocks him into the corner. Dr. Noceda stands in the open doorway, breathing hard, her sandal in her hand. "You again!" she shouts, and belts the stunned Jacob across the face with her shoe. "You didn't learn your lesson the first time?"

"Dr. Noceda," Hunter croaks. "The door—my uncle—"

"Don't worry, sweetheart, this is why we wear two shoes." She flings the door shut and rounds on Belos, still sprawled in the corner. "Listen up, comemierda—you didn't hear that word, Hunter—you touch any of these kids again and you're going to taste the front bumper of my car instead of chancla, understand?"

She whips her second shoe at his face, which peels apart into two thick ropes of green. The sandal smacks harmlessly into the wall, and Belos's entire body ripples. In a flash, he knits himself back together, on his feet now, without a seam in sight.

Dr. Noceda takes advantage of this pause to clip him with a swing of her handbag, hard enough to turn his head. But real fear breaks across her face—and Hunter is useless to help her, as another spasm of weakness drops his head to the floor.

"Mom!" The door crashes open again, and Hunter's friends pile through, not a moment too soon. "Hunter!"

"Look out!" he cries, as Belos lances out at them with an arm that stretches obscenely into a sword, a scythe. Luz tackles her mom out of the way, Amity and Gus leap to either side, but Willow—

Willow instinctively flings both hands up, sketching a circle that shines electric green in the air. A knotted tree trunk springs up between her and Belos. The emperor's arm slices deep into it, and sticks fast, even as Willow looks at her own hands with wonder. "My magic?" she says wonderingly. My magic, Hunter thinks, but her spell has drawn a little more against a bill he already can't afford to pay, and he can't even call out to her now. She ought to take it, as much as she can; better that she should have it than that Belos does.

"No!" Gus grabs her elbow and yanks her out of another spell before she can complete the circle. Behind them, Belos heaves, slowly working his trapped arm to freedom. "You can't use any more magic, Willow. None of us can. It could kill Hunter!"

"I—" She turns to Hunter, who can't get up from the stupid corner, who can't even move his head away from the look she gives him. It's bad enough that Gus knows—how? Luz would never have told him—but Willow's understanding is unbearable. Her soft, wounded expression hardens into something ferocious, and she looks away, blinking, as Belos tears his arm free of her tree. "Okay. Human-realm rumble rules. Let's do this."

#

"Mom, you need to get out!" Luz tugs her mother's arm, trying to help her off the floor by sheer force of will. Forty-year-old humans don't recover from a hit quite as well as their offspring. "I think it's about to get real magical in here."

Camila grunts. "I'm not going anywhere." She forces herself upright and puts one hand to her head. "No one's throwing rocks or, what do you call them, abominations. You go help your friends." She picks up her sandal from where it's fallen on the ground. "I need to have a word with Mr. Hopkins." A squeak of fear from behind the moldy sofa draws her attention, and she advances on the cowering Jacob with a growl.

"Mom—!" But her mother is right; the room isn't filled with boiling lava or carnivorous plants, and Belos, surrounded by three angry teenagers, appears to be mostly content to swing at them with the same sharp-edged sweep of his arm, not shifting shapes to give himself every advantage. Luz knows why her friends aren't resorting to more magic, but why is Belos extending the same courtesy?

Because he's afraid he'll run out before he gets the portal open.

Luz's gaze sweeps across the room, and she fixes on Hunter, limp in a pile of litter on the far side of the room. The blue glow is distinctly coming from him, and it's clear that it's cutting in and out, guttering like a candle flame that's burned to the bottom of its wick.

She throws herself across the room in the chaos as Belos tries to sweep Willow's legs out from under her and Amity hits him across the back with a board she's pried from the closed-up window. That's my girl, Luz thinks, and slides on her knees the last few feet to Hunter's side. "Hunter? Talk to me." She grabs his arm and drops it again immediately when her fingertips sink into his skin like it's nothing more than rotting wood. "Oh, no, no, no. Hunter, he's killing you!"

"It's not him." When Hunter's eyes peel open, they've lost their vibrant pink color. Instead, they've gone a dull reddish-brown, the color of old leaves. When the light shifts, she can see the faint edges of what look like scales overlaying the skin his face. "It's the human realm, Luz. I'm a magical thing in a place without magic. I was never supposed to survive here."

"Don't be stupid. You are not a thing." Her eyes prick with angry tears. How many times do they have to break Belos's grasp on him? He should be able to live. They should all be allowed to just live. "You just have to hang on long enough for us to get you back there."

His eyebrows twitch upward a fraction of an inch. "Did you figure out the glyphs?"

Her fingers go involuntarily to the folded-up piece of paper in her pocket. "I—I think so?" Maybe it's cruel to give him false hope, but right now she'll hold out any kind of hope she can offer. Anything to keep him hanging on a little bit longer.

Those wrong-colored eyes glimmer. "Let me see. I'm not as good at glyphs as you are. But I can double-check it?"

She knows he's right; he's as book-smart as Vee, in his own weird ways, and if there's an error in her set-up, he has the best chance of spotting it. So why does she want to say no so badly? It's just selfishness, she supposes, wanting to have at least this small part of the day saved by her and her alone. Her glyph, without anyone else's red-pen corrections; her glyph sending them all safely back to the Boiling Isles at last. Her chance to save the day and undo a tiny part of the harm she's caused. Vee did the math. Amity found the beastmaster's bell. Couldn't she just have this one small thing all to herself?

No. She can't, and she doesn't need to. This isn't just about her, it never was, and that's a lesson she doesn't want to learn again. " … Okay."

She slips the paper into his hand, and his eyes move to study it. "Wow, Luz," he says, after a moment. "This is brilliant. This is … I think this is perfect, actually. One thing, though."

"Yeah?" She fumbles in her pocket for a pen, to make whatever last amendment is needed to do the job that has to be done. "What is it?"

"Tell your mom thanks for me." His arm wrenches, a terrible exertion of energy. His fist, still clutching the glyph, slams into his chest, which gives way with a sickly splintering sound.

"Hunter—!" But it's too late. Magic explodes upward between them, throwing them apart. When Luz recovers, she can't see Hunter at all, only the portal, shimmering blue and spinning slowly on an invisible axis.

She's not the only one who notices. Belos's head turns sharply, and he takes off at a sprint, mindless of Amity clinging to his back like a tiny luchadora trying her best to choke him out. At the last minute, he shakes her loose, and she goes rolling across the floor; there's a faint jingle as he throws himself throw the portal and vanishes.

"What happened?" Amity asks, as Luz hauls her to her feet.

"The portal!" Luz pushes her toward the glowing oval. "You've got to go, Amity. What if it's not stable?"

"Hunter?" Willow runs across the room to the crumpled shape in the corner. When she goes to roll him over, she gasps, and claps her hand over her mouth. "Oh, no …"

Gus clutches at Luz's elbow. "What—what happens if we try to put Hunter through the portal now that he's powering it? Will it close? Will it change the portal somehow? Will it create a singularity in space and time that grows until it devours both realms?" His breathing has accelerated far past the point of panic. "Will it hurt him?"

"Gus, I don't know, but I do know you have to go—all of you." Luz gestures desperately at her friends. "I have no idea how much time we have. We'll try putting him through after you've all gone. We'll try—"

Amity chokes on a sob and then there's no one else in the room, as far as Luz as concerned, but the two of them. "I thought we'd have more time," she gasps. "I thought we'd get to say a real goodbye…"

"So let's not call it goodbye!" Luz grabs her face in both hands and rests their foreheads together. "How about see you soon, batata? If the portal closes, find a way to come back to me."

"I promise," Amity vows, and Luz kisses her hard, so hard that she stoppers up any more promises that Amity might not be able to keep. When she breaks away, she has tears in her eyes; she grabs Gus's wrist and tows him toward the portal. "Come on. You too, Willow."

Willow stands up uncertainly, her own tears streaking her cheeks. "I can't just—"

"You have to just!" Luz cries. "I love all of you, but you can't stay."

"I know," says Amity, and puts her free hand around Willow's shoulders. "See you soon, batata," she says, over her shoulder, and pulls them both through the portal with her.

Luz runs over to Hunter, who's not moving. If the portal is still here, then he must be still … here … too. Not totally depleted. Right? He must be. There's still light coming out of that horrible hole in the center of him, but it's barely there.

She can see why Willow hesitated, now. In the fall, he landed badly; worse than badly. His right arm ends just above the elbow, a clean snap with a few woody splinters clinging to one side. No more Emperor's Coven, but not the way anyone would have wanted him to finally lose that horrible sigil. "Why did you do that? Stupid, self-sacrificing …"

She tries to get her hands under his armpits, but she's so afraid that anything she does now will only hurt him more. It's not fair, but the math never is, is it? He wants to stay here and the laws of magic won't let him; she wants to go but she would never break a promise like that to her mother. The tears spill over now, still hot and angry—angry at Belos, angry at her mother and at Hunter, angry at the whole stupid terrible world where this could happen.

And angry, most of all, at herself for letting it.

"Scoot over, mija," says Camila gently, her hand on Luz's shoulder. She squeezes once, then lets go. "Let me."

Luz moves back and her mom takes her place beside Hunter. When Luz glances across the room, Jacob Hopkins has been hog-tied with a bunch of bent sofa springs. "Did I get the shot?" he asks breathlessly. As if in answer, his phone falls off the windowsill, the screen shattering noisily.

"Oh, baby," Camila says sadly, and brushes Hunter's hair away from his face. Luz has to look away, but her mother doesn't flinch at what she sees. "What did you do to yourself?" She lays his bad arm carefully across his chest, then slides her arms under his shoulders and knees. She struggles to stand until Luz helps pull her the rest of the way. "Okay, mija. Are you ready to go?"

"… Go?" Luz's heart rolls over in her chest. "What do you mean go? You made me promise to stay."

"It's okay, sweetheart, you go on," Camila calls, and Luz realizes she's not talking to her. Vee glides across the room, and for some reason she's holding Luz's backpack. She gives Luz what might be intended as a reassuring smile if it weren't stretched across her obvious nervousness. For a moment she hesitates, staring into whatever she sees, or whatever she imagines, on the other side of the portal. Then she disappears into the blue shimmer.

"There are people waiting for you, Luz, wanting to know what happened to you, where you went. I know that feeling, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, and certainly not someone who loved and cared for you." Luz's mom nods toward the waiting portal. "I did make you promise to stay, mija. So do it. Stay with me." She shrugs and shifts Hunter's weight, so that his head lolls on her shoulder. "Places are just places, baby. People are where we belong."

Luz is so full of feelings that none of them feel quite real. She's excited, and terrified, and underneath it all is a pulsing, aching love for a mother who sometimes seems too good to be true. When she speaks, she does it around a lump in her throat, and the words come out mashed and mangled. "Okay, Mom. I'm ready."

She walks through the portal, looking back to make sure that her mother follows close behind her. Camila backs carefully through, so that Hunter crosses over last of all. As soon as the three of the emerge into the bright, orange-streaked light of the demon realm, the portal swirls away into nothingness, as if it was never there at all, as if it's just waiting, hidden, until someone who remembers its name calls for it again someday.

###

Chapter Text

The woods around Eda's house are just like Luz remembers, and completely different. No rustling of drop-demons waiting for hapless prey to walk under the branch where they're lurking; no birdsong or bugs. There's not even a lingering breeze to stir the leaves on the trees; everything feels silent, uninhabited. Just a vast, lifeless, emptiness.

"This way, Mom," she says, tugging on her mother's sleeve. The Owl House isn't far, and even a looted, deserted home is better than staying out here in this eerie nothingness. "We can walk somewhere that should be safe." Not that anywhere in the Boiling Isles is particularly safe right now.

"Just a second, mija." Mom lowers herself carefully to her knees, taking Hunter to the ground with her. "Ooh, my back! I can't carry him all that way on my own."

Luz stands over her shoulder, not wanting to look, but too guilty to turn away. "Is he still … ?"

"It's just an arm!" her mother says; too firmly, because of course, it's not 'just' an arm. "You don't need two of those to survive. He'll be fine."

"Okay." Luz chooses to trust her mother's words; the alternative is unthinkable. And he does look … better? The faint scales have faded from his face and arms, and the crack just below his neck has closed, hiding the blue light from the galdorstone. The mark that's been left behind looks a lot more like an ordinary scar than a split piece of lumber. "Do you want me to—?"

But Willow's already there, bending down to loop one of Hunter's arms around her shoulders without speaking. Mom hangs onto his other arm, the one that isn't quite an arm anymore, and when she and Willow step forward together, the toes of Hunter's boots just barely drag over the ground.

Willow knows the way, but Luz still runs on ahead. To get things ready, she tells herself, but that isn't the only reason. She doesn't even bother to hope that there will be lights on in the Owl House—in the real Owl House—that there's someone waiting and hoping for their arrival. That would be too easy. And of course, it's vacant, the front door standing open with a Hooty-sized hole in it.

Her eyes prickle, but there's no time for that right now. She sets her backpack in the corner and cracks her knuckles, trying to decide what to clean first.

"Need some help?"

Amity's in the still-open doorway, looking tired and worried and—hopeful. Luz musters a smile for her. "Sure, sweet potato. You want to sweep up all this paper and junk? I'll take the couch cushions outside and smack them till they're dust-free."

"You look like you could use a little smacking-things-around." Amity approaches Luz instead of the broom propped in a cobwebbed corner, and takes both of her hands. "I know things aren't great right now. But I'm really, really glad you're here."

"I'm glad, too." She should just leave it at that—there's so much to do!—but the words squeeze out of Luz anyway. "Even though I don't deserve to be! Every time I get what I want, every time I try to help, or make things better, I just make things worse and someone else pays the price. Eda. King. Hunter. Everyone in the Boiling Isles!"

"Is that what you think?" Amity kisses the backs of Luz's knuckles, first one hand, then the other. "I don't understand how someone so smart can be so wrong all the time."

"Amity—"

"You make things better everywhere you go. You make people better. Me, and Hunter, and Willow, Eda too—all of us!" She shakes her head, purple hair sweeping back and forth so hard that it tickles Luz's nose. "So, yeah, maybe you can't fix the whole world with a flick of your fingers, but you shouldn't have to, not all on your own. And you literally can't! People like Belos have been working really hard to ruin things for a long, long time. One person isn't going to make everything right with one big, bold strike. It takes time. It takes everyone." A wry little smile twists her mouth. "We're a team, batata. Like it or not."

"I do like it." Luz leans forward just enough for a chaste little kiss on Amity's nose. "I like it very much."

"Good. Because I'm not going anywhere." They grin at each other until Amity leans back a little ways, suddenly pink in in the cheeks. "Oh, and also … there's one other thing I should mention. About Belos."

"What?" Luz clutches at her girlfriend's hands. "What did he do to you? I will kick his butt. However green-gluey his butt may be at the moment!"

"It's more what I did to him." Amity looks pleased, but embarrassed. "That Beastkeeper's Bell I found? In the Historical Society building? I, um, put it on him."

"You what?" A peal of surprised, delighted laughter breaks out of Luz. "Amity! That's amazing!"

"It won't last long," Amity clarifies quickly. "They're not really meant for people."

"I thought that might be why it was called a Beastkeeper's Bell instead of a Beloskeeper's Bell." Luz frowns thoughtfully. "A Beastkeeper's Bell-os? Hmm."

"Anyway—" Amity steers the conversation back onto course. "It should buy us maybe a few days of 'docility', if we're lucky." Goodness knows they could do with a bit of luck right now. "Heal up, rest up. Maybe do a little scouting and get the lay of the land. Enough to keep us a couple steps ahead of him, at least. And …" She blinks, looking over Luz's shoulder. "Um. Luz? Is your backpack moving?"

#

Gus doesn't much like being in the Owl House without Eda there, or at least Hooty. It feels less like someone's home than the bones of one; it remembers how to be house-shaped, windows and doors and rooms, but that's about it. Still, after a bit of tidying up, and once Luz finds some fleaswax candles in an un-ransacked drawer, it's a lot cozier than the rapidly darkening forest.

Luz and Amity have retired to a corner with Luz's palisman egg, which is starting to show signs of life. Nothing has emerged yet, but every now and then, the egg gives a violent shudder, as if whatever is inside would like very much to get out. Meanwhile, Vee and Dr. Noceda rifle through the stark kitchen cupboards for whatever unspoiled food remains (very little, but that's better than none).

Gus stations himself by the front door with a can of cold stench-onion soup and a spoon. If he stands on his toes, he can peer out through the space that's supposed to be occupied by Hooty. He's not sure whether they should be taking turns on the watch, with Belos on the loose and the Collector somewhere out there? He's glad to silently volunteer for the first shift, if so. It's the least he can do. He should be doing more, he just doesn't know what. He would ask, but everyone is exhausted and sad and scared and worried and confused, and why should they have to deal with the added burden of questions he should be able to answer on his own? Peering out down the front path will have to do, for now.

Of course, sometimes being on watch duty means you see more than you meant to. Gus has an acute awareness of Willow, who occupies the corner of the sofa, her feet pulled up under her and Hunter's head in her lap. And an even more intrusive sight: the shocking abruption of Hunter's arm, hidden though it is now where Dr. Noceda has rolled up the extra fabric of his torn sleeve. Will he still want to play flyer derby with us? Gus thinks, and the unbidden optimism of that thought shocks him so much it hurts.

Willow has been quiet all evening—quieter than usual—until Gus, glancing over his shoulder, accidentally catches her eye. "Did everyone know?" she asks him. Her face is a closed door, no emotions to be seen—none to be shared, at least. "Everyone but me?"

"No." Gus fidgets, stirring idle circles in the cold, gluey soup. "I think Luz knew. And I wasn't supposed to know. On the Day of Unity, I—I accidentally saw inside Belos's head." Maybe he should have said something before, even if it wasn't his something to say. Maybe if he had, they could have found a way to keep Hunter safe in the human realm; maybe someone else would have put two and two together as soon as Hunter started to feel sick. Maybe—and he hates the way this angry thought threads its way in among the guilt, but he can't see a way to unweave it from the rest—maybe Hunter should have just come out and told them all himself, because they're supposed to be his friends. "It wasn't my secret to tell you, or I would have."

"… I know." Willow stares off into the middle distance. "I told him I wouldn't mind if things only lasted a few months, or weeks. I didn't want it to only last minutes." Her gaze sharpens, focusing in on Gus. "Do you know enough about it to—to fix this?"

"I don't know if I know." Gus frowns at Hunter's waxen face. His chest rises and falls, but he still hasn't woken up. "I think I know where I could get a new galdorstone. Depending on how much things have changed, since we've been gone." The dead illusion masters won't be able to complain, seeing as how they are, in fact, dead. Isn't a living person more important than any dead one?

Willow's hand, in Hunter's hair, stops moving. "A different galdorstone. Would that … change him?"

"It might save him!" Gus says, louder than he'd meant to. Luz and Amity look up from the other side of the room, but he gives them a fake-reassuring grin that seems to be enough, in tandem with their exhaustion, to overcome their concern.

Willow's closed-off expression opens a little, letting out some of her own fear and worry. "This isn't your fault, Gus," she says. "This isn't anyone's fault—well, except one person, and he's not exactly the taking-responsibility-for-your-mistakes type. You can't do this to yourself. Okay? None of us can afford to waste energy beating ourselves up right now."

"I know." Gus tries to square his shoulders, which are not of a very good size for squarability. "We just have to be strong."

"No, that's not what I meant! I just—there's enough bad stuff happening. You don't need to do more of it to yourself, too." Willow extends her arm over the side of the couch: an offered hug. "And you don't have to be strong with me. It's okay to be totally squishy sometimes too, if you need to."

Gus accepts her invitation without another word, practically falling over the side of the sofa to squeeze his arms around her neck. "I just want to see my dad," he says through a sniffle, sounding a lot less than thirteen years old.

"You will," Willow vows, and when she says it like that, Gus has a hard time disbelieving her. She returns his embrace with her free arm and knocks their foreheads together. "You will. Besides …"

She trails off, head canted to one side. Gus gives her a moment, then nudges her. "Besides what?"

"No, I—do you hear buzzing?"

Gus remembers, belatedly, his self-assigned guard duty. He leaps across the room to the door—and ducks just in time to avoid the small brown-and-yellow missile that comes rocketing through the doorway. Look out! he thinks, but before the words can come out of his mouth, his brain puts together the pieces of what his eyes are seeing. This isn't an attack; it's Clover, humming frantic, joyful circles around Willow's head.

As Luz and Amity jump up to see what the commotion is, there's a scratching at the door, and a moment later, a streak of white launches through the hole, too: Ghost, leaping directly into Amity's outstretched arms.

Hope is a risk that Gus is willing to take. He flings open the door, scanning the dark night outside the Owl House, waiting to be devastated—but how can he not look?

And, impossibly, wonderfully, there she is: a little spot of blue against the deep dark shadows. She's not as fast or fleet of foot as Clover or Ghost, but when Gus runs out to meet her, Emmiline flows up his arm and curls around his neck like a scarf, like a part of him, as if they were always meant for one another.

For a moment, there is nothing else but holding her close—nothing but the time for them each to reassure each other that they're all right, that things have been hard, but that everything will be better now that they are together again.

Soft footfalls in the grass finally break this perfect bubble of happiness. Luz stands just behind him, her eyes on the sky. Her face is a question, one that Gus speaks out loud. "Emmiline. Where's Flapjack?"

Emmiline blinks her wide, round eyes at him, one at a time: a gentle rebuff. Flapjack's business is between him and his witch. A curl of her tail under her chin offers him some reassurance: nothing, she promises, is broken beyond repair.

"Not even the world?" he whispers, and her tongue flicks rebukingly into his ear, pulling a reluctant smile out of him.

#

Luz knows she should sleep, but … what if she misses it?

The egg has continued to show signs of imminent hatching all night, while stubbornly failing to actually hatch. Every time Luz's chin droops to her chest, only for her to yank herself awake again, it's still there, twitching, on the rug in front of her. "It's okay, mija," her mother had said, at one point, and kissed the top of her head as she draped a repurposed tablecloth around her shoulders. "Late bloomers are worth waiting for."

She really should take advantage of what should have been her first opportunity for a sound night's sleep in ages. The palismen, though they've mostly kept themselves safely hidden, have still managed to organize routine scouting trips to the other Owl House. The citizens of the Boiling Isles are being kept alive, they say. Not safe exactly, and not uninjured, but, yes, alive—and it sounds as if the Collector could use a safety review team for his ever-changing rules about how 'Owl House' ought to be played. The palismen have seen a few of the kids' loved ones: Emira, Gus's father, Lilith and Hooty. And King, of course, who is apparently never far from the Collector's side. Never allowed to be far, Luz suspects.

Everyone else seems to have settled to sleep—Willow and Hunter on the couch, Gus curled up on the rug beside them, Amity snoring softly on a torn curtain just beside Luz, Luz's mom sitting upright next to the door as if she expects to personally put a stop to any sort of imminent invasion. Everyone, that is, except Vee, who slips out of the kitchen now with a pair of steaming mugs in her hands. She hands one to Luz, who accepts it gratefully. "Hey," she whispers. "I thought you could use this. I don't know a lot about tea, but …" She takes the box of teabags out from under her arm. The front of the box displays a witch whose hair stands on end in every direction, his eyes wide and red-rimmed. "This seemed like the right stuff."

"Thanks, Vee." Luz take a testing sip. It's … well, it's hot, and that's about the only positive attribute she can ascribe to it. She wraps her hands around it, absorbing the warmth, and blinks blearily up at her sister. "I know this is kind of hypocritical to say, but: shouldn't you be sleeping?"

"I don't think I could sleep right now." Vee's rounded basilisk features morph into a copy of Luz's face, then cycle quickly through the others in the group as well as a few impressive celebrity imitations, before resolving back to basilisk. "I'm so full of magic again; it's nice, but it's a little hard to get used to after all that time without it."

In the tea's shining surface, Luz can see her own reflection. "I'm sorry you got dragged along back to the Boiling Isles. Especially now that Belos is back here, too. Now you don't get to go to school in Gravesfield, and you won't get to see your camp friends …"

"Hopefully Hexside will be accepting exchange students," says Vee, with clearly-forced good cheer. "Once we get this whole, um, toddler-tyrant situation under control. And I'll be able to keep in touch with my friends once we find a way to make the portal more permanent."

"I might know where we can get a little bit of Titan's blood," Luz admits. "If we ask nicely and have an appropriate Boo-Boo Buddy follow-up. And offer some kind of bribe. Like candy; or undying fealty." Because King is going to be okay. They're all going to be okay. Luz is ready to literally fight god to make sure of that (or fight a god, at least, she thinks, sending mental apologies to her belated, never-missed-a-single-mass abuela).

"Besides." Vee settles onto the floor next to Luz, looking across the room at Camila by the door. "My family needs me right now, and I'm glad I'm with them."

"I'm glad, too," Luz tells her, with feeling. Her family needs her, too: both of her families. She sets the tea aside and leans her head on Vee's soft, cool shoulder. "I am too …" This time, when she closes her eyes, they don't pop immediately back open.

#

Sometime after midnight in the Owl House, and not a sound to be heard except the soft rhythm of breathing, the occasional twitch of makeshift blankets, the gentle touch of the wind on the branches outside.

And then, so soft it might almost have been a dream itself: the stir of wings against the air. A dark shape lands for a moment in the hollow space in the door, then lifts its wings again and flutters into the room. It takes a wide circuit, checking over the various sleeping witches and humans: some known, some unfamiliar. Then finally it alights on the back of the couch, watching Hunter's sleeping face. It says, not unkindly, I know when you're just pretending to sleep.

Hunter's eyes crack open. Keeping them closed wasn't exactly a pretense; his eyelids still feel so heavy. He can't deny, however, that it was a convenience if the others continued to think he hadn't woken up yet. There's so much he doesn't want to explain—that he barely knows how to. There are untrusting looks he doesn't want to see, questions he doesn't want to answer.

And birds he doesn't want to talk to. He pitches his voice low enough to avoiding waking Willow. "Then you must also know that I'm just pretending to be the person you think I am."

I knew you didn't want to see me. But I didn't know why. Flapjack flutters down and begins combing through Hunter's hair with his beak. I never thought you were Caleb. Even though you look like him.

"But I remind you of him. That's why you picked me."

The combing pauses as Flapjack gives his hair a reproving tweak. I picked you because you wanted to choose your own path so badly. I wanted to change my path, too. No more feeling sad and sorry and alone. It was time to choose something new.

"Even if I'm only—"

I loved him. The combing resumes, gentle as ever. And I love you, too. Differently, but not less. Never less.

Something fragile inside Hunter breaks, at that—not a piece of him, but a place, a place that he had shut away the moment he saw Belos again. Something breaks, and from that place, everything he'd locked away there comes rushing out on a tide of tears. "I'm so tired and cold and scared," he hiccups. "I thought I was going to die. I still don't know if I'm going to—"

Shh, shh. It's okay. Flapjack keeps combing as Hunter keeps crying; he can't seem to stop. You don't need to be afraid, but you're always allowed to be.

"Hunter?"

When he cants his head backward, Willow blinks sleepily down at him. Her eyes are red around the edges, with sleep or sorrow or both. "S-sorry," he gasps, looking away. Trying to forestall what she might say now, whatever she might ask, or accuse. He told her before that she didn't really know him, not like she thought. He's not ready to see how that new knowledge crowds in between them, pushing her away, filtering the light in which she sees him. "I didn't mean to wake you ..."

"Oh, my Titan." Her arms—just as strong as he has, on a frankly embarrassing number of occasions, imagined—go around him and squeeze tight. The hair from her braids sticks to his cheeks where they're wet, and they're not getting any dryer as he curls into her, shaking silently now, afraid to wake anyone else. Less because he's afraid, now, of what they'll say, and more so that this moment doesn't end any sooner than it has to. "You're okay," she repeats, "you're going to be okay."

It's less that he stops crying than that sleep just drags him back down again, but by the time he sinks back under the weight of consciousness, something has shifted. The space where he'd been keeping everything stoppered up and shoved aside is empty now, and it fills slowly up again with things that don't need to be locked away, that ask to be taken and lovingly looked over, that need to be given away and shared in turn too. Before long, Hunter's heavy eyes are drifting shut again. Things are going to be different now, says the voice at his ear. The movement of a tiny beak continues, slow and almost hypnotic. I think you know that. But you're going to be all right. And I hope you know that, soon, too.

#

Luz wakes early, and alone.

Vee is snoring softly on one side of her, Amity drooling adorably on the other. But the egg—the egg—all that remains of it are a few curls of blue eggshell on the floor at her feet.

Luz lurches to her knees, looking under the broken fragments as if a palisman might be hiding somewhere beneath. There's a horrible crick in her neck from the position she fell asleep in, and a matching one in her heart. After all that, she thinks hysterically, all that waiting and hoping and worry—and the palisman she'd carved didn't even want to be around her?

A flicker of movement freezes her in place. When she looks across the room, the scene isn't quite the same as it was before she finally fell asleep. Someone has tucked a gossamer-fine silver-white blanket around Gus where he's curled up beside the couch, and another is thrown loosely around Hunter and Willow. The delicate pattern glimmers in the moonlight: fine crochet, an elegant pattern. Almost like a spider's web …She scans the room again and sees it—sees her.

The spider pauses where she's just started to cast the first threads of a new webbed blanket over Luz's mother's legs. She's easily as big as both of Luz's fists together; her carapace gleams like a polished cabochon, a hundred iridescent colors glittering just below the pale-sand surface. Her dark blue legs are impossibly long, and eight golden eyes blink, in a cascade from top to bottom, at Luz. She lifts both forelegs in an awkward wave, and chitters a question that falls just below the horizon of Luz's understanding.

"Hi," Luz whispers. She puts both hands over her mouth. "Hi. Wow. You're so beautiful."

The spider takes a tentative step forward and Luz holds out her arms. Almost faster than she can see, the spider shoots across the room, and before she knows it, spindly legs are wrapped around her neck. "It's really good to finally meet you," Luz says, against where she imagines an ear would be, if ears are something that spiders have. "I'm Luz."

I know who you are. The spider pulls back, her two front legs on Luz's cheeks now. When her mouthparts softly chitter, the quiet spaces in between sound like words to Luz. I've always known who you were. You can call me Opal.

"Opal," repeats Luz. "Come on. Let me show you around."

They slip outside, Luz taking care not to bump her mother with the door on her way out. Dawn is just breaking over the woods, casting everything in rosy shades of pink and yellow. The breeze is cold—the wind must be blowing down from the Knee—and the air tastes a bit like magic. A little easier to let hope leave its fingerprints on your heart, on a morning like this.

Luz turns toward the Head, where a huge, ominous shape hangs in the sky. A house, a literal Owl House, a stone monstrosity shaped into a giant bird that floats above the ground. She can't pick out details, nor movement in the windows, and not for want of trying; she's simply too far away. Part of her wants to set off alone right this second. Just for a better look, she tells herself. Not to fly right in through a window and sneak out again with Eda and King and—as long as she's dreaming big—everyone else in the Isles hanging on tight to the back of her staff.

She takes a deep breath and crouches down. With one fingertip, she sketches a little diagram in the dirt, and hesitates just a fraction of a second before she presses her hand against it. A daisy pushes its eager way up between her fingers, its little white head bobbing as if in greeting. Hello again, Luz thinks, I missed you, as if the dead Titan below her can hear. The magic is still there for her. The magic is still there.

Behind her, the door creaks quietly on its hinges. Luz's mother slips outside, tugging her cardigan tighter against the bite in the morning breeze. "Te levantaste temprano, mija. ¿No podías dormir? ¡Dios mio!" She startles at the sight of the spider perched on Luz's shoulder. "Oh. Oh! Is this your, um. Magic friend?"

"Her name is Opal." At the sound of her name, Opal extends one delicate leg, which Camila accepts in a gracious handshake (a distinctly different reaction, Luz knows, to the way she greeted the spiders she would find in the basement). "And yes! She's my palisman." My palisman! She chews on those words for a moment, enjoying how they feel in her mouth.

Her mother nods at the Owl House in the distance. "And that's where you think your friends are?"

"It has to be." There's a pang of metal in the back of Luz's throat. If they're not there, in mortal peril, then it's because that mortal peril is now in the past tense. She says, fighting for optimism: "They're going to be so excited to meet you. To meet both of you."

Camila stands quietly for a moment, leaning into the cool breeze that ruffles her hair. "You know," she says, "worlds are too big to get saved by one person."

Sometimes it's like Luz's mother can read her mind. Her thoughts about running off for the Head by herself before anyone else woke up was only a passing wish; she would never really have done it! Probably. Still, she braces herself for a lecture.

"Back home," her mother goes on, "there are those doomsday prepper people. You know the ones I'm talking about? Hiding in their basements with their piles of guns and bottled water and powdered food." She makes a face. "Pah! It's not the people who hole themselves up all alone who survive disasters. You know who does? Communities."

"Okay," says Luz uncertainly, still not certain about exactly when and where this lecture is going to bend back on her. Opal gives her a gentle pinch on the earlobe with her mouthparts.

"Communities that build gardens, that knock on each other's doors when they haven't seen each other for a day or two. Communities that share what they've got and borrow what they need. Communities that decide together what needs to be done, and then do it." Camila turns Luz to face her, gripping her by both arms (and mindful of Opal still perched on one shoulder. "I'm so proud of the community you've built."

This isn't a lecture at all and Luz doesn't have the framework for how to start processing that. "Mom …?"

"I mean, sure, do I wish you had done it in a little less demon-y place? Maybe." She tweaks Luz's nose. "But look at you. The way you all care about each other and look after one another; webs are stronger, the more strands they've got." Camila laughs a little and tilts her head at the spider. "Opalita here can tell you all about that, I'm sure. I know you want to carry the whole world on these skinny little shoulders of yours. But I'm so glad you're learning that you don't have to. And it's so good to see that you know when you hold out your hand, you will always have someone there to help you share the load." She squeezes tighter one more time, before letting go. "Including me. Especially me. Always, always me."

Looking up at her mother, Luz flashes back, with a pang, to how it felt to look up at her on the porch of her own house. The world has flipped upside-down, now, and they're at the axis, standing together in front of the Owl House instead, and Luz's feelings are all turned inside-out too. We're a team, Amity says in her memory, like it or not. "Thanks, Mom. I love you so much."

"I love you too. Now come inside and we'll get some breakfast started. It's no good hatching big plans on an empty stomach." Her hands go to her hips, and Luz gets the feeling that someone is getting a lecture today, even if it's not her. "That boy better wake up soon. He needs some food in him, and I need to tell him that he's grounded for one thousand years."

Luz suspects that, for Hunter, a scolding from her mother might be more reward than punishment. Whichever it is, she hopes too that he's up to being on the receiving end of it today. "I'll be right behind you, Mom." Camila accepts this and ducks back into the house, and Luz turns once more toward the Head. The enormous bulk of the other Owl House casts long, misshapen shadows over the silent, waiting Isles. "I'm coming for you," she whispers. "King. Eda. Just hang on."

There's a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye, and Opal's weight leaves her shoulder. She reaches out instinctively, and suddenly she's holding her staff, Opal perched dramatically at its top. It feels solid in her hands; like she's always known how to hold it. It feels like her mother's smile looks, like how Amity's hair smells, like the sound of her friends laughing together. It feels like the strength of spider-silk. "We're going to do this," she promises; to Opal, to the Titan, to herself, to whoever's listening and to whoever, even if they can't right now, needs to hear it. "Together."

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