“I like Bear,” she declared.
“Bears exist on every continent on the planet except Antarctica!”Bonnie sang. “Even though the Greek root for said continent’s name,arktos, actually meansbear!”
I blinked over at Bonnie. The little intellect spirit was a repository of vast amounts of information—but she didn’t really understand much about the world. It would be a generation or two before she was of much practical use for anything but a trivia night as she slowly learned to apply her knowledge to the real world. “That was an excellent cross-reference, Bonea,” I said.
“Yay!” Bonea said, and the little wooden skull wiggled at the praise.
“Yeah, Bonnie’s getting better and better at helping me with studies,” Maggie said.
“Just you make sure she isn’t doing it for you,” I told my daughter. “You need to be able to think for yourself. It’s one of the most important things you can ever learn to do.”
“I know, Dad,” Maggie said with a little roll of her eyes. “Mouse wouldn’t let me cheat even if I wanted to.” She fell quiet and watched me for a couple of circles. “Dad? You okay?”
No, I wasn’t. But that wasn’t the kind of thing a responsible adult shared with his young child. “Just…have things on my mind,” I said. The light had gone orange, the shadows of the merlons getting longer. “I’ll be okay.”
“Like Thomas?” she asked carefully.
“That’s one thing,” I said. “You still having dinner with Matias’s family?”
“Yeah, we’re playing games,” Maggie said, pleased. She checked her analog watch. “And then you read to me?”
“And then I read to you,” I said, nodding.
“ ’Kay,” she said. She braked the bike, parked it, and then got the tarp Michael had made into a weather cover for it. I helped her get it over the bike, and then she jumped up. I caught her, she kissed my cheek, then hopped down, said, “I’ll see you in a little bit.” Then she took up Bonnie’s skull under one arm and ran down from the roof.
I watched her go.
It’s strange. Having the care of a child changes everything.
Just everything.
Maybe I should sell the castle. Take all the money left over from the raid of Hades’ vault—it was a little over a couple of million bucks in bootleg diamonds I had to sell a little at a time for under market value—and get a place in the middle of nowhere for us until she was more grown-up. Maybe that would be best for her.
Living in Chicago, among so many mortals, meant that ninety-nine percent of the time, any supernatural threat would have to tread very carefully about choosing where and when to come at me. On balance, I had always felt better about living in the city than out in the country, where there were far fewer eyes to see, and where supernatural threats would have a much easier time coming at me.
But maybe the Battle of Chicago had changed that.
I just wanted her to be safe.
But safe…is generally an illusion. We live in a world where entropy and a planet full of competing living things, from the microscopic to the very large, will have no compunctions about killing us if we’re foolish or unlucky. You aren’t safe. I’m not safe. If we do create some measure of safety, it is because we work hard to do it.
Here I was living in a fortress. With my own men-at-arms. With folks who were depending on me. It would take a fairly serious force to threaten me here—which meant anyone who came at me would bring one. And I should have been thinking about that a long time before now.
Maybe my brain was finally coming back online.
I sat down on the ground next to my girl’s bike and closed my eyes as the light faded and the night came.
It was time.
Time to start pulling things together.
Time to give myself a break.
I couldn’t protect Maggie or anyone else if I was busy trying to tear myself apart.
Karrin wouldn’t want that for me. She wouldn’t want my grief at her loss to result in harm to me, or anyone in my life.
Because she had cared about me.
