“Oh yeah?” Mom asks, skeptically.
The smile that spreads my lips might be a little mean, just like Darcy’s gets when he's planning mischief. “Yeah, Mom. All I gotta do is wait. Someone’s going to suggest I run away and marry them, and the next thing you know we’ll all be in Vegas with Elvis officiating our elopement.”
Mom laughs. “Make sure you get us there with you. I’m not missing my baby’s wedding.”
I reach over and pat her hand. “I’ll make sure we’re all there for it.”
29
I catch up with my parents for about an hour before Darcy slides down the stairs on his butt. I smile as I watch him, because my parents installed the slide to the side of the stairs just for me when I was a toddler, and it’s how both me and my sister still come down most mornings. I wave to him from the kitchen table, and he flashes a sleep-lined grimace at me as he stalks over and sits across my lap, pressing his face into my neck.
I wrap my arms around him, rubbing his back as he grumbles in his deep, resonant voice. “Yer s’pose to cuddle me when I expend all my energy saving yer sister’s life.”
I kiss his messy hair and hum. “Sure thing, mate. I’ll do that next time.”
“We are not making a habit of Liz getting herself into trouble like that,” Dad protests.
Darcy grumbles again, then slowly peeks at them over his shoulder. He takes a deep breath, shakes his head, and buries his face in my neck again. “They’re fuckin’ human,” he grouses.
I nod, because it’s true. “So am I, remember?”
“Yeah, but at least you have access to magic. They’re so far removed from it that they can’t even see it when it happens right in front of them.”
“What is he talking about?” Mom asks curiously as she grabs the man a couple of fritters and a coffee instead of a cider.
“I’m a dragon shifter and a feu follet and MawMaw’s oracle—” Speaking of the old woman, she comes tottering in, cane in hand, and settles on the chair that’s been hers my entire life. “And you all can’t see it or remember it, so he’s complaining about that.”
MawMaw tuts. “I like that about you,” she tells my parents, who look confused, then their eyes glaze over for a second, and they smile at my grandmother.
“Hey Mama,” my mother greets her, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “Where ya been?”
“Oh, I was just visiting my sister,” she responds as Darcy harrumphs irritably.
Darcy sits up, accepting the coffee my mama offers him with a muttered thanks, and peers at MawMaw. “Did you see that” —he rumbles out a sound— “that attacked in the barn?” he demands sourly. “Elijah killed it.”
“Did I?”
“You shifted,” he explains, then returns his attention to MawMaw.
I guess I’m more murdery in my dragon form than in my human form.
MawMaw’s jaw tightens. “The cherubs are the ones who trapped the Avatar all those years ago, but they wouldn’t have come up with that plan on their own. We thought they might’ve had contact with The Hollow.”
Darcy sputters into this coffee, coughing like he just heard something startling. “Fer fuck’s sake,” he grumbles, setting his coffee down. I hand him a napkin and he wipes the mess up, talking as he does. “The Hollow was banished out of the universe, so how’d it get access to the barn?”
“Banishment isn’t going to stop a determined evil forever. It would have eventually figured out how to bypass the event horizon. It may have already done so, but how long it’s had free access is anyone's guess. I'd bet my eyeteeth that it was free when the cherubs locked the last Avatar of Neutrality away.”
My dad picks up the newspaper and starts reading as Mom hums, cleaning up and pulling out ingredients for supper. They’re completely ignoring a conversation about magic. “It’s weird how they can do that.”
Darcy tightens a fist into the hair at the back of my head. “Ignore it. They’re not going to remember this conversation anyway. The last time The Hollow was in this universe, it almost destroyed it,” he explains to me. “We banished it keep it out of our universe, but if it’s figured out how to get past the event horizon of the universe, we’re fucked.”
“What is it?” I ask. MawMaw said “evil,” but that doesn’t explain what it is.
“We don’t know,” MawMaw replies with a frustrated scowl. “We call it The Hollow because it consumes without finding satiation. It will eat anything and everything. It is small, but it can hold entire galaxies in itself if it has enough time to consume them. It’s hollow, and it’s evil. It is intelligent and delights in causing harm.”
Darcy growls in agreement. “Have you heard of Boötes Void?”
It’s an area of space about three hundred thirty million light years across that doesn’t have as many galaxies as it should, according to modern astronomy. It only has something around sixty galaxies when there should be several thousand.
