“Everyone likes Dagda. It’s annoying.” It really is.
“The BBQ smells amazing.” Pepper barely finishes the sentence before Vanessa is gone. Not walking. Not even running exactly. Just one second she’s beside me and the next she’s vaulted the bar and disappeared through the kitchen door like a woman possessed. Or like a dragon who smelled ribs.
A crash. A grunt from Dagda that shakes the walls. The sound of something ceramic hitting the floor followed by the most aggressive, unashamed slurping I’ve ever heard in my life.
“That’s a whole rack of ribs!” Dagda bellows from somewhere behind the wreckage.
“Was,” Vanessa calls back, her mouth clearly full. “Was a whole rack.”
Kieran looks at me with the expression of a man reevaluating every choice that led him to this moment.
I shrug. “She’s a dragon.”
“I gathered.” He keeps saying that. I think it’s becoming his coping mechanism.
The tavern is too small for all of us. It’s in the walls. Too much magic in one room. The wood groans. Dagda emerges from the kitchen with a platter that could feed a small village and sets it on the nearest table like a Fae charcuterie.
“Question.” Sabina sidles up to me. “That one. She creeps me out.”
She’s pointing to Badb. “She is,” I exhale. “That’s Badb.” I point to Macha who is throwing darts. “Macha.” Then to Morrigan. Sitting on the other side of the room, a slight smile on her face.
“And her?” Sabina elbows me.
“Morrigan.”
She hums. “Tell me about her.”
“You know how growing up, Artemis was secretly Grandma?” I lick my lips. “Morrigan, she raised me in a way I only hope to completely remember one day.”
“Before?” she leaves the word hanging.
“Before.” I look at her. “Before Mom, Dad.”
I focus on the life exploding around me and catch fragments I can’t hold onto fast enough. Vanessa’s voice from the corner—”depends on how fresh the kill is”—and Orion’s laugh cuttingacross it, startled and real, overlapping with Sabina’s hand going flat on the bar the way it does when she’s winning—”Taxonomy is a cage, not a framework”—while Finnian’s eyebrows climb toward his hairline and behind me, Pepper’s chaos magic makes the bottles rattle softly on the shelf and something loud and ancient drifts out of the kitchen that might be Dagda singing or might be a war cry. Hard to tell with him.
Everyone talking at once. No one waiting for turns. My cousins’ voices braided through my guys’ voices in a way that shouldn’t work and somehow does, and I can’t track all of it but I try anyway because I want to remember this. Whatever happens next, I want to remember what it sounded like when everyone I loved was in one room and no one was dying.
Vanessa passes behind me on her way to steal more food from the kitchen and leans down close enough that her breath hits my ear.
“The scholar is the most dangerous one in this room,” she says, the way you’d mention the weather. “You know that, right?”
And she’s gone before I can respond, which is probably for the best because I don’t have a response. I’ve known since the Dark Forest, since I watched him cut through a camp of twenty with a sword that shouldn’t exist and come out the other side with blood on his hands and hunger in his eyes.
That doesn’t mean I wanted to hear it said out loud. Some things are easier to carry when they don’t have words yet.
Kieran sits at the edge. Watching. The way he does.
Pepper is beside me at the bar, close enough that our elbows almost touch.
Almost.
I feel that quarter inch like a blade.
Three years ago there wouldn’t be air between us. Three years ago her elbow would be in mine.
I don’t close the gap.
“He watches you,” she says. Not specifying which one.
