Page 53 of Demon and the Raven

“But you left home without your⁠—”

“No,” he said quickly. “You got out of bed and cast your protection spell, even though I don’t think you were actually awake.”

“I did?”

“You did,” he rumbled. “I promise. Now go back to sleep, and I’ll see you soon.”

“Okay,” I mumbled. “I love you.”

“Me too,” he whispered, then hung up.

So very pleased, I rolled over with the phone in my hand and went back to sleep. Somehow, in the middle of everything, I had forgotten it was Saturday.

First there was a bump, then a yawn, then the smell of banana, which wasn’t that odd since I made a lot of banana bread…though none that week. Rolling over, I opened my eyes to slits and saw JJ, Amanda’s youngest, now five, smiling at me.

“Why’re you in my bed?”

“’Cause it’s almost eleven and we were supposed to go to the farmers’ market this morning and then come here and make tarts.”

“That was today?”

They giggled. “Yes, Uncle Xan.”

“I totally spaced that.”

They shrugged. JJ, born Julia, preferred their gender-neutral name and pronouns, and liked to wear boys’ clothes. But JJ also liked to carry a mini Birken that matched their mother’s regular-sized one. At the moment, JJ had on pink gingham socks, denim overalls, and a short-sleeved shirt with sharks.

“Nice shirt.”

“Boys’ shirts have predators on them, like sharks, did you know that?”

Predators. Did most five-year-olds use that word? “I did not.”

“Girls’ shirts have bunnies or kittens or ducks.”

“Okay.”

I was certain JJ and Toby both had such amazing vocabularies, even at such young ages, because Amanda and Eddie had talked to them since they were born like they spoke to all the adults in their lives. She had been twenty-six when Toby was born, and didn’t have her own mother to turn to, and didn’t trust her mother-in-law enough to ask for advice, seeing how all her other children, Eddie excepted, had turned out.

So Amanda went with her gut, as she did with all things. She communicated with her children like they were adults. She talked to them constantly, about everything. If she had been away from them during the day for some reason—she had her own business, so most of the time, when they were infants, then toddlers, she worked from home—when she returned, she explained in excruciating detail what she had done. Once they went to nursery school, when they got home, she read to them and played with them, and there were endless adventures they went on together. And when she did have to leave them to fly away on business, she took comfort in knowing that I would step up and take care of them during the day and would hand them off to Eddie after school.

Because I had known even less than Amanda about children when she first brought Toby home, I followed her lead. I had been talking to them just like her and Eddie since they were crawling around on the floors of my cottage. And now, here I was, having a groggy conversation with her youngest at close to eleven in the morning.

“Boys’ shirts have dinosaurs on them too,” JJ continued, “and Toby says a T-Rex makes sense but not triceratops or stegosaurus or ankylosaurus because none of those ate meat. They were not predators. They ate veggies.”

“Got it.”

They studied my face for a moment.

“You have a question?”

“I asked Mom why there’s no lock on your front door, but sometimes, no matter how hard I pull, I can’t get out.”

“When has that ever happened?”

“Like when you say it’s raining too hard and you don’t want me to go outside.”

“Uh-huh.”