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Everyone looked at me.

“I left the original outside the Wards. The easel, too. I just threw on my backpack and walked toward the strange light.”

“We’ll get it,” Knox said.

I looked at him. Not someone would. Not Guy would. We would. Future tense. Plural.

Carrick cleared his throat through a burst of static. “I will arrange for someone outside Arrhythmia to secure it. No one here crosses the isolation boundary until Guy approves.”

“Please tell me we’re not walking back to your house,” Hank said, with a side glance at Guy.

“I can portal us,” Bernie said.

Hank put one hand over his heart. “I have never loved you more.”

“Careful,” Guy said.

“Ha! As if! Your Mate is terrifying. I meant it platonically.”

Bernie opened a lavender-and-silver doorway before Guy could answer, and every last one of us abandoned the murder cabin with enthusiasm.

Guy’s house met us with the kind of normal things that felt almost indecent after the murder cabin.

Water. Coffee. A first-aid kit large enough to suggest Guy knew exactly who his friends were. Clean clothes. Showers. Sunlight through the kitchen windows. Food that might have been breakfast if any of us had known what time it was.

Knox sat at Guy’s kitchen table wearing a borrowed shirt while Hank and Bernie argued about eggs. Eggs. How weird was that? We had all almost died, and now we were discussing the proper way to make breakfast.

The Hellhound insisted scrambled eggs required cheese. The Necromancer threatened him with a spatula, and Knox watched all of it like ordinary life had become a language he was trying to remember.

This was victory. Plain and simple victory. We needed a parade, but I was too tired to make it happen. Maybe after I’d slept for a week.

I watched him notice it. He did not make a speech. He looked at the coffee steaming beside his hand, at Guy moving around the kitchen, at Bernie wrapping Hank’s arm while insulting his pain tolerance, and Knox absorbed the quiet domestic chaos like sunlight.

When the dishes had been shoved aside, and Hank had been bullied into letting Bernie finish bandaging his arm, Guy sat across from Knox. His gaze dropped once to the dead scar, then returned to Knox’s face.

“You staying?”

Knox knew Guy wasn't asking whether he planned to stay in the chair. “Aye.”

Guy nodded.

Knox looked down at the table. “I missed you.”

Guy looked away because, apparently, MacAllen men and feelings were natural enemies. “Yeah. Me too.”

Then Guy stood. Knox stood with him. They moved to the side, away from the table, in unison, and Guy wrapped both arms around his brother. The hug was rough, brief, and absolutely not discussed afterward.

“He is ready,” Neysa said quietly.

“Ready for what?”

“To live.”

I didn’t know what to say to NeyNey. So, I said nothing. After all, she and I shared a brain. She knew what I was thinking… Most times before I did.

Several merciful hours later, I woke on Guy’s couch wearing borrowed sweatpants, a T-shirt that said: Necromancy: It's a Dying Art, and one huge sock. I had no clue, and didn’t care, where I had lost the other.

My hair was a crime scene. Most of it was atop my head in one of Bernie’s banana clips. The rest refused to be tamed, and I couldn’t blame it.