I guess we hadn’t kept our voices as quiet as we thought we had.

“Etri,” my grandfather said. He nodded his head once and said, “We’re having a … personal discussion.”

Etri, the head of the svartalf embassy, gave Ebenezar a look devoid of sympathy or understanding. “Have it elsewhere. You are frightening my people’s children. While you are in my house, McCoy, you will conduct yourself with courtesy and decorum.”

The statement was flat, uncompromising, and there was not even the subtle hint that it might entertain the possibility of some other outcome. I raised an eyebrow at the svartalf. I knew he was well respected in the supernatural community, which generally translated to considerable personal power, but only a fool squared off against Ebenezar McCoy.

(Yes. I’m aware of the implications of that statement; I’d been doing it for like ten minutes.)

The old man took a deliberate breath and then looked around. His eyes lingered on Maggie, and suddenly he seemed to deflate slightly. It was like watching him age a decade or two over the course of a few sentences.

And I suddenly really thought about the things I’d said in anger, and I felt ashamed.

“Of course,” the old man said. “I formally apologize that the discussion got out of hand and that I disturbed your people’s children. I offer no excuse and ask you to overlook my discourtesy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Same here. Me, too.”

Etri regarded Ebenezar for a moment and then glanced at me and rolled his eyes a little before nodding. “I believe this visit is over, Wizard McCoy. I will send your effects to the front gate.”

“No, wait,” I said. “Sir, I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you are right, Etri,” Ebenezar said, his voice brusque. He started to turn away.

“Sir,” I said.

“Time to go,” Ebenezar said, his voice weary. “Work to be done.”

And he walked out.

I hadn’t seen Austri enter the garden, but the security guard quietly stepped forward to tail the old man. I made a go-easy gesture at Austri. The svartalf kept his expression stiff for a second, but then something like compassion softened it, and he nodded in reply to me.

Etri watched him go. Then he gave me an unreadable look, shook his head, and walked away. The other svartalves went with him.

Once everyone was gone, Maggie hurried over to me and threw her arms around my waist. I peeled her off and picked her up and held her.

“Was it my fault?” she asked me, her voice quavering. “I wanted … wanted to talk to Grandpa, but I couldn’t make the words happen. I didn’t mean to make him mad and go away.”

My throat grew tight and I closed my eyes before any tears escaped. “Not your fault, punkin. That was so not your fault. You did fine.”

She clung to my neck, hard enough to be uncomfortable. “But why was he mad?”

“Sometimes grown-ups disagree with each other,” I said. “Sometimes they get angry and say things that hurt when they don’t mean to. But it will pass. You’ll see.”

“Oh,” she said.

Mouse came up to me and leaned against my legs in silent support.

“Will Grandpa come for Christmas?” she asked.

“Maybe he will.”

“Okay,” she said. “Are you mad at me?”

“No,” I said, and kissed the side of her head. “You’re my punkin.”

“Good,” she said. “I still want pancakes.”

“Let’s go make them,” I said.

Mouse’s tail thumped hopefully against my leg.

But first, we all stood there for a moment, the three of us, taking comfort in one another’s proximity.

5

Of course it went badly,” Karrin said. “It was a fight with someone in your family. Believe me, family fights are the worst.”

“The family hasn’t even been assembled yet and there’s fights,” I complained.

“Looks pretty assembled to me, from what I’ve seen,” she said, her tone dry.

“Yeah, well. I’ve never had much opportunity to fight with family,” I said.

“I have,” she said. “Everyone cares about everyone else, so when you get mad and say something horrible, it hurts that much more. And too many things go unsaid. That’s the worst, I think. Everyone thinks they know one another better than they probably do, so you fill in the silences with things the other person never actually said. Or thought. Or thought about saying.”

I scowled and said, “Is that your professional opinion, Doctor Murphy?”

She snorted, fell silent, and squeezed my hand with hers. Her grip was small and strong and warm. We held hands a lot these days.

I’d come over to cook her some dinner. My cooking skills are modest but serviceable, and we’d both had our fill of oven-roasted chicken and potatoes and a fresh salad. Karrin was having a hard time moving around in the kitchen, between her knee, her shoulder, and all the braces she had to wear to keep them more or less immobilized. And she’d gotten sick of the available delivery food after only a few weeks of being laid up. I came over a couple of nights a week and cooked for her, when the Carpenter kids were available to babysit Maggie.

“Speaking of doctors,” I said, all smooth, “what did the doctor say today?”

“Round one of surgery went okay,” she said. She exhaled and laid her head against my arm. We were sitting on the couch in her living room, with her injured leg propped up on an ottoman I’d gotten for her. She was a bitty thing, five and not much, if a very muscular five and not much. Blond hair, clean but bedraggled. Hard to keep it styled when you’ve got to do everything with one hand. No makeup.

And she looked tired. Karrin Murphy found the lack of work during her recovery exhausting.

She’d collected the injuries on my behalf. They weren’t my fault, or that’s what I kept telling myself, but at the end of the day she’d put herself in a place to get hurt because I’d asked her to be there. You could argue free will and causality and personal choice all you wanted, but the fact was that if I hadn’t gotten her involved, she’d probably have been in one of her martial arts classes at this time of evening.

“Round two can start next week,” she continued, speaking in her professional voice, the detached one that didn’t have any emotion in it, used mostly when something really, really upset her. “Then it’s just three more months of casts and stupid braces and then I can start six months of therapy while they wean me off the painkillers, and after all of that is done, if it goes very, very well, he thinks I might be able to walk without a cane. As long as I don’t have to do it very fast.”

I frowned. “What about your training?”

“There was damage,” she said, her voice becoming not so much quiet as … dead. “In the knee, shoulder, elbow. They’re hoping to get me back to fifty percent. Of basic function. Not athletic activity.”

I remembered her scream when Nicodemus had kicked in her knee. The ugly, wet crunching sound when he’d calmly forced her arm out of its socket, tearing apart her rotator and hyperextending her elbow at the same time. He’d done it deliberately, inflicted as much damage, as much pain, as he could.