Cameron’s mother? He’d saved her life?

“I went on a camping trip with Casey’s Boy Scout troop when he was in second grade, kept a constant vigil on him, and stopped, I’m assuming, whatever happened to him.”

And I’d never found out what that was. When Glitch was in the second grade, his troop went on a camping trip during spring break. Something happened. I never found out what, but it had changed Glitch. He withdrew, became depressed, and hated—no, more like feared—Cameron from that day on. That would explain why they were now friends when in the other reality they could hardly stand each other. But I was still dying to know what happened on that trip.

“And most important,” Mac continued, “I stopped the men who took my wife.”

“She’s alive?” I asked, hope blossoming in my chest.

Mac lowered his gaze. “No, ma’am, she is not.”

“But—”

Grandma put a hand on my knee to shush me. “She died of cancer a few years ago, but you knew her.”

“That’s right,” Dad said. “If you’ll think back to your memories of this time, you knew her.”

I tried to remember. It would come to me, I was sure of it. My new past was revealing itself bits at a time.

“But she’s here with us in spirit,” Mac said, so sure of it, there was no sadness in his voice. “And I stopped Dyson.”

“Dyson?” I asked with a gasp.

“Pix,” he said, lowering his gaze again. “Before it got to that, enough things came to pass for me to know that everything you said was the God’s honest truth.” He chewed on his lower lip before admitting, “I did what I had to do.”

“You … you killed him?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am, between you, me, and the fence post, I did. Mr. Jake Dyson, aka Norman Sydow, died in a home invasion about fifteen years ago. I saw no reason to let someone like that live. He’d already been cooking up a plan. He had a book called a grimoire. He knew how to open the gates. Knew how to summon a demon and was researching exactly which one he wanted to summon.”

“Malak-Tuke,” I said.

“He hadn’t settled on any one at the time of his death, but yes, that name was on his list.”

“Then you stopped him from opening the gates in the first place.” I looked at my parents in turn. “You saved them.”

“No, Pix,” Mac said. “You did. Just like our ancestors prophesied, you stopped the war before it ever happened.”

“No,” I said, disagreeing completely, “not just me. All of us.” Every single one of my friends had been involved in saving the world. Brooke with her insistence that I practice, that I learn to go into pictures and hone my skills. Jared fighting the demons off before they could come after me, before they could stop the prophecy from coming to fruition. Cameron protecting me as long as he possibly could, long enough for the picture to end up in my hands. Kenya going back for said picture, that handful of photographs of no importance whatsoever. Then Glitch giving his life to retrieve just one, the one that would change the world.

We did the impossible. All of us together.

I shook out the T-shirt and pulled it over my V-neck before looking at my parents. “You don’t know how long I’ve dreamed of this. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate everything, but what the heck is this party about?”

“Didn’t you see that part?” Mac asked me.

“I don’t think so.” I scanned my brain. “Nope. No idea.”

“You told me the date.”

“The date?”

“The date of the war. You told me when it would happen and you said if we were still alive the next day, aka today, then we’d done it. We’d stopped the war. Then you insisted,” he added, seeming to hold back a chuckle, “with your torn clothes and dirty face, that we were to throw a huge party to celebrate. You didn’t have much faith when you appeared to me. You were so lost, so desperate. But you said if this day came, if we made it this far, we had to celebrate and that you wanted this very T-shirt.” He pointed to my new T-shirt.

I let out a throaty laugh of astonishment. “Do you think we really stopped it?” I asked them.

Dad took my shoulders into his large hands. “Lorelei Pixie Stick McAlister,” he said, shaking me a little.

I loved it when he called me that.

“You did it. We made it. We are here and we’re alive because of you.”

“And my friends,” I added.

“And your friends. It’s time to stop worrying.”

Mom nodded and squeezed me against her. “And no more bad dreams.”

“Bad dreams? Of the war?”

She nodded.

“So even though the war had supposedly been thwarted, I still had the dreams?”

“We think that, perhaps, you were reliving a different life somehow,” she said. “Your other life.”

Grandma sniffed into a handkerchief and added, “You’re very powerful, Lorelei. Your abilities far exceeded even our expectations. You’ve been seeing that life since you were a kid.”

“We didn’t understand it at first,” Dad said. “And nothing we did seemed to help, so we just waited.”

“For this day,” Granddad said.

Mac tugged on a lock of hair. “For this marvelous, glorious day.” He started to rise, then stopped and added, “And for the food. The food is always a plus.”