Page 79 of Monster Queen Rising

Down in the grass my daughter sits down hard, gets up without using her hands, keeps going.

"The mark on her palm stayed dark this time," I say.

Madison doesn't ask what that means. She never has. She carried her six weeks with a clock ticking that somebody else set, and went down to a basement every morning with a phone in her hand and made the woman who built it account for every hour, and she's known what her daughter was going to be since before the rest of us did.

"Good," she says.

"Good?"

"She's going to need it." Madison flicks the towel at a fly. "There's a whole world out there of people who'd have liked her in a room with a number on the door. She should be hard to keep."

Gabi reaches the tree line.

A year ago the trees were where the bad guys came from.

I let her go.

***

Harek comes out with coffee and hands me a cup and stands there watching her chew bark.

"It's the equinox."

"Is it?"

"Today. This afternoon, technically. Same length of day and night." He drinks. "Then it tips."

"That mean something to you?"

"It means the beans go in next week."

That's the whole ceremony. The fae drinks his coffee and thinks about beans.

I do the math anyway, because I can't not.

A year ago today we were running.

That's it. That's all of it. I've tried. I know we were in a truck. I know it was cold. I know somebody's blood was on me and I couldn't tell you whose.

***

Fen comes out at noon, and Gabi abandons the trees and charges for him at full speed, falling over twice before she gets there.

He catches her without looking, settles her on his knee, and she immediately starts trying to get back down.

The bunkhouse is loud across the yard. Somebody's got music on. Janet's out there with three of them and a folding table, and whatever she's teaching, two of them are laughing and one of them is crying, and Janet isn't stopping for either.

"Fen."

"Mm."

"Do you remember where you were a year ago?"

He doesn't answer right away.

Gabi gets a fistful of his shirt and hauls herself higher.

"No," he says.