Blackberry spends the half hour drive fiddling with the radio, examining the clutch pedal, prowling through the glove box, whatever piques her curiosity.

I follow her every movement, equally eager to explore new things, but also cautious of my babe’s privacy. Tess knows better than to leave anything totally personal in the car, other than necessary registration and insurance stuff. Boring.

But then there’s the hairbrush in the door pocket, receipts for gas, dirty tissues, fast food wrappers, mostly empty coffee cups.

Ooooh, stale coffee with mold growing in the bottom. I slurp those up in a hurry, before the two forest girls can steal them.

“Did anyone ever tell Tess that she’s as big a slob as Blackberry?” Salal snorts with disgust. She picks up some of the debris in the backseat between her fingernails and stuffs it in a makeshift litter bag that once held a hamburger and fries.

“I am not a slob. I need to sprawl. I need space to thrive,” Blackberry retorts.

“Here’s a notebook and paper. Start making a list of things you need,” Allie jumps in, digging said notebook and paper out of her neat little purse. The purse isn’t big enough to hold her gun, so she has it holstered on her left hip, hidden beneath her baggy sweatshirt. She’s so organized she’s no fun at all. I didn’t think to remind her to bring THE gun. If Tess were here we wouldn’t need it. Evah.

If I had to live with Allie I’d die of boredom inside a week, nothing to clean up after her, nothing to color coordinate. Sheesh, how come she and Tess are such BFFs? They are complete opposites.

But I digress. The issue at hand is how the two girls react to life outside a cave in the forest.

“Um . . . “ Blackberry hides her hands in her armpits.

Salal looks out the window and points to a big Halloween display in front of a donut shop. There’s inflatable ghosts and pumpkins, a scarecrow with crows on its outstretched arms, an ugly witch flying off the roof on a broomstick, the whole shebang.

“What is that?” she asks, seemingly quite innocent.

“Tomorrow night is Halloween,” Allie says. She sounds puzzled. By the lack of awareness of the funnest holiday on the calendar, or by the avoidance of making a list.

“What’s Halloween?” Blackberry asks. She relaxes her hands and returns to fiddling with the window handle—Tess’ car is a bit old and stripped down. She has rolling handles for the windows rather than electronic buttons. She also has manual locks.

She says it’s for safety, in case she gets into a mess and doesn’t have her keys or the engine dies and she can’t get out of the car. Or into it. Or something. I’m not exactly sure.

“Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows Eve. Sort of a day of the dead celebration, but it’s now about parties and candy and spooky things that go bump in the night,” Allie explains.

“Oh.” Blackberry shrugs.

“Sounds like fun,” Salal says. “I think that’s the day the boys get to explore other dimensions ’cause the portals get real weird and easier to find.”

“It can be fun,” Allie hedges. She bites her lip, clearly thinking multiple trains of thought. “It’s also a night when some people think they have a license to play mean tricks on others and tear up property.”

“You ... you mean ... rip out grass and break shrubs and strip a ring of tree bark so the tree will die?” Blackberry asks. She sounds truly appalled and frightened.

“Been known to happen, yeah,” Allie replies. “Worse than that, children, and even adults can get hurt by poisons and sharp objects hidden in treats. Or by fires that start small but get out of hand.”

“But they actually kill green things!” Salal is as upset as Blackberry.

“You sound like you’ve had to clean up after a few pranks,” Allie says.

“Yes,” the girls say in unison. They don’t sound happy at all.

“Father is going to need help the morning after,” Blackberry says.

“He’s going to be very upset if we aren’t there to do the heavy work for him,” Salal continues. “The boys are always useless after a night prowling other lands. They get to do all the neat things while we get stuck with the work.”

“It doesn’t matter if your father is upset, girls. Tess and I will protect you from him. You don’t ever have to go back to him.”

“But who will replant the grass and stomp out the fires and properly prune the broken shrubs?”

“Why can’t your father do it? Or your brothers?” Allie is starting to get mad. She doesn’t believe there is any difference between men’s work and women’s work. It’s all work, and should be done by the person most qualified. “The parks department has trained arborists and a lot of volunteers to help too.”

“Father says they’re useless. And he can’t do the work because he’s sick. Tess hurt him bad,” Blackberry protests.

“Did she truly hurt him or is he using the wound as an excuse to get out of his responsibilities?” Allie asks. “Lazy, manipulative bastard,” she adds sotto voce.

Both girls have to stop and think about that.

Allie pulls into the parking lot. I see her scan the clumps of teenage boys gathering around tricked out pickups and low-slung ancient sedans. She circles until she finds a spot beneath a streetlight with a direct path to the store that doesn’t intersect any of the potential gangs.

“Who are they?” Blackberry asks with extreme interest. She begins pumping out pheromones.

I’m not sure if she’s just being a young teen or if she’s reacting to her father’s training. Either way, I see trouble looming.

The tips of my wings start to turn pink. I smell a great deal of predatory anger on one group of boys. They want to hurt people. They think that’s the only way to prove to the world that they control everything within their circle.

I got news for those guys. Allie’s still a cop in her heart. She’s also nearly six feet tall, fit, and solidly built. She’ll take them down in a heartbeat without breaking a sweat.

A lady after my own heart. She’d make a great Warrior of the Celestial Blade.

Then I spot the tattoos on the inside wrists of the boys. The black ink of a skull within a pentagram glows through multiple dimensions. They have otherworldly protection.

If they are still hanging out when Allie and my girls exit, I’ll fetch Tess.

“Are you finished already?” I asked, holding out my hand for the papers.

“It’s been nearly three hours,” he said. His glasses slid down his nose, revealing his pale blue eyes. Tired lines made them look heavy.

And sexy as hell.

I think I gazed longingly into his soul a little too deeply. He sat next to me and drew me close.

My head automatically drifted to rest upon his shoulder.

My eyes were just about to close in guilty contentment when something on the papers caught my gaze.

“What in the hell ...?” I jerked upright. “You listed yourself as the girl’s father! I told you to put unknown.” I was on my feet shaking the papers at him.

Actually, I was shaking all over, my tummy doing somersaults. My deepest desire was to live my life with this man and bear his children. And now ... now ...

“Calm down, Tess. It makes sense. If you look at the dates it makes sense. Blackberry’s birthday is the day before Julia’s first suicide attempt. Salal would have been conceived the night before I left for Africa as a mercenary. It explains the blind trust fund set up by my mother to avoid scandal, to avoid hurting Julia’s mother who is her best friend.”

“But ... but how does it explain why no one knows about the girls, or how we met, or why you, the most honorable man I’ve ever met, seduced a teenager?”

Dammit, it did make sense. And it made the idea of seeing him more often plausible.

“So where have the girls been while I was in college and becoming a writer?”

“With MoonFeather. She’s had numerous foster children as well as her own two, and stray students in and out of her house for years. Why not your two?” He cocked his head and gave me one of his endearing smiles, the kind that made me want to throw my arms around him and hold him so close we merged our souls and our lives.

Okay, just about anything made me want to do that. But that smile drove a stake of enduring love and guilt and loneliness deep into my heart.

“You’d better give your aunt a heads-up in case there are official questions. I showed her as the midwife in attendance at both births.”

“Gollum, is this really going to work?” Butterflies erupted into flight in my gut. Thousands of them. All at once. I wanted to shake with chilled nerves. I didn’t dare.

“I think so. If we’re careful. I’m anxious to get to know our daughters. They should be back by now ...”

Trouble! Scrap screamed. He burst into view bright red and flapping his wings double time.

The doorbell rang.

“Who, Scrap?”

“Where are they?” I grabbed a pair of shoes from under the sofa, grateful they were sturdy walking shoes with good traction. I’ve had to fight in bad shoes before and gotten hurt.

Apparently, Gollum answered the door, keeping one eye on me, the other on my date.

“What’s going on, Tess?” Sean asked. He offered me an arm for balance as I hopped around trying to put on the shoes and get out the door at the same time.

“You wanted to know about my life, Sean? You just got dumped into the middle of it. Scrap, can we go through the chat room?” Without me knowing quite how, Gollum had herded me and Sean out the door and down the steps. He had the keys to his car out and the lock button working remotely as I hit the pavement running.

“Scrap, you’ve got to take me to Allie and the girls, now.” I had one foot inside Gollum’s new hybrid SUV.A red one, I noted. Sean’s BMW was parked right beside it.

My heart plummeted into my stomach. “We’ll never get there in one piece if you drive,” I sighed to Gollum.

“What do you mean? I’m a good driver. I’ve never had an accident.”

“Luck. Sheer luck.”

“We can take my car,” Sean offered.

The world tilted slightly right. Light shifted slightly left. A swirl of mind numbing brightness, endless unbroken light and ...

I stumbled out of the SUV into a different parking lot. Light and reality snapped back into normal alignment. I held my right hand out for Scrap. Brilliant vermilion spread from his wing tips to his core. He stretched into impossible lengths and thinness.

I clamped both hands around the center of the shaft he’d become and twirled. He used the centrifugal force to curve his ears into a quarter moon sickle. At the same time his legs and tail arched into a mirror twin blade.

While he did his thing, sharpening on the inside curve, extruding tines on the outside, I scouted the battle zone.

Allie planted her left foot in the throat of a dark-skinned youth nearly as tall as she. At the same time her right fist connected with the jaw of a shorter blond boy.

What did she need me for?

The six others who ringed her. As I watched they all shook switchblades, chains, and guns out of their sleeves.

She pulled her gun from its holster.