Ru went straight upstairs as soon as they returned to Cutter’s parents’ house, and he couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t said a word the entire ride home, and he couldn’t imagine what it must be like to have so much of her past dumped in her lap all of a sudden when she’d been searching for even a whisper of a memory for most of her life. While he wished she hadn’t taken the picture of Larkin, it did open his eyes just a bit to the possibility that he had yet to completely convince Ru that her Keeper side was more important than her father’s family.Thoughts of where to go with that problem were interrupted by laughter coming from the kitchen, and Cutter realized his mother’s voice wasn’t the only one he heard. He quickly rushed into the back room, delighted to see his sister Cinder innocently tossing handfuls of flour at his mother. Windy was not one to go down without a fight, and Cinder’s hair was even whiter th

“Lindisfarne.” Lyric pointed at the map spread out on Cutter’s parents’ dining room table, an air of confidence about her that made Ru almost believe she was right.“Gesundheit,” Rider replied. He was sitting at the opposite end of the table from Lyric, so Ru supposed he couldn’t actually see the name written on the map, though he likely would’ve had a similar response even if he’d been the one to come up with the foreign word in the first place.“And how did we come to this conclusion, exactly?” Cutter asked. He was sitting next to Ru, his knee bumping into her leg underneath the table, which somehow seemed to calm her otherwise turbulent tummy.“Well,” Lyric began, sitting back in her chair and looking at each of them. “Once Cinder told us we were looking at things wrong, I was able to find the answer pretty quickly.”Cinder was in the room, but she was sitting off

Ru recognized her location immediately. She was standing in the same garden where she’d met Thanatos not too long ago, a hundred years ago. This time, the bench where he’d sat crying, mourning the loss of a family killed by a woman his Reapers had attempted to claim the day before she stole a car and drove the wrong way down the freeway, losing her own life in the process. Thanatos’s tears had overwhelmed and confused her. Cutter insisted he was a monster, but at the time, he’d seemed anything but.The petals cascaded from the trees as she walked along, making her way with bare feet down a row of flowered trees which rained an endless volume of red, pink, and white flowers down upon her. She glanced down to see she was wearing a long, flowing black dress and wondered who, exactly, was picking her wardrobe for these forays.It didn’t take her long to find him. He was a beacon, after all, much like the portal openings.

Ru sat at her Nana’s kitchen table sipping warm tea as the other woman worked on rolling out cookie dough. At her feet, Piper played with Nana’s cat, Patches, and Ru absently wondered how Piper even remembered what it was like to have another feline to play with since she hadn’t had any others around since she was a tiny kitten herself. Her neighbor had found the litter in the garage and it hadn’t taken much convincing for Ru to choose one. Piper stood out to her immediately. That was four years ago, back when Ru was a new teacher, and Piper had been her faithful companion ever since.“Cats are our best friends sometimes, aren’t they?” Nana asked, glancing up from her task long enough to catch Ru’s eyes. “My Patches has been a constant companion to me for… years.”“They are,” Ru agreed. She remembered Thanatos’s warning from the night before. The first “person” Ru thought o

Cutter’s house was empty when Ru arrived back, and she noticed his parents’ and Cinder’s vehicles were gone. Assuming they’d all gone out somewhere together, she’d tried the doorknob and been relieved they’d left it unlocked. She assumed they rarely went to the trouble to barricade the doors in these parts. Piper took to the stairs as soon as they met them, and Ru thought she might be retreating to the comfort of her own area for a while. Her own bed, dishes, and carrier might’ve been a consolation to her.Despite feeling a little odd walking through Windy and Walt’s home while they weren’t there, Ru headed for the kitchen in search of a drink of water. When she entered the cozy room, she saw Cutter sitting outside on the steps of the back porch. In the short time she’d lived with him at Angel Grove, she’d noticed he seemed to like to sit outside and think. While part of her thought it might be a good idea to l