We come together the next morning, a Saturday, and my mom smiles as we go out the door together. I think I hear her mouth something like 'take care of your brother' through the window. I almost smile back, but upon remembering an eerily similar sentiment from Evan, I give her a thumbs up and keep walking, maybe a little faster than beforehand.

I turn towards the church alley, Adam trailing behind. He has this dull, almost dead gaze, which I try to counteract with a smile, but given circumstances, I doubt either of us should be excited to come here. "I've used another portal around here," Adam says.

I laugh.

He raises an eyebrow.

"Sorry," I say. "I still can't get over this. Knowing you were engrossed in this the whole time..."

"Hasn't sunk in here either," Adam responds. "Give it time." My face falls, and he walks past me into the Veins, into our lair this time, though it's been refurbished overnight. The pillows are on the benches instead of sprawled all over the floor, fabric drapes over the banisters, and a door on the opposite side, sealed by a lock with cryptic writing engraved across it, which Serena and Harper came from last night.

"Nice," I say, although I could do without any of the additional decoration. That said, the worst adjustment has to be Anthem, who unlike Shiloh, doesn't even put up a facade of amiability. Her beady eyes follow me across the room, her mouth stretched into a scowl. Her words from last night bother me as much now as they did then. Oh, Adam... His shoulders roll up upon seeing her, protecting his neck. It's not as if Anthem is going to throw herself at him, but you don't need to touch someone to destroy them.

The seven of us are a formidable force, standing side by side, though it's far from an organized line. Serena and Harper cluster off to one side, and Amanda is staring at Adam like she can burn his head down using the force of her own glare. "Let's go." I offer, and Shiloh pulls up a portal. "One last time."

My team files through, and the others fall in, their presence disconcerting for reasons I can't give words to. We're being stalked by ghosts, and all my alarm bells are ringing- we've been caught. They're not wrong, of course. Someone did find us, at last, but it wasn't adults or the authorities. It was just more scared kids.

The Saturday morning is cold, and the sun overhead is bleak, scattered by the budding foliage on the trees and the coarse branches. It offers us enough shelter to trek up the hill, into rows of dormant houses, but my pulse quickens at every light I see in the windows. "We need to move fast."

Amanda nods. We enter the yard, and Adam balks. "It's a house in the suburbs."

"Genius observation. Can we go now?" Garrett mutters under his breath. Unspoken agreement echoes through the team. To prove his point, Garrett flicks open the door, as I blink to get a quick radar on the Diosite location. He looks back to me.

I give him a thumbs up. "Where we left him."

The house has not moved since we left it. Dust and chunks of cactus lie across the floor, unstirred, and the windows are still broken, the air fragrant with flowers and and mown grass. There's a creak of floorboards, not subtle enough not to catch our attention, and the whole group jumps. Harper's cloak rises and a massive, near-tangible shadow beast, bowls through the hallway, snapping something in the kitchen in two. Serena summons a flamethrower, and Garrett reaches for his halberd. The shadow returns, cactus falling through its mouth as it lapses in and out of tangibility.

"That should handle that," Harper says, petting it like a big dog.

Serena loosens the grip on the flamethrower. Karen extends a hand to us, like can you believe these guys, and I nod.

"Downstairs?" Adam asks. Light seems to emanate from him. He's beautiful. He's terrifying. I want to die inside my own costume.

We really were a big joke this whole time, I think. "Yep. Downstairs."

"Can you imagine what Onyx's fire powers would do here?" asks Serena.

"Don't mention Onyx." Adam growls.

"Who's Onyx?" I ask.

"Take a wild guess," Adam shrugs, entering the basement. His sword lights the way, inches from scraping the ceiling, and he descends with it into the murk of the lower floor.

Ignatius is waiting, eyes wild with desperation, and a horde of plant creatures thunder down from upstairs on one side and surge from the basement on another. There are smaller versions of the monster Amanda gutted the other day, a new host of succulents, and a few new, half-formed beings he must have been working on when we stole his other shard from him, leaving them a mess of plant tissue and distorted features, stunningly incompetent. Adam goes at it with his sword, hacking a way through the group, and they burn at his touch until there's nothing left.

"More of you?" Ignatius asks.

Adam nods. "Absolutely."

The hordes grab Serena's flamethrower, and she retaliates with a pole, meanwhile, Karen, Amanda, and Garrett are fighting back-to-back. Even Harper seems to being having trouble with the sheer density of the plant beings. I spar with the hydra, who this time is wary enough of my shield for me to keep it back, but it lunges for my other limbs on occasion, and it has too many heads for me to handle.

"Luna!" Amanda yells, out of view from the botanical mass between us. "You okay?"

"Yeah!" I say, as the beast manages to tilt one head enough to grab the circular shield with the sticky part of the bloom. "Maybe less okay." The flower erupts in frost, and Adam's sword burns off a head. He strikes me with a defiant look, cutting the stalk down, and I grab my shield.

Amanda cuts an opening through the wall of succulent guards to the two of us, brush spinning in circles worthy of a professional performance. She switches from acid to fire in a heartbeat, then to the purple impact paint. With one hit to a hydra head, she asks, "Ignatius?"

I point behind our current adversary, to where Ignatius is directing them all with a few twitches of his fingers, and as Adam cuts through the heart of the hydra, I run to Ignatius. He has the Diosite bared on his coat, and I grab it as a vine grabs me, my fingers sliding down the stone as I fall to the floor.

"But you can't-" I start. Ignatius's back is alive with vines.

"I can't what?" he says, binding me around the neck. Old nightmares choke me as a knife, a weapon clean, hard metal, raises to my throat. The plants stop. Serena struggles against the grip of a succulent, wincing with pain, and the others turn. "One move and he dies," Ignatius warns.

Amanda's brush twitches.

"Please let this be over." Ignatius whispers. "I need to get out. I-" His voice is cut off as a burning sword enters the back of his body. He never saw Adam coming, and the knife leaves his hand as he falls forwards into a gathering pool of his own blood. His expression dull, Adam draws the sword back.

I stare at my brother, mortified, as the vines fall from my neck.

"He was going to kill you." Adam says, voice shaking.

Amanda stoops down to pick up the shard, covered in blood, and behind us, a corpse, beginning to rot, falls from the ceiling. The plants begin to wither away around us, leaving a broken room, unlit. We look like children, playing a particularly engaging game of dress-up in a ruined house- if not for the dead man on the floor.

There is no poison in the house. We check three times, out of fear, and no one speaks.

---

I lie in the bed for what seems like forever afterwards, all the smiling I used to fake out my mother drained. My dad types in the office downstairs. The door is shut, with a pillow under it, but it's not I have anything I could say to my brother.

"Okay. I thought I might have misheard earlier, but seriously. Luna?" Adam asks, after hours of silence, with that cocky uptilt to his voice that makes me want to shrink under my bed.

"Yes?" I ask. That was the biggest upset of the morning for you.

"Seriously."

I slam my hands on my bed. "Why are you like this?"

Adam drops his phone. His eyes are dead and his canines look like cherub teeth. He doesn't even seem human when he answers, "Calm down, cowboy." It's like a machine simulating my snarky, insuffrable brother.

"I'm serious. A man died today, Adam," I say, low as I can keep my voice as the emotions try raise into a fever pitch. "because of us. Doesn't that scare you?"

Adam replies, his voice rising, "That was how she died, Will. She walked towards Evan, fresh out of the echo chamber- the possession machine, I mean- and he stabbed her through the heart. I was three steps away from being able to do something. I don't know what I would have done... sometimes I think I could have pushed her out of the way, but I'll never know. What's important is that I saved you, this time."

I pause. Solemnly, I ask, "You know how I asked about that 'love triangle thing' earlier? Way earlier?"

"You were right. We're totally in love. I was scared to tell you," he says, one hand gripping his sheets. "I always knew you'd be better than me at this, you know. In life, too. I figured I could keep making jokes about it, keep putting you down, and you'd never figure out how afraid I was. Of you. Growing up. Being in love. Everything." His shoulders slump. "Let me do this, alright? Let me kill the people for us and make the tough decisions. One of us has to come out of this unscathed, and it's too damn late for me."

"Adam?" I say.

"Yeah." he mutters.

"I don't think you're a bad leader. I don't think you're a bad person, either, and..." I stifle myself. He's glaring at me.

"I don't deserve that from you, Will," Adam says.

"But you're getting it."

"You heard Anthem last night. She doesn't bother me because she says bizarre shit. She bothers me because she's always been right. If she says I'd screw the group in every other conceivable outcome, well, that's a few more deaths on my mind."

"This is the future they couldn't account for. Maybe it's because we work things out this time."

"You're an optimist."

"I think I am," I say. Maybe because I have to be. Maybe because it will let me be better than a part of Shiloh, or a part of him. 

"Sorry." he whispers, falling against my side with a hand stretched around me. He's taller than me, enough so that the angle is awkward, but I can hold him up. "I'm so sorry."

I smile, hugging back. "It's okay."