She's worried about him and he doesn't realize it.

My mom talks about Adam the whole way over to Megan's house, her fingers rigidly clasped around the wheel, taking every turn ride and grinding the brake pedal until it cries out for mercy. She complains about his new friends, about how she never knows where he goes, and all about the way the other parents, what they must think, how worried they must be, if she's a good parent, that she doesn't know how to get through to him, and that dead look in his eyes no matter what he does.

"Do you think he's depressed?" she asks. "Do you think he's going through something?"

Every few days I go to the house of a mad man and fight magical plant monsters in his basement because otherwise he's going to kill everyone I've ever loved, I don't know how long I have, and I still sleep better than I ever have in my life because I have a magical being projecting psychic energies into my brain to fix the anxiety you and Dad never let me get diagnosed for. I have been gone. I have been out. I have been stressed. Have you not noticed? How loud would I have to speak to make you listen?

"I think he's just going through puberty," I say.

"He was here just the other night," she frets.

"I'll see you tonight, at nine," I tell her. "I promise, Adam and I are fine. If you think something might be up, maybe you should talk to him about it."

Her eyes are warm. "Of course I will. Thank you, Will, I know you don't want to listen to me worrying over nothing. You're so kind."

I smile. 'Kind' is second only to 'nice' in adjectives people affix to people they have nothing, positive or negative, to say about. I trudge through freshly fallen snow to Megan's door, bust inside to a dozen and a half girls at the smallest gathering we've had yet, and establish myself on a corner of the sofa with a cup of eggnog punch and the best cookies I've ever eaten. I'm getting a peculiar sense of deja vu, but that's superseded by concern.

"Rya," I ask, approaching her. I feel naked next to her ugly Christmas sweater. "You wouldn't have seen Amanda, would you?"

Rya shakes her head. "No, but I think we found your webcomic. Em says yours looks a little bit like Run Fallow, which has some of the mad-sciency bits, plus the magical girl integration. It's not exactly the same, but you know, it was apparently made by a pretty local artist. Not that long, either, but I'm sure if we keep looking we'll find it--"

"Oh!" I laugh. "That. I mean, actually, Amanda and I made that up. The two of us are working on this thing together, and we're gonna... I mean, actually, if we wanted to get the whole group into it, I'm sure we'd love to have some help."

I can see every one of Rya's teeth. I don't think I've ever seen anyone smile that wide, save for Amanda, and Rya's bouncing off the balls of her feet. "You are double going to read Run Fallow. I'll go get everyone. This is going to be so fun! We haven't had a group project since Scarborough, and that went flat in two weeks!"

Why does that make me so sure that this one's going to take even less time to sink like a rock?
As Rya runs across the room to grab people, I feel the noise seep into my bones, my rabbit heart quickening back up into anxiety pace, and it becomes increasingly hard to remember that these people are not going to eat me alive if my webcomic idea is some garbage. Shiloh is just a dull murmur in my mind. Something must be occupying him right now. Is he okay? Does he need help? Should I be here, talking to strangers...

I bump into the kitchen. Amanda is over near the punch, and she waves to me, smiling. "Rosenbloom! In the singular!"
"Did you expect more than one?" I ask.

"I would hope not. We'd never see Megan again if she started inviting Adam to club outings," she says. "Bet he was here, though. She's acting really weird tonight, but it's the usual weird. Bet something's up with them. Bet."

"I have bad news," I tell her, eager for everyone in my life to stop talking about my brother to me, like he even lets me have anything to do with him. "I may have told the Naval Brigade about our comic, and they might be gathering to produce said comic, in conjunction with us, which, as nice as the prospect is for my artistic development, is not exactly something I have time for on top of living the comic, especially if Rya keeps giving me comics for research--" I swipe through to the homepage. "Such as this 'not that long' six-hundred page one she just recommended to me."

"It's not long unless it's long, Will," Amanda says.

"What does that even mean?" I ask.

"It's not long unless it's long. You'll know when you read a real webcomic, like us real women. Ten thousand pages in counting."

"I think I know what you're talking about," I say, "And no, no thank you, again, there's the whole actual-job thing to consider..."

"We can get through this together," she says, heavy hand on my shoulder. "The two of us, you see, we're going to read comics, write comics..."

"Amanda! You didn't tell us about your project, you big jerk!" yells Rya from across the room. "Consider our friendship terminated!"
"Even if I let you storyboard and concept?" she asks.

"I'll mark it down as a probation," admits Rya. "But you'll also need to contend with all eight of us--"

She really does have half the party together. I know you're not supposed to split the party, but could someone give us a little room to breathe? Amanda begins delegating tasks, to the point I'm not sure that the two of us are going to have anything to do (which I believe was the intent... well played, Amanda), and I found myself crowded out by bodies. It's much heavier than Naval Brigade, and everyone's rowdy off of non-alcoholic eggnog and six cookies each. Shiloh's still not answering me. He has to be somewhere, right? What if he's dead? I could just sneak out to the Veins for a second... I manage to scoot out past the edge of the crowd and check the bathroom, but there are no cracks there. There's a small slit on the ceiling of the family room, but that's going to look ridiculous and I wouldn't fit. Fitting my head into an alternate dimension would be a great party trick, but explaining it would be more trouble than it's worth.

Fingers clutching the moonstone, turning it like a dagger in my hand, I look back at Amanda, who, due to her height, is tall enough to peek out over the mob of high school girls. She looks so happy that I smile, too. It's our world, now, and I'm sure she'd be happy to know I can handle things for the both of us, without her. It means that she never has to worry. That's what a team leader does, right? Am I even a leader?

Lost in the fog of my own thoughts, I stumble down the steps and find Megan in the basement, running a finger along the shelf of DVDs. She turns, and for a second, I hear her mouth a name that isn't mine. Just past her, on the wall next to her, is a long crack, the perfect exit.

"What are you doing down here?" she asks.

"What are you doing? It's your party," I say.

"People are a bit much sometimes," she says. "Even though I love them, and sometimes because I love them. I figured I would come down for a second, clear my mind, and get some DVDs rolling so we could all watch movies together."

"You have... a really impressive collection of DVDs," I say. The whole wall must be full of them, and that's the short dimension of the room. There's another shelf, to the right of the television, that's full of books, and that one's even longer. Their whole basement seems to be a massive trove of media, ranging from the stuff owned by every family in America to obscure foreign properties. I've never heard half of these names. "Are these imports?"
"A lot of them are video games. The family that plays together stays together... y'know," she shrugs.

"I wouldn't," I say. "My family is nice, but they don't get us. You know? This is just stories to them. It's separate from our world. Some of us, though, we live here. My family doesn't understand that. They think I'm stuck in my head."

"You don't think Adam would understand that?" she asks.

"Can everyone stop asking me about my brother?" I ask. It was louder than I intended, I don't want to cry in front of her, but I'm shaking. I don't know why I'm so stressed. I should be able to handle one party. Nothing has even happened. It's just me, here, alone, no team, no Shiloh, trying to operate in front of the girl my brother is probably dating, and I still feel like she's looking for him behind me, but isn't everyone, really? Who am I even supposed to be if no one's there around me to cast some light on my face?

Megan's expression shifts again. "I'm sorry, Will."
"It's fine. I overreacted. It just comes up a lot," I say, tears rolling down my cheeks. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life living in his shadow.

Megan's glasses gleam silver. She asks, "Do you want a tissue? I can help you upstairs. We can get some punch, and talk, and you don't even have to think about him if you don't want. Promise."

No wonder everyone loves her. "I think I'm just going to need a moment," I say, "In the bathroom."

I choose another bathroom this time, flicking on the light in the basement bathroom. While most of the room bolts to life, there is still a dark corner waiting for me, just wide enough to squeeze through. In the ever-changing landscape, it's hard to say if it'll be good for a return visit, but I know, deep in my heart, that I need it too much for that, and embarrassing as that might be, I can't even conjure up any shame about it. Instead, I find myself swinging from darkness to darkness, emerging right outside the room, and gingerly pushing open the doors.

"Shiloh, are you--" I pause. There, under the second floor's rafters, is one little sprig of mistletoe, gracefully tracing its way down to two bodies interlocked in a fierce kiss. Garrett's wild hair and Karen's dark, frizzy curls both move slightly as the two of them pull apart.

"Will! Why are you here?" demands Karen.

"I guess I felt I needed to be," I say, leaning against the frame, staring into the inky darkness until it settles to allow the red of the Veins to creep back in where the portal was. "Because sometimes it feels like there's nowhere else you can go."
Garrett's bewilderment and Karen's anger both ease into a kind of understanding.

Karen grabs Garrett's hand. "We should go," she says.

"Wherever we're going, can we still--" Garrett asks.

Karen stares back at me. "It's not you," she says. "I mean, it is, but it was stupid to even meet here. We're going somewhere we can get more privacy."

Shiloh's purple eyes stare out of the darkness. He's fine. I do want to warn him never to worry me like that again, but then he'll know that I was worried to begin with, and therein lies the issue, because worried? Me? Why would I possibly be... I'm an idiot. I can tell he's looking straight through me, and he knows, oh he knows, that just being cut off for a second was enough to get me panicky.

"This isn't your playground. You already knew that," I tell Karen.

"This isn't a playground for anyone," Shiloh warns us in a soft voice. "All of you have places to be. Take the night to yourselves."
"Are you alright?" I ask.

Shiloh looks to the door. "I need to check on something."

I don't know anything about cherub culture, or even, for that matter, if there's someone or something he could check on, but the glint of his eyes, the kindness in them, is enough to ward me back. Even though just being Luna, being myself, is enough to fill my body back up with energy, to give me a purpose and identity that no one out there foisted upon me, he has a point.

"Sorry," I tell them.

Garrett shoots Karen a look. Karen just folds her arms. "It's fine, Will."

"Luna," I insist.

"We're not on a mission," she says.

I sound stupid. She knows that. I know that. We all know that. "Of course not," I laugh. "See you guys later." I exit, back into the bathroom, and unlock the door from the inside. Upstairs, people are still huddled around, now concepting a story out on a shared notebook in the den, and pictures of characters, most of which are crumpled up, line the floor.

"We can't ditch the central conceit," says Megan. "That's critical."

"We can too, if it sucks," Ana, a sophomore with a mouth sharp as thorns and hair sharper than that, says. "It's too busy. If we integrated the magical girls into the mad-science deal, if we made them a product of it, maybe."

"I've always wanted to come up with a semi-plausible reason for transformation sequences," agrees Em. "I read somewhere on the internet that the reason people don't go near them when they're transforming is because of sheer energy release. We could weaponize that. What if they can literally vaporize people?"

"While we're at it, give them real armor," adds Rya. "I want to add some realism. Not much, we're not trying to ruin the fun, but maybe a little. You know?"

There's a round of assent.

"Urban fantasy setting?" asks Em. "It sounds like we're going for an American suburb anyways."

"We could set it here," says Rebecca.

"Nothing happens," I say. "We're a pretty average town."

"Bull," Sally says, "have you all heard about the Chester Tree Incident?"

"No," Amanda says. "Why?"

"You want to hear about real magic, you don't need to look far. That's all," she says. "Two days ago, a tree on Chester Street fell on someone's house. They checked, and it was a perfectly healthy tree, and the next morning someone had carted the whole thing out, like it had just grown legs and walked away. No one knows where it went. My mom says we should start installing anti-tree measures."

"Dude, if the trees turn on us, we're dead," says Rya.

I laugh, but I can hear the anxiety crackling in my own voice. Every single hair on my back is on end.

"The only magic in this town is that suspicious drug outbreak," says one girl, whose name I've never quite gotten a handle on. She wears a cat beanie, and usually sits in the corner, locked behind her school-assigned laptop on some roleplay site. "Worse than Krokodil, which is that one Russian zombie drug. It rots your brains out, but it's a huge performance enhancer, and the high is supposed to be legendary."

"How do you even know about that?" asks Megan.

"Parents are cops," she says. "They tell me all the time about how dangerous this stuff is. They're super stressed on this one. There's all this trespassing, all these weird missing persons cases... sounds like supernatural shit. Either that or a normal cult."

"Probably," Megan says. "Just a cult. A dangerous one. You guys stay safe, okay?"

"We will," Amanda promises, moving a little closer to Megan. "I'll keep an eye out for cultists, and you keep away from any magical trees."

Megan rolls her eyes. "Of course, if anything magical had to happen to us, we'd just be background characters waiting to be disposed of out back."

"That's why we make our own stories," Amanda says. She holds up the sketchbook. "Why don't we get back to the real magic?"

For a second, she makes eye contact with me, and then winks, subtly as she can.

My stomach twists.