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on one side and sticking out on the other.
    Yeah. Just like mine.
    Not quite awake, Mom frowned. She squinted at me, then at the calendar, then back at me. “Did I sleep longer than I thought? You can’t be home already.”
    I shrugged. “I cut the meeting short and caught a ride with a sylph.”
    “Seems fair. Meeting not go well?” She ran her fingers through her hair, unsurprised by the idea that her daughter had been whisked home by a sylph. Crazy stuff happened at our house every day. It seemed we were all difficult to catch off guard. For that matter, Mom had been at this Aegis thing far longer than I had. She may have dealt with sylphs before.
    We didn’t talk much about the time she’d spent away. Her absence during my childhood was too raw a subject.
    “It did not go well, no.” I pushed a chair out for her with my toe. “But we’ll get to that when everybody else gets here.”
    She accepted a cup of coffee Maurice shoved in her hands. “Everybody else?”
    “Yeah. Time for a team meeting.”
    Riley made it over about forty-five minutes later. He used to sleep at my place more often than he did at his apartment in Sausalito, but since the breakup—Aegis-handler or not—it wasn’t appropriate. Plus, having him walk around my house shirtless and with sleep-tousled hair was a gut punch. And awkward.
    Darius and Kam rolled in around ten o’clock, and Sara showed up five minutes after that.
    Once everyone took a seat in the living room, I told them what I’d learned in England.
    Darius—who looked like a man-shaped tree, chiseled out of charcoal and muscle—sat in my biggest overstuffed chair. His knees stuck out, and his hands dwarfed the armrests. Kam, our djinn, sat on the couch in a pink poodle skirt and sweater, her long black hair pulled into a sleek ponytail. She was supposed to be saving up her magic to open a portal and go home to the djinn world, but lately she’d been frittering her magic on a new, weird outfit each day. The magic gems in her wrist were recharging, but not as fast as they would if she weren’t draining them to play dress up. Darius and I had both talked to her about her magical spending habits, but she insisted she knew what she was doing. She wanted to feel pretty after a century of being locked in a box and told what to eat, do, wear and think.
    I couldn’t argue with that.
    Besides, I’d miss her once she finally went home. If her silly costume changes kept her around a little longer, I wasn’t going to complain.
    Without a word, she sat on the middle cushion between Riley and me. She didn’t approve of our having broken up, but she did what she could whenever she was around to act as a buffer. I appreciated her efforts, though they weren’t necessary. Riley and I were grownups. We would deal. And by deal, what I really meant was do everything in our power to ignore the situation.
    So, maybe not as grownup as we might think.
    Mom sat on the floor next to Darius’s chair, and Maurice bustled around the room filling drinks and making tutting noises when somebody forgot to use a coaster. I’d told him often that he didn’t have to wait on anybody, but he enjoyed it. I probably would have hurt his feelings if I’d tried to stop him from doing it.
    Sara came out of the hall bathroom and joined us, settling into the other overstuffed chair. She smoothed her cream-colored skirt and smiled at me.
    I drew my brows together and tilted my head toward her in a gesture she understood was asking if she was okay. She nodded, and her smile widened.
    The last few months had been rough as hell on Sara, but she was doing a lot better.
    Late last year, an incubus named Sebastian had come after me and everyone I influenced. He’d also been hurting Sara and wiping her memories of having been repeatedly raped both physically and metaphysically. It was a dark time, and we almost lost Sara, but her inability to remember shielded her from most of the trauma.
    Until a few months ago. The