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appreciation.
    Lia shook her head and heaved a dramatic sigh that was undermined by her smile. “Fine. Second batch is down two cookies thanks to you two, though.”
    “Three,” said Sunny.
    “What?”
    “I caught you sneaking your own taste when I came to steal ours.”
    Lia went completely poker-faced and said, with all the calm of a politician under siege, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then she disappeared back into the kitchen.
    “Come on down,” said Sunny. “You’ve earned a break.” She held the ladders steady while Elly climbed down. “We really appreciate you doing this.”
    Elly paused at the bottom and eyed her handiwork. From down here, the runes would look like irregularities in the plaster to the untrained eye, especially when the paint dried. Which was how Sunny and Lia wanted it, considering they entertained normal human beings from time to time. Both women held day jobs—Sunny as a counselor, Lia as a gym coach at the local college—and as far as their colleagues knew, they were just a happy suburban couple with a nice home.
    Which, until Elly had arrived in town last month, had pretty much been true. Elly’d come to Edgewood full of grief and vengeance, and she’d brought monsters on her heels. They’d made a stand here, in Sunny and Lia’s living room, and Elly still felt a pang of guilt when she caught sight of a claw mark gouging the wood or a fresh patch of spackle to hide a dent in the wall from someone’s fist. They’d done a fantastic repair job in a short amount of time, but Elly knew where to look, what corners they hadn’t quite finished fixing yet.
    They probably ought to have asked her never to come back, thanks,
don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out
, but they hadn’t. That wasn’t how they operated. Even asking her to help refresh the house’s wards wasn’t done out of punishment or repayment—Elly and her brother Cavale were good with wards, different kinds from the demonic ones the ladies had already put up on their own, and they’d insisted on paying her for the work she did.
    The cookies were a bonus.
    Sunny led her over to the couch—another new delivery—and they sat quietly, licking the last of the dough off their spoons. Elly appreciated the tasty distraction; she was terrible at small talk.
    Lia joined them a few minutes later, peeling off her apron (which read
Hell’s Kitchen
) and plopping down in the chair near Sunny. “First batch is cooling, you vultures, so you can spoil your dinners.” She scanned the ceiling much as Sunny had, nodding in satisfaction. “Those look good.”
    “I’m almost done,” said Elly. “The basic ones are down, and most of what I needed to tailor to you two specifically. The rest, I’ll need to know, uh,
who
to protect you from. Or what.”
    Elly couldn’t read the look they exchanged. It held a lot of things: anxiety, a guardedness Elly herself was familiar with, other emotions she couldn’t parse from their faces.
    “The underworld,” said Lia at last. She plucked Sunny’s hand from the armrest, ran her thumb over her partner’s knuckles.
    “That’s . . .” Elly paused, not quite sure how to answer. “That’s kind of a tall order.”
    “I know. We don’t know who might be looking for us. Or if anyone even is.”
    “Someone always is.” Sunny’s good humor had fled. “We’d fetch a handsome reward for whoever dragged us back there.” A shiver went through her. She edged closer to Lia, though Elly wasn’t sure she was aware she was doing it.
    “I’m guessing it was a bad situation?”
    Lia nodded. “Bad then, exponentially worse if we’re brought back to face punishment for running away.”
    “How’d you get out in the first place?”
    “Easy enough to get lost in the chaos of a battle,” said Lia. “We waited until our master’s attention was elsewhere, took our knives, and fled.” She was referring to the keris knives they kept in a