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skeeve pretending to be a seventeen-year-old high school junior. That would be too creepy for words… particularly since she was the closest thing he had to a friend, even if she wouldn’t tell him where she lived.
    Tinkas: Are you OK?
    DarkWizard: Yup.
    Tinkas: That’s good. You ready to kick some butt?
    DarkWizard: Yup.
    He wondered, and not for the first time, what Tinkas was like in real life.

Chapter Three
    Maddie heard the creak of a footstep in the hallway and levitated several inches from the ground. Adrenaline raced through her system as she whirled her body around facing the upstairs hallway.
    “Want slave labor?” Eli asked, clearly having no idea that he’d scared her to death.
    “How’d you get in?” She held a palm to her throat to catch her racing heart before it jumped out of her chest.
    Eli held up the key in his hand. “Spare key. We knocked but you didn’t hear us.” Concern slashed two lines between his eyes. “Everything okay?” He stepped toward her.
    Maddie nodded, trying to pull it together. “You startled me.” After all the creepy-weird things that had happened in D.C. before she left, she hadn’t yet managed to decompress. She gave Eli a smile to show him everything was all right, even though it wasn’t.
    The heat of Eli’s regard as he studied her for a moment longer caused her face to warm. Rogan came around the corner, his shoulders hunched, his fingers buried in his pockets. Today, his jeans were blue and full of rips, but he’d maintained the black everywhere else. Maddie stifled the urge to give Rogan a hug, feeling sure he hadn’t had nearly enough in his lifetime, but instead latched onto an opportunity for diversion as she fought a fairly intense desire to mother him. “Hey, Rogan. How’re you doing this morning?”
    He shrugged in a classic teenaged non-committal gesture that made her smile and Eli’s shoulders visibly tense.
    “Put us to work.” Eli glanced around at the towers of filled, half-filled and empty boxes stacked around the room.
    She hesitated. Could they really pretend that nothing was different? On the other hand, did she want to dig through her three and a half decades of her parents’ stuff by herself when she had willing help? “I’d love help.”
    “Did your parents take anything with them to Florida?” Eli asked.
    Maddie scanned what ostensibly had been her mother’s sewing room. “Apparently Mom’s condo is pretty small. But it’s affordable and close to Dad’s nursing home. I guess she figured de-cluttering here would happen on its own time.”
    “So your mom left it for you to clean up? That bites,” Rogan said.
    It did bite, but Maddie would never say so out loud. She’d recognized her mother for what she was in the safety of her own head, but she never shared her feelings about it with anyone else, though she suspected Eli had always known about how much their relationship pained her. “That wasn’t her intention, I don’t think. She’d planned a trip in a couple of months to come back and do it so she could put the house on the market this spring. However, since I’m staying here until at least August, I’m doing it so I have room to move around.”
    And as frustrated as she was with her relationship with her mother, at least she was willing to let her live here for six months rent-free. Of course, when her mom came to put the house on the market, she probably wouldn’t appreciate the progress Maddie had made and would continue to make on their house. “So I guess you guys are in time to help.”
    “I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.” Eli puffed out his chest and grinned.
    “You’re who?” Maddie returned.
    “I’m Luke—”
    “Yeah, yeah, I got it. Mark Hamill, Star Wars . The next line, as you may recall was—”
    Eli nodded. “Oh, right. Leia says, ‘You’re who?’“
    Rogan groaned as he picked up a magazine off the top of the box that contained hundreds. “What’s with all the movie