“Yes, you are,” said Jesse stoutly. She’d come down the stairs while I wasn’t looking. “But that doesn’t mean that they can come here and feed you to a monster on our watch.” She patted him on the head. “And while I’m at it, thanks, squirt, for saving my life.” She looked at her dad. “They came out of the river. Ben was the first one to notice them—we were stargazing in the backyard. He yelled at us to get in the house, to get to the safe room.” She frowned. “We should have, but there were a bunch of those things, and only Paul and Ben to fight them. So we ran up to your bedroom and I grabbed the .444 and ran to the sitting room and started shooting. You’re going to have to get that window replaced.”

“There are a lot of windows that need replaced,” I said.

“The back wall of the house needs to be replaced,” said Mary Jo. “One of them had some sort of earth magic. She took the huge rocks that Christy had placed around the backyard as décor and hurled them. A couple of them hit the house.”

“I think I killed her,” said Jesse, suddenly sounding younger. “I tried to anyway. She threw that granite boulder and hit Paul with it.”

“That’s about when I arrived,” Mary Jo said. “Ben’s pretty proud of you, kid, you hit her right between the eyes. You are the reason that Paul and Ben aren’t dead—and if the fae had taken those two out that early, I’d have shown up too late.”

Adam started to put a hand on Jesse, and I caught his eye and shook my head. She was holding on, just barely. If he hugged her, she’d lose it—and she deserved better than that.

Jesse caught his hand and gripped it tightly, giving me a smile. “Anyway, one of them climbed up the side of the house—and bullets didn’t do anything to him. He got through the window in the sitting room, and Aiden touched him.” She swallowed. “I’m not actually sure he’s dead. We got out of there and shut the door. There was a lot of noise by that time, and the blue-silky caterpillar lady was downstairs, so Aiden and I crouched in the hallway and waited.”

Mary Jo said something under her breath, dodged into the kitchen, and grabbed the fire extinguisher from the counter—we now had a lot of fire extinguishers stashed around the house—and ran up the stairs.

“If the house were going to have caught fire,” Jesse said, “I think it would have done so by now.”

“Reflexes,” I told her. “Remember, Mary Jo fights fires for a living—and Aiden has been doing his best to refine her response time.”