“It’s okay,” Mary Jo called down after a moment. “But you’re going to have to replace some furniture and the carpets in the sitting room.”

—

Mary Jo had been right: the back of the house was going to need major repairs. The yard was a real mess. Christy’s careful landscaping had been ruined. Four of the five giant boulders were scattered at random, to the detriment of lawn furniture and trees and garden spots. The fifth boulder was in the middle of the kitchen floor. There was now no question that we’d have to retile the kitchen. The big window in the living room was shattered, as were, as far as I could tell, all but one of the windows in the back.

Werewolves trickled in as word spread to those not actively involved in the actual battle, and they came over to help with cleanup. Someone rustled up tuna-fish sandwiches, and the night took on the oddly festive air of a work party. When they were done, the yard didn’t look pristine, but it was neat. Paving stones were stacked in piles. Things broken beyond repair, like the cement benches, and a lot of garbage bags from the house were set aside for the next garbage run. We did the best we could with the inside of the house, mostly sweeping or vacuuming up glass and throwing away broken things.

Ben and Mary Jo brought out plywood sheets from the garage, and I helped put them in place over the windows. Windows are fragile, and werewolves are not. Putting up plywood wasn’t a skill I would have actively sought out on my own, but I was pretty good at it. We were four sheets short of getting the job done, so we left the front window open until someone could get to a hardware store in the morning.

Adam came over when we were getting the last one up.

“Ben,” he said, “Auriele and Darryl are headed home; you can ride in with them.”

Ben’s truck had gotten smashed in the battle between Zee, Sherwood, and the Fideal. I’d told him that he’d be better off taking a settlement from his insurance and buying a new truck rather than repairing the old one. Once the frame was bent, it wasn’t usually worth the trouble of fixing it.

Ben stepped back from the job and stretched. He had a long cut the length of his face from the tip of his eye, down his jaw, and onto his collarbone. It had mostly healed up, and he looked as though he’d been in a car wreck several days earlier. “My croaking fat frog will shag my fucking Aunt Fanny before I’ll go now,” he said. “Until we get matters straightened out with the fae, I’m living right the fucking hell here.”