I nodded thoughtfully. “One of the things it can do is show us the way home. That might be useful in Underhill.”

“Every boarding party needs its guide to light the way, its wizard to defeat the magic, and a tank to kill everything that tries to stop the party,” Jesse said. She had been playing too much ISTDPBF with the pack lately, and it was affecting her thinking. She looked at her father. “The tank is not sacrificial.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Adam with only a little irony in his voice.

“You come home, Daddy,” she told him. “I love my mother, but if I have to live with her for very long, one of us will commit a homicide. And you bring Mercy and the pip-squeak back.”

“Am I the wizard or the guide?” I asked our captain.

“Aiden is fire touched,” she told me after considering the matter. “You can only turn into a coyote. So he’s the wizard, even though he has to guide the party in. You guide the party out. And Dad makes sure you all get out alive.”

“Next time,” said Aiden, who’d been learning the fine art of playing pirate on computers, too, “I want to be the tank.”

—

Jesse came with us.

“No one will touch her,” Zee told Adam, breaking into the middle of the heated after-breakfast discussion. “I will be there. Tad will be there. Nothing will happen to her.”

Zee and Tad had shown up in the middle of the night, neither of them willing to talk about what they’d been doing. Since Baba Yaga had sort of told me already, I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.

“What do you mean, you’ll be there?” asked Adam.

“Underhill doesn’t like our kind,” Zee said. “So we won’t follow you in. But Tad and I will come with you, we will watch over Jesse and see that nothing befalls her. I agree that Underhill is no place for someone who is wholly human.” He glanced at Aiden, who grimaced and nodded emphatically. “But Jesse is no longer a child. It is her right to witness what her father does.”

The Alpha wolf and the Dark Smith held each other’s eyes.

“Daddy?” asked Jesse.

The Alpha stare-down broke up with neither participant a winner or loser.

“Please?” she said.

“Fine,” Adam huffed, because Jesse’s awesome, seldom-used secret power was that she had her father wrapped around her little finger.

“Now that that’s settled,” I said, “we should go.”

I took my dishes to the sink and stopped to kiss Adam’s cheek as I passed him. I would have moved on, but he held me against him for a moment. He smelled of me, of our early-morning lovemaking, and of the pack. But mostly he smelled like himself: mint and musk and Adam.