“Wait! Pause!” I wave wildly. “Felix, the rubber thing on the end of your sword fell off.”

He lifts it, twisting the blade in the sunlight. Makes a face. “So it has. Nice catch.”

“That could’ve been bad,” Dad mutters as the sword is recapped.

“Doubt it,” Jake says. “I’m too quick.” Snow falls from the tree and splats him on the head this time.

Felix backs him up against a tree (“Oh, yes,” Marilou murmurs), sword to his throat. “Surrender.”

Jake drops his weapon. “Okay, you win.”

Mom, Grandpa, and I cheer. I think the others were more excited in the other timeline.

“I win!” Felix whoops. He grabs his wife. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get a restraining order, I promise, and we should probably check the cameras when we get home to make sure she hasn’t planted more poison ivy in our flower bed. I know I’m messy, but I love you so goddamn much and I want to be with you forever. Life means nothing without you in it.” He’s breathing heavily. “This means you’ll stay with me, right?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Whomp-whomp,” Ichabod crows. To Hall, he adds, “That’s how you use ‘whomp-whomp.’ ”

Felix throws Marilou over his shoulder, marching straight into the house. Jake wipes the sweat from his brow with one sleeve, grinning. “I let him win.”

*

Chapter Fifteen

JAKE STAYS FOR lunch, then gets caught up in a marathon of What We Do in the Shadows with Grandma. “I’ll give you five thousand dollars to come back and do that every Christmas,” she offers him when he leaves.

“Bye, Uncle Jake!” the kids yell, waving.

Before Jake can say anything else, Hall shuts the front door on him. “He’s not bad with a sword, but if you want to see something really impressive, watch this.” He brings out a collapsible top hat, taps the brim with his plastic magic wand, and then a real rabbit jumps from inside it. “Here, you can keep this,” he tells Octavian, who is instantly told by three adults You’re not keeping that.

“Where’d you get that rabbit?” Athena demands.

Hall flourishes the magic wand, doing jazz hands. “With my very real magic wand.”

I poke him in the stomach. “You told me you can’t magic things to life. Where’d you get that rabbit?”

“A magician never tells.” He shoos me away.

Hall behaves erratically all afternoon. I overhear him asking Mom what her favorite brand of lemonade powder is and happily complaining to Athena about traffic. (Just traffic as a concept.) He asks my nieces and nephews if they’ve “heard any hot goss lately.” I discover two orange road cones in the truck bed, which I’m fairly certain he stole.

I don’t know what to make of it.

Hall slips off while I’m wrestling the swords away from two excited nephews. I check the bedroom, the purple guest bath, the tower. I duck behind palm trees and the stack of presents that’s begun to accumulate in the living room. “Has anyone seen—”