“You do remember that you’ve spent almost a week telling me the exact opposite?”

“Yes. And that was unkind of me.” He scuffed his shoe awkwardly on the balcony floor. “I’m not very nice to anyone, but I was much worse to you. I know I told Ashwini just now that this was all Mahishasura’s fault and it wasn’t fair to blame you, and that’s true, but I did blame you at one point. I hated that you’d given us these lives. I hated that you got to be a kid with a mum who loves you while we lost our families and our childhoods.” He looked up at me. “I guess I convinced myself that everything that had happened to us was all just fun and games to you. So that’s why I was pretty horrible to you. Then we had that argument before you got captured and you told us why you created all this. I realized it wasn’t just fun for you. You cared.”

“And then Pip died,” I said gently.

“Yeah. And I lost my temper.”

I did some of my own awkward scuffing of shoes. “Pip would still be here if it wasn’t for me. You don’t have to feel bad about what you said to me.”

“Pip died because Mahishasura is evil,” Lej said. “That’s the only reason. I should never have said it should have been you instead of him.” His voice cracked and he brushed a hand over his eyes. “He was my favorite. All he ever did was try to make people happy, and he tried twice as hard for me. When I saw what happened to him, something inside me just broke. It wasn’t fair to take it out on you.”

“It’s okay. Honestly.”

“Thanks.”

Another awkward pause. We were really bad at this.

“For what it’s worth,” he said after a moment, with the briefest of grins, “I don’t actually think your rainbow unicorn pajamas are silly, either. They’re kind of okay.”

“Careful,” I said. “You could hurt yourself displaying such unbridled enthusiasm.”

“Shut up.”

I smiled as I stepped back into the palace. “Now that sounds more like you.”

27

I don’t know what we expected when we got back to Crow House, but the mess and Suki’s inconsolable sobs were not it. Our arrival only added to the mayhem. Jojo burst into tears, Suki threw herself at Lej, and Samara raced over to hug me.

“You came back!” Suki cried.

Lej took a step back and stared hard at her. “Why wouldn’t I come back?”

“We th-thought you m-might have left us, t-too,” she sobbed.

Lej looked shocked, and a little hurt. “I wouldn’t do that. I promise.” He looked around. “Ashwini was here, then?”

“Yes,” Simha rumbled from the corner, where he was lying beside three empty teacups. “She told us what she did.”

“She asked us to go with her, to join Mahishasura,” Jojo added, scrubbing at his face with his sleeve. “She said if we didn’t, we’d end up like Pip and she didn’t want that. She said we would all be able to go back to Kiki’s world if we helped Mahishasura win. We said no.” His voice wobbled and he gestured to the mess around the front room. There were shreds of black, red, and gold everywhere. “She said she couldn’t believe we were turning our backs on her after everything she’d done for us. Then she tore up all our costumes and left.”