For the first time since I’d walked into that damned hospital storeroom last night, I felt real hope. If Sam the wolf could keep to civilized manners for a few days, maybe I would have a chance to persuade Bran to give us a little more time.

Sam had reached the office door and stood patiently waiting for me to let him in while Maia patted him on the top of his head and told him he was a good pony.

“Mercy? Are you okay?” Sissy looked in my car—I often brought cookies. I’d brought the ones I made this morning out of habit. I usually make a lot more cookies than any one person can eat, so when I have a baking fest, I bring the cookies for customers. She didn’t say anything when she spotted the bags sitting on top of the book I still needed to deliver to Phin, but she got a big smile on her face.

“I’m fine, Sissy. Want a cookie?”

WHEN I OPENED THE OFFICE DOOR, WHICH WAS A FADING orangish pink and needed to be repainted, the blaring music was overwhelmed by “Mercy” and “Look, dog!” And what seemed like a hundred small bodies piled on us.

Sissy put her small fists on her hips, and said in a picture-perfect imitation of her brother, “Barbarians.” And then she took a bite of the cookie I’d given her.

“Cookie!” shrieked someone. “Sissy has a cookie!”

Silence fell, and they all looked at me like a lion might look at a gazelle in the savanna.

“You see what happens?” asked Gabriel’s mother, not even glancing up from scrubbing the counter. Sylvia was about ten years older than I, and she wore those years well. She was a small woman, delicate and beautiful. They say Napoleon was small, too.

“You spoil them,” she told me in a dismissive tone. “So it is your problem to deal with. You must pay the price.”

I pulled the two bags of cookies from where I’d hidden them in my jacket. “Here,” I gasped, holding them out over the horde’s reaching hands toward their mother. “Take them quick before the monsters get them. Protect them with your life.”

Sylvia took the bags and tried to hide her smile as I wrestled with little pink-clad bodies that squealed and squeaked. Okay, there weren’t a hundred of them; Gabriel had five little sisters. But they made enough noise for ten times that many.

Tia, whose name was short for Martina, the oldest girl, frowned at us all. Sam, sitting beside her, had been abandoned for the possibility of a cookie. He seemed amused, more amused when he caught my wary glance.

“Hey, we’re doing all the work,” Rosalinda, the second-oldest said. “You chicas start scrubbing right this moment. You know you won’t get cookies until Mamá says.”

“Sissy got one,” Maia said.

“And that is all anyone will get until it is clean,” proclaimed Tia piously.