Ray winced, her eyes flicking to the shifting walls as if able to see the large glen beside the river where her mother had last stood upon the earth. The last I’d looked, Lucy was sitting directly between Ellasbeth’s stately snobbery and my mom’s loud refusal to let anyone think Ellasbeth was better than she was. Takata was enjoying himself immensely, sitting back and watching the show before the show, as it were.

“Ahh, I’ll wear yours, thanks.”

My heart almost broke from happiness as she all but flopped onto a linen-covered bail of straw and I carefully used my hairpins to fix it among her elaborate braids. Ellasbeth was not happy, making no bones about her disapproval of Ray’s marrying a Rosewood baby, even if that baby had grown into a powerful demon who’d turned his thoughtful studies into researching aura mechanics. The field was relatively new and massively funded by an ever-decreasing but desperate segment of the old undead. It had never occurred to me that Ray might marry one of the kids that Trent and I had saved from Ku’Sox. Funny how things worked out.

But I think Ellasbeth’s disapproval stemmed more from the coming lack of grandbabies than from Keric’s being a demon. While elves and demons had finally learned to live together—in part because their new Goddess was a demon and she wanted it that way—the biology remained static. There’d never be a successful demon-elf pairing. The magic fought the science, and the science undermined the magic. There were some things, apparently, that even a crazy Goddess couldn’t fix.

Ray wound her fingers around themselves, fidgeting as she looked to the billowing drapes and the coming sunset. “Maybe I should’ve asked Loo to ride with me. Mom looks ticked.”

Mom meaning Ellasbeth this time, and I sighed, fixing her hair and knowing it would be the last time ever. “She’s not mad at you, she’s mad at my mom. To tell you the truth, I think Lucy likes sitting between them. If she can keep them from throwing curses at each other, then she can convince a hanging judge that the sun is black and the moon is green.”

Ray snorted, reminding me that under the finery and glam, she was the same little girl I’d spent the last twenty-seven years helping Trent and Quen raise, putting Band-Aids on cuts, making unexpected cupcakes at dawn before school, cheering from the stands in the rain, and drying tears when a boy was mean—missing her when she was with Ellasbeth. If that wasn’t being a mom, then nothing was. It had been glorious, even if Trent and I had never made it official. With Ray getting married, it felt as if a tie between us was being cut.