Apparently, nothing fazed Potsdam for long. After Clark got back, she had turned the lights back on and went on as if nothing unusual had just happened. Alice shook her head, watching as the professor merely accepted the last ingredient she had needed from the greenhouse, checked to make sure it was the correct specimen, and then crushed it to add with the rest of the salve she had been making.

Clark was still standing there, looking confused, so Alice just whispered to him that Nancy was talking to ghosts now. It was a measure of tonight's peculiarity that he merely nodded, accepting that without requesting additional information.

"Now, it's nearly three in the morning," Potsdam told her sister, "and you should be in bed."

"I don't want to be by myself," Nancy said softly.

Potsdam smiled at her. "Your sister has to stay here so she can give her husband his medicine, and they might have grown up stuff to talk about. You can stay with your brother, but not in his dorm room. There is a bedroom across the hall for guests that the two of you can use."

It was left unsaid, but Alice was sure that Potsdam herself would tend to reinforcing wards around the room as soon as she was done with Hieronymous.

"Ok," Nancy said, and then walked up to Alice. "Goodnight Sissy. Thank you and goodnight Mr.—what do you want me to call you?" she asked Hieronymous. "You aren't my teacher, and you have a hard name to say."

Hieronymous smiled at her. "Uncle Hieron will do. And thank you too, Nancy. I think you just gave me at least as much as I gave you."

Nancy nodded. "She's wanted to talk to you for a long time now, but I had to be strong enough to let her and I couldn't say anything about magic when you came to pick Alice and Clark up."

Alice blinked. Nancy had not mentioned talking to ghosts at that time, that she could remember anyway. Maybe scolding her about implanting visions in other people's heads had discouraged her from making the claims.

"Oh," Nancy said, as if just remembering something. "Grandma says she was trying to talk to you Alice, to warn you that I was going to be in trouble. The black one was keeping her from talking to me, so she tried talking to you. You couldn't hear her, though she thought you might have been thinking about her because you got her locket out."

She could feel the weight of the locket still around her neck that contained the picture of the only Grandma that Nancy could possibly mean. "Do you know why she is staying instead of going into the light?" Alice asked. She could understand why Violet had stayed, having unfinished business with Hieronymous, but her grandmother?

"She thinks we still need looking after," Nancy answered. "She was able to get through to Asim when she gave up on you, so he came faster and made it into the room just after I fell through the hole. He was able to make sure the fall didn't hurt me."

Alice nodded. She had wondered if it had been simple luck or not that Asim had gotten there in time to protect her sister. Apparently, at least some ghosts could communicate with a manus…just as Violet had.

Nancy took her brother's hand, and they left the room. This left nothing else except for Potsdam to teach her how to apply the salve.

"The green one you brush into the wound bed—make sure it touches all of it—and the clear one is for the pain." Alice noticed that the muscles in her husband's back were starting to tense up. He was probably in more pain now that the adrenaline had worn off, and he did not have Violet's ghost or herself wrapped in only a towel to distract him from it. "The clear one goes on after the green, and they stay on for the period of an hour," Potsdam was continuing. "After an hour, rinse it off with water, and then reapply until the wound is healed. It should take about three or four applications."

Potsdam then demonstrated the technique, and then had her do the rest of the wounds. Potsdam was correct, they were not that deep, but the flesh was red and angry looking. Hieronymous sighed, relieved, after they were done. Potsdam left the room, and Alice set the alarm clock to go off in an hour so she would remember when to perform the next treatment. She then had Hieronymous lie on top of the covers on his bed, and found a robe to cover his lower half leaving his back exposed.

"Is there anything else I can get for you?" she asked. "We don't have to talk now, but when you do, just let me know." This night had given them both a lot to process.

"Just…don't go far," he asked.

Alice smiled, and then yawned, realizing exactly how exhausted she was. It also occurred to her that her roommates would wonder where she was, especially if they had woken up when she had Teleported out of the room. She found a piece of paper, wrote a hasty note, and then Teleported it so it would be found on her pillow. That done, she crawled under the blankets next to her husband, and left one arm out so she could hold his hand as she rested. He held so tightly to her hand that she decided that this was insufficient, so she scooted close enough to her husband that she could feel his warmth, even through the blankets, and he could place his arm around her.

Alice was not sure if she slept or not, drifting in and out of a twilight sleep fueled by the exhaustion of keeping the gate open as long as she had. Sometimes her husband's embrace was lax, and at other times tight. She though she heard him crying into his pillow once, but undecided if he would want a response from her or not, stayed still until the alarm went off.

Somewhat groggy, Alice splashed cold water in her face while getting water to wash Hieronymous' back with. Deciding that she was now alert, she walked into the other room, turned on the light, and proceeded with the treatment noticing that the wounds looked a little less angry and were a little more shallow.

"Am I using too much pressure?" she asked when Hieronymous grunted as she washed the old salve off.

"No…I…you are doing fine," he said.

Alice smiled. "What I can't understand is why you try to avoid complaining when you are injured, but are usually a bear when you are only sick."

Hieronymous paused, then chuckled. "After everything that happened tonight, that is the question on your mind?"

"It's as good of a starting point as any," she replied, finishing with washing and then proceeded to pat his back dry.

"I suppose the answer to your question," he started, "is that if I am sufficiently distracted by something else, I forget to 'be a bear.'"

"So if you are too unruly the next time you are sick, I merely have to find something to distract you?" Alice mused out loud. "I'll keep that in mind. Maybe I'll ask Donald for ideas, if I can't think of anything myself."

"Please do not enlist the aid of Mr. Danson," Hieronymous asked. "There is no telling what the two of you might come up with."

"Was gluing the dragon's mouth shut really that original?" she asked.

"A couple have tried before," he admitted, "but given that we did not provide the recipes along with the ingredients, it did not turn out nearly so well."

She smiled, and then returned to her work. Silence reigned for the next few minutes. "What do you suppose made the portal that Nancy fell through? Weren't the wards supposed to stop that kind of thing? Nancy said a black spirit that wanted to eat her made it," she finally said.

"I'm not sure," Hieronymous admitted. "E would have to be particularly powerful to make the gate, and crafty enough to dismantle the alarms from the wards first. I do not know how a five-year-old child would have made an enemy like that. It is more likely that e is an enemy of one of her 'friends' and was trying to get at the other being by destroying her. You should ask Petunia if she recognized any of the spirits that were battling above us."

Alice frowned. Her sister was so innocent, that the thought of her having any enemies at all just seemed foreign to her. But, as she did know, some spirits enjoyed feasting on the innocent, and Nancy was as innocent as a….

"What do you think of the news about the babe we will have someday?" she asked softly. That had been a shock. Having any child was a great responsibility, but a child of such importance…. It was a bit overwhelming.

"Considering what she said," Hieronymous started, "it was a doubly good thing that I was able to get your sister out, so the child could be born."

"What?" she asked. "Not hearing that prediction would not have made any difference on us having the babe."

"I…" her husband floundered, looking for the words he wanted while she put the first salve down to get the pain reliever. "Our contract forbids divorce, but not separation. I thought that if I had failed and your sister had died maybe…." He trailed off, unable or unwilling to finish.

Her eyebrows rose. Perhaps she should have expected that. "I would have been grieved, and angry, perhaps at you whether you deserved it or not. Trying and failing is still better than not trying at all. I would not have stopped loving you."

"But you would have had every right to," Hieronymous answered.

Alice decided to try to make him look at it from a different angle. "If I disappointed, failed, or betrayed you in some way, would you still love me? If I was truly sorry, would you forgive me?"

"It would not be easy," he said slowly, "depending on what exactly the betrayal was. But you are precious to me, and I would do whatever I had to in order to keep you."

"Exactly," she said. "Real love is unconditional; you don't have to worry about being worthy of it overmuch because it can't be earned anyway."

"I have never really thought of it that way," he admitted. "I confess that I had a lack of experience with such an arrangement during my childhood years."

With a father like his, a mother that had abandoned him whether she had wanted to or not, and servants that he had known were being paid to be around him she understood how he could have thought that any affection must be earned in some way. "Until you met Violet," she reminded him.

"I…I did not know that she had forgiven me. I had always assumed that her spirit would have been angry with me for failing her," he admitted.

"You were angry with yourself," Alice guessed. "You assumed that she would not extend the grace to you that you did not to yourself."

Hieronymous said nothing, which probably meant that she had hit the nail on the head.

"Can you tell me what happened?" she asked gently.

Her husband drew a long breath as she set the bowl of clear salve aside, done with it for now. She reset the alarm clock for another hour and lied down next to him before he was able to begin.

"I still do not remember whose idea it was to enter Otherworld," Hieronymous started slowly. "She was a Wildseed, and did not know our traditions. Since I had learned to take everything my father said with a grain of salt, I transferred this line of thinking to my teachers as well.

"To us, Otherworld was a mysterious frontier forbidden us for only the purpose of hampering our progress in magic until those that had power over us considered us 'mature' enough not to get in their way. She was not as suspicious of authority figures as I was, when I met her, but eventually my mistrust of them gained some footing in her mind."

Alice could recall Potsdam saying something similar when she had first told her about Violet.

"We were in our Junior year, and I took her home with me for Christmas break, intending to propose marriage while we were there. My father was at home, and not happy but resigned when I told him what I had planned to do. I found a book in his library about the Spiral Gate, and showed it to Violet. She thought we were advanced enough to perform the spell, and we both decided to try it. I had a thought that such an exotic setting as Otherworld would be even better for the proposal than the plans that I had already made, and was quite eager to go.

"We went that evening, and let the gate close behind us because I could sense my father's manus approaching us. We spent our first few minutes in Otherworld looking around in wonder, and then started experimenting to see if magic did indeed flow more unrestricted there. It was wondrous. When I turned around intending to propose, I instead sensed that we had been noticed by something evil."

Hieronymous paused for a long moment before he was able to go on. "Goblins, just like the ones you just saw, appeared out of nowhere and everywhere. I tried to maintain a parameter while Violet tried to open another Spiral Gate. We both failed. In the process, my wand was broken and Violet received a head injury that I'm sure would have been fatal without medical attention. The goblin shaman toyed with me while Violet lie dying. Before she could die of the injury she had already incurred, he stepped so I would have an unobstructed view and gave the order for her to be torn apart, and then he devoured her essence."

Alice shivered, reversing the situation to imagine having to watch the same being done to Hieronymous while she was helpless herself. It was too horrible for words.

"It was not a moment afterwards that Hafiz appeared, plucked me away from the shaman, and brought me through a portal in the sky back to my father's house. I wondered if the timing of his arrival was chance, or a mechanization of my father's."

"But you never asked?" Alice wondered.

"I had no use for him as it was," Hieronymous admitted. "I knew that if he had betrayed me in that fashion, that I would never forgive him."

"So you let the thought that he had fester instead?" Alice said with a sigh. "He needs you so his line can continue, so I doubt he would have put your life in jeopardy. Having Hafiz wait to rescue you certainly would have done that."

"There is that," her husband admitted.

"Thank you for telling me," she said softly. "It must have been difficult."

"It was not easy," Hieronymous admitted.

"But because of tonight, you know that she forgave you. You also know that she gave you a shove towards me," she pointed out.

Her husband smiled. "I had not expected either one. To know that she holds no ill will against me eases a burden. And that was a little more than a 'shove,' my dear."

Alice returned his smile, but with a mischievous glint. "Fine, she hogtied us both, dragged us to the alter, and then stood there with a shotgun. At least now you know that she's the one that messed up your wards, so you didn't actually make a mistake that morning. And Hafiz…maybe we should have em try to develop es skills as a matchmaker."

Hieronymous actually laughed at that.

"Please Mistress, do not have Hafiz punished in such a manner," she heard a hissing voice say.

She should have known the manus was listening in.

"That is not my intent at this point," her husband reassured his servitor. "But now that we know that it would be a good punishment…."

Alice giggled. "He's joking. We don't know anyone that needs that kind of help."

"And we are much more uninterested in such pursuits than Petunia is. If you were her manus, that might be a more pertinent concern," her husband finished.

Alice was not sure, but she thought she heard the manus sigh in relief.