Luz's first summer in the Boiling Isles had been the best time of her life. She had learned magic, made lifelong friends, and fell in love. Sure, there'd been an evil emperor breathing down her neck, she'd missed her mother so much, and she'd been constantly worried about how Camila would react to the changes in Luz's life, but Luz figured that there were always downsides to everything. During that summer, she hadn't envisioned that things could get any better for her. But she was wrong.

Because her second summer in the Boiling Isles was loads better than the first!

Belos was dead, the new government wasn't after her, and she'd had a full summer of Amity Blight as her girlfriend! And on top of that, not only was Camila completely okay with her witchcraft, but she herself was now training to be a witch! And she was in the Boiling Isles with Luz! And Luz's mothers and Raine were now all together! It was enough to make her want to jump up and down with glee.

But of course she couldn't do that right now, because Luz was on the threshold of a pivotal moment: Her first Grom with her girlfriend. Okay, sure, they'd gone to Grom together in the end, but that was just as friends! Amity had been scared of being rejected by Willow, so Luz had stepped up to the plate in a platonic manner, and together, they'd danced and defeated a horrible fear monster. You know, the sort of thing friends do. It wasn't until later that Amity developed a crush on her.

The strange thing was that practically everyone in her life had tried to convince Luz that she was the one that Amity had wanted to take to Grom. Gus, her moms, Edric and Emira, even Willow herself was adamant that Luz had been Amity's crush all along. But that was ridiculous. What had Luz done at that point to deserve being Amity's crush? All she'd done was make her life more complicated and miserable. She didn't deserve –

No.

That was not true. She did deserve happiness. It was possible for someone to have a crush on her. And she'd been a good friend to Amity. That was what caused her to develop those feelings for Luz later.

Luz and Amity had gone into Luz's mind to acquire memories of Luz's birth to make a present for Camila. While there, they'd run into Inner Luz. Luz was expecting her inner self to be a goofball, maybe even a witch with a dark side. It turns out that Luz herself was the witch with the dark side, a dark side that had deluded herself into thinking that the past year's events were just a hallucination out of a complete lack of faith in herself. Since then, Luz had been making a conscious effort to try to stop patterns of thought that would lower her self-esteem. It wasn't easy, but she was trying.

Still, setting all that aside, there were a lot of reasons, based on pure logic, to suggest that Willow, not her, was Amity's initial crush. First and foremost, Luz had been with Amity for almost a year now. Surely Amity would have mentioned something as important as that if it were true. Indeed, Amity had always been evasive when Luz tried to interrogate her as to who her crush had been. Why would that be the case if it was her girlfriend?

Secondly, Willow was totally crushworthy. Luz didn't have a crush on her herself, but Willow was smart and pretty and levelheaded, all qualities that Amity also possessed (well, maybe not the levelheaded part, at least not to the extent she thought she did). Willow's date to the Grom was a lucky witch indeed. If only Luz knew who it was. Willow had been uncharacteristically evasive about their identity, only stating that she'd prefer to reveal it at Grom and that Luz should try to keep an open mind.

God, she really hoped that Willow's date wasn't Boscha.

Okay, focus, Luz, she mentally berated herself. Thirdly, there was the way that Grom had acted. It had taken Camila's form. Well, sort of. But Camila had been visible. Amity's crush was not; Grom had just taken on the form of an amorphous blob. Luz's theory about that was that Amity was happy to have Willow back in her life, but was unsure of whether her newfound strong emotions towards her were friendship or romance. Regardless of whether Luz had been Amity's crush or not, Amity's feelings towards her would only have been one possible thing, not leaving her questioning whether it was one or the other.

In any case, it didn't matter who Amity's crush had been. What mattered was the present, and in that present, Amity's love of her life was none other than Luz Noceda. And Luz was utterly determined to make the best Grom possible for Amity.

Actually, that wasn't accurate. She was otterly determined.

Luz wasn't quite as irresponsible these days as she used to be. Unlike back in the old days, Luz knew that her otter onesie was not exactly anywhere near appropriate formal attire. And she wouldn't have even considered wearing it normally under normal circumstances. But Amity had been dropping hints for weeks that she wanted Luz to wear it, saying things like "Luz, do you still have that otter costume?" or "Luz, do you think that Principal Bump would be okay with someone wearing an otter costume to the Grom?" or "Luz, where do you keep that otter costume again?"

Luz was dense, she freely admitted that, but no one, not even her, was that dense.

So she opened the door to the closet where she kept her otter onesie, and it wasn't there. It had been there just that morning! She had checked! Someone must have stolen it! And there were only hours left to find it!

The door to her bedroom flew open and King rushed into the room. "I heard screaming! Your liege is here to save you!" He put up his fists, unaware that the motion just made him even more adorable. King was like an onion of adorability – every time you'd thought you'd reached his limits, he revealed another, more adorable layer. "Face me, you sniveling cowards!"

"King, my otter costume is gone!" Luz explained. "Someone must have taken it! Do you have any idea who?"

King gasped. "Someone dared steal from you?! We can't let this stand. Luz, I don't know who was responsible for this vile crime, but I swear to you, it will not remain unpunished! I'm going to get Lilith to investigate this right away!"

Luz's eyes widened. "Uh, King, she's really busy. You know, doing deputy prime minister stuff."

"Nonsense!" King said. "If her king commands her, she must obey!"

Lilith was also head of the Law Enforcement Coven. She was busy trying to stop seriously bad guys – serial killers and people like that. She didn't have time to investigate the theft of an otter onesie. That wasn't the problem, though. The Boiling Isles' new government was a constitutional monarchy, which meant that King had vast power that he was obliged to never, ever exercise. But he could, in theory, and that would cause serious problems. The last thing Luz wanted to do was spark a constitutional crisis over an otter onesie of all the ridiculous things.

"Well, Lilith is so busy," Luz said, "and I was kind of thinking that maybe the two of us could investigate together! I mean, who needs Lilith, right? She's so prim and proper. We could so do it better than her!"

"Yeah!" King shouted. "That's a great idea, Luz. Brother-sister bonding time!"

Luz rummaged through her closet and came out with a trench coat and a fedora – the costume that she'd worn for Summerween. She put them on and she could swear that she felt detectiveness coursing through her veins. "All right, King. Let's crack this case!"

If Luz was going to be honest with herself, she had probably just misplaced the onesie. The idea that it was stolen was now sounding increasingly farfetched. But an afternoon with King playing detective sounded like just what she needed to take her mind off of her nervousness about Grom.

So together, the two of them wandered through "the mean streets of Bonesborough. Where a secret lurks behind every door, and a door lurks behind every secret. Where the hearts of witchkind are blackened, shriveled, and small. In those streets, a brave defender and her little brother walk. And that brave defender is named Luz Noceda!"

"Luz, who are you talking to?" King wondered.

"A private eye monologue is a staple of the genre," Luz explained. "You can't be one without it. All of the best private eyes do it – Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Harry Dresden."

"Ooh, can I try?!" King said. Luz gestured for him to go ahead. "The darkness closes in on our brave heroes. Stuffocating, stultifying, endless darkness. A darkness without form, without borders, without end. It is a darkness that doesn't seem to have a light or a point or a past or a future. The darkness will envelop everything in the end, and when it does, it will be as if the light was merely a dream. Remember: reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram, buy gold!" He let out a wide smile. "How did I do?!"

"Um…let's get to the investigating?" Luz suggested.

Their first and foremost suspect was none other than Boscha Hart, Willow's longtime bully and Amity's one time friend. God, Luz really hoped that Willow hadn't been foolish enough to decide to date Boscha. Maybe Boscha was pretty on the outside, but that beauty had only been skin deep. She was a thoroughly unpleasant individual. Once a bully, always a bully.

Through careful interrogation, Luz and King had discovered that Boscha was usually doing homework at one of Bonesborough's most elite tea shops in the afternoon. And sure enough, there she was.

"Hi, Boscha," Luz said, striding into the tea shop with a confident expression. Everyone looked scandalized at her appearance, and were it not for the presence of the king beside her, she'd have probably been kicked out instantaneously.

Boscha let out a yelp, drew a potion vial out of her jacket pocket, and tossed it on the ground. It erupted in a cloud of yellow smoke that hurt Luz to even breathe. As the smoke dissipated, she spotted Boscha running to exit the tea shop through the back door in the kitchen. "After her, King!"

The two of them followed Boscha outside and watched as she fell into the pit trap that they had set up in the event of this exact contingency. "Let me out of here, you jerks!" Boscha shouted. "What did I ever do to you?!"

King stood over Boscha, his eyes alight with sadistic glee. "Let's start with the fact that you bullied my sister and her friends mercilessly!"

Luz expected Boscha to be completely unrepentant about that, maybe even saying something about how they deserved it. Instead, she looked like she was about to cry. "I'm sorry I did that," she whispered so quietly that Luz almost missed it.

"You really expect me to fall for that?" Luz said. Bullies didn't change. They couldn't.

"I don't care!" Boscha said, in a much louder tone, and then winced. "I mean, it doesn't matter if you believe me or not. I'm still sorry. I've been getting therapy…and anger management classes. I realize now that I was just taking my own insecurities out on you."

Well, Luz sure as heck didn't see that one coming. There was no way that Boscha was capable of pretending to have done that much introspection if she hadn't changed and all that was a ruse. "So that's why you asked out Willow," she concluded.

"What? No! Willow is so far out of my league, it's not even funny." She scowled. "Okay, maybe I asked her out. But she said no. She's dating someone else, she said. But she was just trying to be nice and let me down easy. I know the real reason she said no."

"Aha!" King said triumphantly. "So you got your revenge by stealing her best friend's otter onesie!"

Boscha looked bewildered. "Uh, I don't even know what that is. And if I'd done that, don't you think I'd have told her or you? It's not revenge if you don't know about it!" Luz had to admit that there was some logic behind that.

"And you know absolutely nothing about your friend's attempt to feed Luz a love potion?!" King screamed at her, looking murderously angry. Cat, Boscha's friend, had been planning on dosing Luz with a love potion. Thankfully, she got caught and sentenced to forty years in prison, but it was still the one and only incident that summer that had really freaked out Luz.

Boscha appeared furious that King would even make such an insinuation. "What do I look like, some kind of giraffe?! I haven't even talked to Cat since I left Hexside!" Luz believed her.

"Let her go, King," she said gently. "She's not our perp."

King sulked. "But it was so obviously her! Why'd she throw that smoke potion at us, then?!"

"I freaked out, okay?!"

"It's never the most obvious suspect, King," Luz said sagely. Years of reading detective fiction had taught her that much. If it was, then the book would have been very short indeed. "It's often the person you least suspect."

Luz helped Boscha out of the pit. She expected Boscha to punch her in the face. Instead, she held her hand out. After checking to make sure there wasn't a joy buzzer or something concealed in her palm, Luz shook Boscha's hand.

She wasn't sure what to feel about the fact that a bully like Boscha was walking down the road to redemption. On the one hand, it was possible, she knew that much upon further reflection. After all, hadn't Amity changed in such a manner? On the other hand, it was Boscha. Luz wasn't sure that she could ever forgive her, any more than she could forgive Erik Hellinger or any of the many, many bullies that made her life a living hell for so long. But then again, so long as Boscha was at a different school, it wasn't her problem.

King announced that he had a new suspect, so Luz followed him to what turned out to be the hotel that Camila was staying at. Even after starting up a relationship with Eda and Raine, Camila had continued to stay at the hotel, as she enjoyed having her own space in relative peace and quiet. Also, Luz suspected that her deep hatred of Hooty was also a factor.

"Are we going to interrogate my mom?!" Luz asked incredulously.

"You said it's often the person you least suspect," King reminded her. "What better front for a nefarious otter onesie thief than the best mami ever?!"

Luz couldn't help but let out a giggle. King was so cute when he was being ridiculously paranoid. "Okay, hermanito, but let me do the talking this time, all right?" King pouted, but eventually acquiesced.

As it turned out, Luz should have been a bit more thorough in extracting promises from King, because he used his sonic powers to blast a hole through the door, causing Camila to shriek and pull an ice glyph out of her purse. Thankfully, she managed to see who was behind the incident before she could activate it. "Mija, mijo, what do you think you're doing?!"

"¡Lo siento mucho, mami!" Luz said. The last thing she wanted to do was frighten her mom. "King y yo jugamos a detectives y él se dejó llevar."

Camila took a few deep breaths. "Luz…I really do not need this right now. I'm worried enough about Eda as it is."

One of the things that Eda had tried to do was to reform the Grom fight. Grometheus still needed to be fought, of course, but her proposal was that it should be done at the hands of professionals in a closed, controlled environment, instead of by children. Bump had been positively aghast that she was going against years of tradition and had fought tooth and nail to prevent the reforms from going into place. In the end, a compromise had been reached: It would be Hexside alumni, not students, who would fight Grom, still in front of everyone. And, also, anyone who had fought Grom before would be grandfathered in, making it so Luz would never have to face Grom again.

In theory, the Grom monarch would be chosen at random. In practice, Luz was pretty sure it was not a coincidence that Eda had been the first alumni chosen to fight Grom. Eda, however, had been positively delighted to have the chance to fight Grom, as she'd always wanted to be Grom queen during her time at Hexside. Camila, of course, had spent the last couple of weeks quietly and sometimes not so quietly worrying about how her girlfriend would do against Grom.

And Luz hadn't exactly made things better by refusing to tell Camila about how things had gone when she fought Grom. Try as she might, Luz simply could not bring herself to tell her mami that she – not a horrible death, not jerks on the internet, not cheese, but her – had been Luz's worst fear. Camila hadn't pressed Luz on the matter – she felt that it was barbaric to have a champion's worst fear laid bare for everyone to see and respected her right to keep it a secret – but still, Luz felt bad hiding it from her.

"You stole Luz's otter onesie, didn't you?!" King suddenly shouted. "I knew it! I knew that no one can be as perfect as you are!"

Camila did the last thing that Luz was expecting her to do. She burst out laughing. "¡Ay, qué lindo!"

"I know, right?" Luz said.

"Gah!" King shouted. "Stop speaking in your eldritch tongue while I'm conducting an interrogation!"

Luz cast a disapproving glance at King. He let out a squeak and tried to hide behind one of the legs of Camila's bed. "King, I told you to let me do the talking."

"Sorry, Luz."

Luz gave an apologetic smile to Camila. "My otter onesie is missing. We're looking for it, and, well, once you eliminate the impossible, right?"

"I did not take your otter onesie," Camila said. Luz believed her. She actually wouldn't have put it past her mother to hide the onesie, but she wouldn't lie about it. "I didn't even know you brought it with you. And, Luz…weren't you kicked out of your middle school prom for wearing it?"

"Yeah, but I asked Principal Bump, and he said it was okay!" Luz assured her. This was true, although she was leaving out the fact that Bump, after seeing a picture of it, laughed more than Luz had ever seen him laugh before. "Anyway, Amity wants me to wear it, and you know I can't say no to my awesome girlfriend!"

Camila sighed. "I think you're making a mistake, but it's your mistake to make in the end. You probably just left it in the attic of the Owl House and forgot about it. I'll let you know if I see it."

Luz put a hand on Camila's shoulder. "It's going to be okay, mami. Eda's tough. She's the Harpy Lady, the most powerful witch on the Boiling Isles! Grom should be afraid of her!"

"Thank you, Luz," Camila said. "I appreciate that more than you know." She pointed a finger sternly over at King. "I expect you to pay for the damage here, young man. I don't care if you're the king. When you break something, you fix it."

"Yes, mami," King mumbled.

Camila walked over and scooped him into her arms. "Ah, you're a good boy, mijo. I know you mean well." She planted a kiss on his forehead and then put him back on the floor. "Now the two of you best get going. Raine is going to pick me up later. And don't think I won't be at the Owl House when Amity comes to pick you up, young lady! It is the duty of a mother to get pictures of her daughter at her first dance with her girlfriend, no matter how embarrassing it may be."

Luz couldn't help but let out a wide smile at that. Some people may have been embarrassed by such things, but Luz wasn't one of them. She was just happy to have a mother who cared about her so much.

Luz may have been in a good mood, but as they walked back to the Owl House to interrogate another suspect, she couldn't help but notice that King seemed down. "What's going on, King?"

"I thought I'd be better at this detective stuff," King admitted. "But all I've done is traumatize a girl who's trying to be better and break down your mother's door. I bet Harry Dresden would be doing a lot better!"

"First of all, Harry Dresden's faced way tougher stuff than you have. Also, he's a fictional character. And second of all, even if we don't find the onesie, we're still having a great time, aren't we?" She gave King a hug. "You don't have to worry, King. I have a really nice dress as a backup. Amity's going to be so happy to be there that I could dress up in what I'm wearing now and it'd be good."

In Luz's opinion, if anyone was responsible for what King described as the "heinous and unforgivable crime of otter onesie theft," which he vowed he would punish with death by dread scorpion from that point onward, it would probably be the notoriously omnivorous Hooty.

"Now this is going to be our most difficult interrogation yet," Luz warned King as they approached the Owl House later that afternoon. After leaving Camila's hotel room, they had gone to "interrogate" Willow, which had really just involved them playing board games and trying to figure out who her mysterious date was. Other than her letting slip that xe used xe/xem pronouns, they learned absolutely nothing.

"Hooty could very well be a secret crafty criminal mastermind," Luz went on. "This could be the tip of the iceberg of his crimes!"

"Yes!" King agreed. "What's an iceberg?"

Right, of course they didn't have icebergs in a realm where the water was always boiling. Anyway, it didn't matter. Luz couldn't remember the last time when she had so much fun. Even if they never found the onesie, it would all have been worth it in the end. "Stay focused, Detective King. Hooty is relying on us to not have our head in the game. We can't give him that satisfaction." King put on a grim expression. Well, he thought it was grim anyway. Like all his expressions, it was really tremendously cute.

Hooty was singing, tremendously off-key, some song that Luz vaguely remembered having put on her iPod at some point. It didn't matter what it was; any song that Hooty sang would be equally bad, and probably worthy of being banned by the Geneva Convention as a torture method. "Maybe we should waterboard him," King suggested.

Luz's eyes widened in horror. "Where did you even hear about that?! Do you know what it means?"

"Sure I know," King lied transparently. "It means…we bore him by telling him about the water cycle!" Luz breathed a sigh of relief. If Eda had been teaching her little brother about real torture methods, the two of them would have needed to have words.

"Hey, Hooty!" Luz yelled at the top of her lungs, the only way that she could be heard over that horrible singing. "Did you take my otter onesie?"

"NOPE, HOOT HOOT!" Hooty said. "But I don't know what an otter onesie is, so maybe I did! How's about I empty the contents of my stomach and we can find out together?!"

"NO!" Luz shrieked. "It's not worth it!"

"Nothing's worth that!" King screamed.

The two of them quickly scurried inside the Owl House only to find Camila, Raine, Eda, Edric, Emira, Viney, Jerbo, and Lilith waiting for them inside. "What's going on here?" Luz wondered. "Why are you all here?"

"Ask him," Jerbo said, pointing at King. "He's the one who asked us all here."

Luz let out a squeal. "A summation gathering! Oh, King, you were listening to what I said when I told you about noir cliches."

"Actually, no, I didn't hear a word of it," King admitted. "Everyone is here for another reason." He held his hand out and Eda put a very fancy looking piece of paper on it. Luz couldn't read what it said, but she could see that it was signed by Eda.

King cleared his throat and started reading from the paper. "'Whereas Luz Noceda is the best big sister that any monarch could ever ask for; and whereas she's shown me nothing but love, affection, and kindness from the very moment we first met; and whereas I love her so much; now therefore, be it resolved that I, King Clawthorne, King of Demons and of the Boiling Isles – henceforth King Clawthorne-Noceda – do hereby declare her legally my sister and princess of the Boiling Isles!'"

Luz let out a gasp. "You mean it, King? You want me to be your real sister?" She pretended to look sad. "There's just one problem with that."

"What? What problem?"

"I already am!" Luz shouted, and she scooped King up into a hug, hugging him so tightly that she was worried for a second that she'd break his spine. There was a huge round of applause from everyone in the room.

"Now, you do understand that the monarchy of the Boiling Isles is an elective one," Lilith said in her formal, deputy prime minister voice. "When King dies, parliament will elect a new monarch who will assuredly not be you. Um, no offense, dear."

Luz nodded. It's not like she wanted the title of queen anyway.

There was an earsplitting yowl as Hooty tried his best to imitate a doorbell and failed atrociously. "LUZ! YOUR GIRLFRIEND IS HERE!" Luz let out a squeal of delight and threw open the door to see her awesome girlfriend on the other side.

And she was wearing Luz's otter onesie.

"Aha!" King said triumphantly, pointing a claw at Amity. "I should have known all along! Once a depraved cupcake smasher, always a depraved cupcake smasher! You're an inveterate criminal, young lady!"

Amity was struggling to hold back laughter. "King, I've apologized, like, twenty times for that. Can't you let it go?"

"NEVER!" King shouted. "As Luz's brother, it is my duty to protect her from bad influences such as yourself! How dare you steal this otter onesie?"

Amity blinked. "I…asked Luz if I could borrow it yesterday. Didn't I?"

Luz let out a nervous laugh. It was entirely possible that Amity had done that. Unfortunately, she'd had a mishap in potions class that day while brewing a memory potion and had forgotten the previous hour. She had assumed that nothing important had happened at lunch, but evidently, she'd been wrong. "Never mind, Amity, it's all a big misunderstanding!" she said quickly. She turned to face King. "Well, Detective Clawthorne-Noceda, we cracked the case!"

"Yeah!" King said, and gave Luz a high five. He gave a triumphant glare to Lilith. "See? We didn't need your stupid hoity toity Law Enforcement Coven!" Lilith blinked, but wisely didn't ask any questions.

Luz turned to look at her otterly awesome girlfriend. She looked amazing in anything, even an otter onesie. "Sorry, I haven't changed into my own outfit yet…I'll be right back!" Luz quickly scurried over to her room, and put on her dress and makeup. Once that was done – it was amazing how much quicker makeup was to apply when you could do it magically – she returned to the living room, where Camila was taking picture after picture of Amity.

"Eda, could I please ask you a favor?" Amity said sweetly. "These pictures that Camila is taking, would you mind sending them to my parents? I'm sure they'd be delighted to see how their beloved daughter is doing." Luz was pretty sure that Amity's mom would probably have an epic, major league freak-out when she saw them, but she was in prison, so that worked for Luz.

Eda grinned. "Oh, yeah, I think that could be arranged."

"Now, come here, mija!" Camila said. "You're not getting out of pictures, like I said!"

And she was right, and Luz couldn't have been happier. Unlike Amity's vile parents, she'd remember these pictures with fondness for ages to come. After Camila had finally gotten her fill of taking the pictures, Hooty's door swung open, revealing an actual chariot, looking absolutely identical to the one in Cinderella, outside the door.

"Your Highness, may I have the honor of escorting you to the grand ball?" Amity said in a mock formal tone.

"Why, yes, my lady Blight," Luz said in an equally ridiculous posh voice. "You may."