Fu Dog meets them on the outside, stepping from shadows that had hidden him more effectively than Jonathan had ever realized they could. He spares Jonathan a nod but addresses Haley. "Good to see you, kiddo. You good?" He's looking behind them.
He's expecting Susan.
"I'm okay," Haley says, but Jonathan knows that tone. She's not really okay; she's only okay enough for now, and once they're all safe and things settle down, the reality of the situation will hit and hit hard. Hopefully, if this night ends with her crying herself to sleep, he'll be able to wrap her in a hug until she's through. "Mom and Jake and Rose are still coming, but we need to hide before we wait for them. We've got the crystal skulls. And some other magical artefacts you can examine later. Can you call Marty for me?"
Fu eyes the bulging bag Jonathan has been carefully tugging free of the tight space between the dumpster and the wall. "I'll let him know you're looking for him. Phone calls this close are emergency only at this point; it'll be safer for all of us to let word travel through the network. We won't be as easy to track that way." He cocks his head to the side as Jonathan sets the bag carefully at his feet. "I don't think you're being tracked, either. I don't hear anything suspicious."
Jonathan blinks.
He hadn't even thought that the Huntsclan might have slipped a (presumably conventional, if Fu could hear it) tracker into something.
"Tell you what," Fu says as he dredges up a key from some fold of fur or fat and hands it to Haley, who takes it without question. "You lighten your load first. Narrow it down to just the skulls, and I'll find someone to—"
"I'm not giving them up," interrupts Haley. "You can't split them apart. Not when we're so close."
"Haley—"
"We can't!"
Fu mutters something nonsensical under his breath. "Fine. But then you can't hide, not long term. You're going to need to keep moving. If you have as many skulls as you clearly think you do, even half an hour of rest is tempting fate when you don't know how close the guardians are."
Haley nods, so Jonathan doesn't protest even though he'd very much like to know more about these guardians and why staying in one spot is tempting fate. He starts to peel off his uniform instead, Haley following suit while Fu keeps watch. When Jonathan offers Haley the healing remedy, she's quick to take some, and when he meets Fu's eyes, the dog gives him a nod.
One of understanding, Jonathan hopes.
Understanding that Jonathan is doing everything he possibly can to help his family without sacrificing them or himself.
"You renounce them yet?" Fu asks, and Haley rolls her eyes and glances down at the uniform discarded at her feet.
"That's not enough of a renouncement?"
"Did you sign anything?"
Haley sighs. "I renounce the Huntsclan. Happy?"
Fu gives her a flat look. "Did you read what you signed?"
"Yes!"
"And that's all you need to do?"
"I think so."
Jonathan makes a mental note to check with Jake and Rose on that point even as Fu huffs and points a paw at the dumpster. "Roll up your uniforms and stick 'em in there. We'll gather them later in case we can use 'em."
Jonathan bends to follow the order—he's fairly sure it's an order—even though he really, really hopes he won't have to find out what later use Fu might have for them.
He doesn't particularly want any of them to have to step foot in there again.
Haley flings her arms around Fu's neck and says into his fur, "Thanks for everything. I'll see you later."
"Always, kiddo. We'll catch up tomorrow. When this is over, you're gonna need some sleep."
Haley lets out something that might be a laugh or a sob—Jonathan's not entirely sure—but she's smiling when she pulls back from Fu and then takes Jonathan's hand to tug him away from all of this.
It feels like Jonathan's spending half the time looking over his shoulder for threats he'd never be able to spot anyway, but if he hasn't gotten lost despite the roundabout route they've taken, Haley's leading them to the nearest train station.
As it turns out, he's not wrong, but that hardly makes him worry less. Once they're inside, Haley charges forward without a care of being caught on the cameras she'd so carefully avoided earlier, heading for the public storage lockers without hesitation. She doesn't even check the key in her hand before marching up to a specific locker and opening it.
Jonathan is painfully aware of the ache in his shoulder that hauling this bag of magical artefacts is giving him, and he's painfully aware that they're too exposed to be doing this, whatever this is.
He stands beside Haley, letting the open door of the locker block him from sight as he murmurs down to her, "Shouldn't we be more circumspect about all of this?" She knows more than he does, he knows she does, but—
"Fu's friends with security here," she says quietly, finally looking up at him, "and he's not the only magical creature who's wrangled a long-term rental here to have a safe drop point."
There's more to that than she's saying—including the logistics of it, though he supposes magic can get around things like locked doors if necessary—but he knows the details don't matter right now. Haley might not even know them herself. For all that Fu doesn't shy away from talking now that Jonathan knows the family secret, he's realized that the dog can say a lot without saying anything at all.
Jonathan slips the bag over his head at last, setting it as gently as he can at their feet and rolling his shoulders to ease their ache. He'd switched sides on the way over, switched between carrying their cargo crossbody and over one shoulder whenever the strap digging into his neck got the better of him, but Ju-Jazzu hasn't prepared him for something like this, and it's been too long since he's gone camping. He'd have been better prepared for all of this if he were a caterer like Susan instead of a financial planner, spending too much of his time at a desk or sitting in meetings with clients. He's not trained, not properly, and he's certainly not used to playing pack mule.
He'll need to change that in the future. He'll need to do more to make sure he's prepared. Not that he ever particularly wants to do something like this again, but the danger of his daughter's life isn't going to go away. Even if they can sort out this mess with the Huntsclan, they aren't the only danger she faces. The same is surely true of Jake and Rose. Jonathan's had many long talks with Susan about Haley, but he….
He should have started preparing then, the moment he'd found out.
Instead, he'd tried to learn, to discover as much as he could, naïvely thinking that danger wouldn't catch up with them until he was ready.
A fool's hope, that. In more ways than one.
He's not sure he'll ever be ready.
Jonathan stands guard as Haley opens the bag and starts to sort through it, eyeing each skull before either placing it into the locker or leaving it in the bag. When she's through, the bag is more than half empty, and the now-closed locker is full of precariously stacked crystal and glass.
She's hesitating, though.
Biting her lower lip as she stares at the skulls in the bag she hasn't yet zipped shut.
"What's wrong?"
She looks up at his words. "I think I counted wrong. I— This isn't all of them. There's supposed to be thirteen, and this is only eleven. Twelve, with Marty's."
Marty. He's one of Fu's friends if Jonathan remembers correctly, or at least one of Fu's friends that grew into a friend of the family, though Jonathan might be mixing him up with someone else. He hasn't met most of their friends from the magical world. Susan's mentioned taking him to the Magus Bazaar, which sounds like the main magical market in their area, but that hasn't happened yet. "So you think Rose missed one?"
Haley blinks, looking an inch from tears. "I don't know. I don't know if the Huntsclan ever had it. I thought—" She blinks again, swallows, and sniffs. "When Rose came back with this bag, I thought— I thought they'd all be here. I thought they were all here, but I…. Maybe I counted something twice. Or made a mistake."
He drops to a crouch, and she's clinging to him as soon as he's opened his arms. "We can find the last one," he murmurs. "If all we're missing is that one, we'll find it before the Huntsclan does."
She mutters something about the guardians into his neck, but he keeps rubbing circles into her back instead of asking her to explain.
He doesn't know how long it is before she shifts her head and whispers into his ear, "I thought this would be over tonight."
If they are lucky, it still might be. For all Jonathan knows, that missing skull might not even exist. They certainly look fragile enough that one could've smashed, even though Haley's convinced it's out there somewhere. "We'll do what we can." It's the only promise he can make her at this point. "We'll do what we can, and we'll get through this."
She grips him tighter. "No," she says, and he knows her tears are coming before he feels them soaking into his shirt because she sounds like she has a head cold. "It won't be over if we don't have all the skulls. I won't be able to save Jake. Or Rose. And the Huntsclan will hunt all of us because of what I've done."
"This isn't your fault," Jonathan says, trying to be the voice of reason, "and it's not your responsibil—"
"It is!" she sobs into his shoulder. "I'm supposed to protect them."
Jonathan doesn't know what he can say to convince her otherwise, so he just holds her and tells her that she's not alone, that they're in this together, and that they'll all find a way through it. If it all seems to be over and everything is wrong, everything is terrible, then it's not over, so they'll keep fighting because they're not at the end of it yet.
He's not sure how long they stay like that, but eventually Haley's tears are spent and she whispers, "I'm glad you know everything. I'm glad you're here."
He's glad, too, and says as much.
"I love you, Dad."
"I love you, too."
They're heading to Central Park rather than the Pantheon when they're intercepted.
Jonathan's initial surge of fear when he realizes the racing footsteps are coming for them soothes as he recognizes Rose and then Jake—his little Jake—but climbs again once they're close enough that he can see from their expressions that Susan isn't with them. Isn't coming and isn't simply off making other preparations to help them, if he's reading it right.
But guilt is an expression he knows well enough, even if he's not used to seeing it shadowing their eyes.
"Where's Mom?" Haley asks, giving voice to the question he cannot.
Rose glances at something behind Jonathan. Jake frowns at the movement even as Haley turns to see what Rose was looking at. "You didn't tell the guardian that."
"I'm not certain."
"Rose." There's so much weight in her name when Jake says it, so many unspoken questions that only years of closeness can decipher.
She takes a careful breath, but for all that she's pretending she isn't winded, he can see how heavily she's leaning on the weapon she's currently treating like a walking stick despite both ends looking lethally sharp. "It's my best guess, but we can't risk exposing ourselves on a guess. We've always known the guardian's network is extensive. If I'm right, he'll confirm it."
"You mean the Pantheon?" presses Haley. "Why would Mom be there? How would she even get there?"
"She's with the Huntsmaster," Rose answers softly, and Jonathan can see the apology written on her face as she looks at him.
"Then we have to help her!"
Jake grabs Haley before Jonathan can, stopping her before she has a chance to run. From her wince, his grip isn't gentle. "If anyone walks into that trap, it isn't going to be you."
Haley scowls. "Let go."
"Not if you're going to run off."
"We should talk elsewhere," Rose says before Jonathan can figure out how to break up what is surely an impending fight between his two children. She steps swiftly between the two of them, passing her weapon off to Jake before placing a firm arm around each of them. A slight grimace is the only betrayal of how much the action pains her. Impressive, considering Jonathan's pretty sure he wouldn't be trying to stretch his arm too far after an injury like hers, healing remedy or no.
He opens his mouth to tell her they were headed to the park, but she's already walking in that direction, guiding his children with apparent ease.
At least he can catch up to them without any trouble.
Rose doesn't let go until they're in the park but off the path and half hidden by trees. Jonathan drops the bag of skulls onto the grass, and Rose's hand drops from Jake's shoulders to take his own hand in hers. Haley steps back to give them space. Jonathan rests his hand on her shoulder, hoping his strength can steady her.
He doesn't know what else to do.
Well, he doesn't know what else to do to help Haley beyond some of the healing potion he'd given her—it's already taken down some of the swelling on her face—but she's not the only one who needs it. He fishes out the healing remedy again, twists off the cap, and offers the bottle to Rose. She takes a swig of it without comment before handing it back. Jonathan holds it up in silent offer, but Jake shakes his head.
One day, Jonathan hopes he'll learn to read his son half as well as Rose can.
"Why would he take Mom there?" Haley's question is little more than a whisper on the wind, and she leans into him as he replaces his hand on her shoulder. "He doesn't know we stole the skulls."
Jonathan can see the answer written on Rose's face before she says, "He does. He thinks that's one of the reasons you came: to steal the skulls from the Huntsclan and to use them."
We have to go to the Pantheon, Haley had said.
She'd meant to use these skulls, back when she'd thought they still could. Jonathan might not know the details, might not know why the Pantheon is special or how it's connected to these skulls when they're bound to be older than the building itself, but if they're thirteen pieces of a magical artefact, separated for their sheer power…. He doesn't need to know all the details to guess at the effect they might have.
This really could have been over tonight.
"But we can't. I was wrong. We don't have them all."
"Then he thinks you know where the last ones are," Jake snaps, his voice tight. Haley flinches. "And if you go there with what you've got, he'll just steal them back from you. You won't have anything to show for what you did or what you made her do."
Haley's breath catches at the harshness in his words, and they spear a wound into Jonathan's own heart, but—
But Jake's breathing is harsh, and his hand looks to be clutching Rose's tight enough to bruise. The weapon in his other hand trembles.
"We'll get her back," Jonathan says, and Jake's anger—no doubt fuelled by his fear—turns from his sister to his father.
"You don't know that!"
"I know Susan." He knows her better than he ever had before. "If we don't get her back ourselves, it'll only be because she didn't need us and was already on her way."
Something in Jake's expression tightens as he stares at Jonathan. When he speaks, his words are colder than Jonathan would have thought the dragon fire inside of him would have allowed them to be. "You might know Susan, but you don't know the Huntsmaster."
"Mom's smart," argues Haley. "She knows how to fight."
"And you think the Huntsmaster doesn't?"
Rose purses her lips at Jake's words. "He knows who she is, but I don't think he knows everything." To Haley, she adds, "If he'd known you were the American Dragon, you'd have been surrounded back on the first level of the academy. He wouldn't have risked your escape or further infiltration."
Jake's mouth twists. "So he doesn't know we're dragons, just that I'm not Susan's only connection to the magical world."
Rose pulls something from her pocket instead of answering. A green crystal, from the looks of it—something not unlike the kryptonite of comic books if it had been cut and polished to a disc reminiscent of a lentil seed. Jake carefully holds the weapon out horizontally to her, so it's clear enough that he knows what's about to happen, but Haley merely cocks her head at the sight.
It doesn't get any clearer to Jonathan as Rose drops the stone into a slight indent at the base of the weapon's blades. It fits snugly, and she turns to Jake. "Ready?"
At Jake's nod, Rose taps the crystal three times and her face lights up with a soft green glow as the crystal burns with magic.
A heartbeat later, images start to take shape in the light emitting from the stone; another, and those images sharpen to the clarity of film, scarcely a trace of green to obscure them.
It's Jake.
Jake, creeping out of the dorm rooms and past patrols.
Then Rose, frowning down at a bandage peeking out of the sleeve of Jake's uniform.
A frame later, Jake and Rose are both sneaking out in darkness and sneaking back in looking considerably more dishevelled than before. Not terribly suspicious, in Jonathan's book, even if he himself hadn't—
That's blood.
The image has changed, and Jonathan is not imagining the red bleeding through white gauze. He can see Rose trying to wrap Jake's leg in a way that secures his injury without it being terribly obvious, but shouldn't something bleeding that quickly need stitches? It would surely be deep. Unless they had stitched it but hadn't cleaned it? Given how Rose had dealt with her own injuries, that's unlikely, but….
Maybe it had been stitched, Jake had torn those stitches open, and they hadn't had time to redo them? Jonathan can't make out enough of the background to be sure, but he doesn't think they're in a bedroom or an infirmary. Of course, considering he can't see much more than a bookshelf, that's not saying much. They could be in a library for all he knows.
Maybe this had been meant as nothing more than a temporary measure, a stopgap before they could get real care or come up with an excuse to get out of class to tend to it properly.
Maybe—
"You're lucky you fell into a bush when that transformation failed," Rose murmurs, but Jake only grunts.
Maybe dragons heal faster than humans. He's never noticed anything unusual about the speed of Haley's healing, but it's something she surely could have hidden from him, given how much else she'd hidden. Still, even if they do, if that had been the cause of the injury, Jonathan wouldn't have wanted to talk about it, either.
There's a shift, and this time Jake is the one holding the bandages and some kind of ointment. Rose looks to have tears in her eyes as she smears the ointment liberally over a blistering burn on her right hand, and then Jake's helping her to wrap it to keep it protected. It's not something they would have been able to hide; they'd have needed to concoct a story to explain her injury instead.
This time, neither of them speaks.
And then there's—
There's Susan. With Jake. At a restaurant. A park. A coffee shop. A bodega. One scene melts into the next, each showing a different location, from angles that look to be from one security camera or another, until Jonathan loses count.
And then Jake appears alone again, scratching down careful notes in the corner of what must be a library. He scowls before crumpling the papers into a ball and tossing it into a nearby garbage bin and moving out of frame. The image holds long enough for a thin line of smoke to be seen snaking its way upwards from the bin.
"Really?" Rose asks, raising her eyebrows as she breaks the silence again. "Could you not have been a little more careful?"
"I was careful! I didn't use my powers inside the academy. Not at headquarters and not at the training base outside of the city. You know that."
"So it was a spell?" Rose doesn't entirely look like she believes her own words. "That's not exactly less damning evidence if they think you were trying to cover something up."
"No, I—"
"You lost control," Haley says matter-of-factly, and Jake's fists clench.
"I didn't—!"
"You might've," insists Haley. "You looked like you were angry, and dragons new to their powers can burn hot, especially if they don't know how to control it. Gramps taught me loads of exercises to make sure I didn't accidentally set something on fire when I sneezed."
"I didn't set anything on fire!"
"Maybe not with flame, but were you angry enough you could feel it burning in your veins?"
Jake glowers at her; Haley merely smirks back.
Jonathan figures he should simply be happy nothing is on fire now.
Not that it's particularly easy to be happy about anything at the moment. The silent images had carried on while they were speaking. There's Susan preparing for and catering different events—or, at least, he sees glimpses of what he knows were two different wedding cakes; then, Jonathan sees himself bent over files and folders at the conference table and subsequently at the computer in his own cubicle, and wouldn't Mr. Lockjelly love to hear about that little security breach; Haley at her school—homeroom, he thinks; he remembers Olivia Mears from Haley's complaints about the girl—then rushing off to work at the shop—
The shop.
Jonathan feels sick anew, but there's nothing from the inside of the shop, nothing more than a shot of Haley doing her homework by the register that looks like it was taken from the camera across the street. From that new electronics store, if Jonathan had to guess. He remembers Lao Shi complaining about it, and he remembers….
He remembers something he'd written off as a joke. Something which had amounted to them being too worried about drawing in business to fuss about necessary upkeep. With Lao Shi hardly being one to talk, Jonathan hadn't thought anything of it at the time.
Now, he'd guess that Lao Shi—or Fu Dog or one of his friends—is responsible for the Huntsclan having no more footage than this tiny clip of the shop.
But then the image changes again, and Jonathan is looking at his own kitchen as if he were standing on a step stool in front of the spare room they use as extra storage space. The camera at his workplace had been bad enough, but this? It can't have been there all the time. It might not still be there now. But the fact that it had ever been there, that he can see himself sitting at the table, reading a newspaper that's currently hiding both a cup of coffee and his face behind its pages…. Susan's making breakfast, keeping one eye on the stove and one eye on the rest of the kitchen, and Haley—
Haley is chasing something with a broom, something round and tiny and fluffy yet vicious with plenty of teeth it isn't afraid to use, though she stops swatting at it and pretends to sweep when he lowers the newspaper to say something to her. She flashes him a smile as she says something in reply, but the moment he goes back to reading, she continues her assault on the little creature that looked like it might have been intent on tearing apart their house if the damage it has done to the table leg in mere seconds is any indication. He'd wondered why that had looked chewed. He remembers thinking Fu Dog might have picked up a bad habit somewhere.
Jonathan squints at the shadows beneath the kitchen table.
Correction: it's not one little creature intent on destruction but many little creatures intent on destruction.
Whatever it is had multiplied in the time that Haley had stopped, looking more like it had divided itself a few times to spawn fully-grown clones rather than undergoing some sort of rapid parthenogenesis. As Haley starts chasing one creature again, the others follow as if they're trying to herd her and not the other way around. The image stills and hangs frozen in the air as Haley's turning around to try to beat back the creatures nipping at her heels.
It's one of many things he'd never noticed, but to know that the Huntsclan somehow has a record of all of that, has sunk claws into so many parts of their lives, ready to tear it all apart—
"How sure are you that they don't know I'm the American Dragon?" Haley squeaks as Rose separates the stone from the weapon and drops it back into her pocket. The weapon returns to its position at Jake's side.
"You weren't ever met with sphinx hair," Jake says sharply. "Neither was I. They don't know." He takes a ragged breath. "But they know Rose and I were sneaking out, and they saw my injuries even if they don't know how I got them. Worse, they know I was meeting with Susan. That she's my mother. And they know you know about the magical world, so they might think—" He breaks off. "Do you remember when that incident was?"
The attack of the feral dust bunnies, he must mean. "It was before I knew the truth, but not long."
"Maybe a week or two after you captured me?" offers Haley as she pulls away enough that she can look up at him with ease. Jonathan nods his agreement; it was sometime around then.
Jake swallows. "I was already going out looking for Susan by then. I'd started as soon as I could, before I lost the nerve. And once I found her, I— I kept going."
"They must have caught you before I did," Rose says softly. "That's why they started monitoring your family more closely. Especially once they realized you were meeting with your mother."
Jake groans. "They know I wasn't using her as an informant because I never filed the paperwork for that. I never even thought of doing that to cover my tracks. They must think I'm the one who was selling secrets."
"Maybe," Rose allows, "but I doubt it. They would've acted sooner if they thought you were betraying them like that. I think they figured someone tipped you off about Susan, and you went looking for her. And then realized she was your family. And maybe then realized her connection to the magical world. Or maybe they were waiting for you to realize it. To see if you'd report it to them. To test your loyalty."
"And when I went missing, they thought I'd made my choice." Jake pulls his hand from Rose's to press it to his chest; heartbeats pass as he stares blankly at the ground, no doubt lost in the past. When he drops his hand, he looks at Rose. "I'm sorry. If you hadn't helped me—"
"I always would have chosen you over them," Rose says fiercely. "Even if they hadn't known I was compromised, even if I'd remained as Huntsgirl until I made my decision, I would have chosen you."
Jake's still looking at her like he almost—almost—wishes she'd chosen a better life for herself rather than this one with him, so Jonathan says, "I'm glad you're free of the Huntsclan, but we should—"
"Wait," Rose says as her gaze turns from Jake to Haley, "you did renounce the Huntsclan, didn't you?"
"I said the words and took off the uniform."
"There's not more to it, is there?" Jonathan asks, hoping confirmation will nip his niggling worry in the bud before it has time to root and grow into something worse.
"That's what the handbook says," adds Haley before either Jake or Rose has a chance to respond, "but the contract was more confusing. That sounded more like any act that could be considered renouncement would be sufficient."
"There's binding magic in the contracts," Jake says. Before Jonathan can wonder aloud why a magical contract would not keep those with ill intentions from signing without some sort of detection of their ill will or consequences afterwards (maybe magic can't actually do that? Maybe whatever magic the Huntsclan uses can't?), Jake continues, "It'll work for you as well as it works for the Huntsclan, since they might take any act of defiance as an act of renouncement. Initiates—" He breaks off. "Think of it like a trial period. For both sides."
Haley frowns, maybe because she's starting to understand exactly what she'd done.
Or maybe because she's wondering, like he is, what exactly becomes of the initiates who have been deemed to have renounced the Huntsclan when that had never been their intention.
"Who showed you around?" asks Jake, sparing Rose a quick glance as he does so as if to see if she's equally puzzled. "They should have mentioned that, not just given you the handbook."
"25," Haley says, "and he might've, but I wasn't listening as much to that kind of thing. I had more important things to worry about."
Jake opens his mouth, but at a pointed look from Rose, he only says, "25 likes to talk, but he'd have made sure you knew all the important stuff along with the stories everyone hears about. He might've been recruited because he's a veritable genius, but he never would've lasted if he hadn't learned how to survive. He wouldn't forget to tell you something important."
"I hope he doesn't get into trouble because of me," she murmurs. "He was nice."
"Lots of people can be nice under the right circumstances," starts Jake, but Rose gives him a gentle nudge and he quiets, yielding the floor to her.
"25's a recruit, not an applicant or someone born to it. He fell into the Huntsclan's line of thinking, and he didn't look back. He wouldn't still be there if he had. Unless the Huntsclan is holding something over him, he's still there because he's chosen to be there." She hesitates. "I'm not saying he'd slay you the moment he discovered the truth. He might listen to you. He might believe you. He might let you go. You might even convince him to take the risk of abandoning the Huntsclan. But…but people don't like to be wrong, and they like to admit it even less."
Haley steps back and wraps her arms around Jonathan's waist, hugging him. "I think he'd listen."
Jonathan hopes she's right, but he also knows Susan wouldn't want her to count on it any more than he does. He ruffles Haley's hair before dropping his hand to squeeze her shoulder. "Let's hope that's never something we need to find out."
Even if Haley did face him again, if their plan with the memory potion hasn't gone sideways and instead works as they hope, she won't have past interactions with this 25 to fall back on.
Presumably, she'd have to convince him to listen to her once he already thinks her to be his enemy.
Susan has said they've taken every precaution they can when it comes to assuring Haley's safety as she carries out her duties as the American Dragon, but Jonathan still has reservations.
Thinking about that potential scenario only serves to remind him of them.
He's trying to figure out how he can change the subject to something happier without the subject change being too obvious when a spark of blue light catches his eye. He blinks, suddenly no longer searching for a topic as he realizes he's looking at a tiny glowing fairy that could have flown straight out of a storybook. It takes a careful perch on a branch above them.
"Oh, hello there," he says, hoping the fairy is a friendly one. (Are there unfriendly fairies? Folk stories and fairytales have not prepared him for any of this nearly as well as he'd hoped, mostly because half the information isn't true, and he's never sure which half.) "Do you need something?"
They don't really have much time to help, admittedly, at least if the help needed is more substantial than directions, but a small part of Jonathan is hoping the fairy is actually here to help them.
Given how tonight has gone, that might be overly optimistic.
"Are you from the new pixie colony?" Haley asks, but she doesn't wait for an answer. "I'm sorry I haven't reached out yet. Is this an emergency?"
Jonathan knows what she means. Can it wait? She's so young to have to learn to triage different crises, and he's—
He's not sure how long Susan can wait. If Fu doesn't contact them soon, Jonathan will volunteer to check the Pantheon himself. He could do that while the others help the fairies. Pixies. Susan had said they weren't the same, but he still hasn't learned to tell the difference. Meeting more of them would help, though.
The little pixie puts two fingers into her—their?—mouth and lets out a sharp whistle.
The world falls silent in its wake.
The others seem wary but unafraid, even as the pixie vanishes into the foliage, so Jonathan tries to swallow back the trepidation beating in his chest even as his skin prickles with goosebumps.
As the shadows start to take shape, solidifying into a nightmare with glowing red eyes and the weapon of death by its side, Jake and Rose shift to stand as a barrier between them and fall into fighting stances that will allow them to guard each other's backs. Jake's slightly forward, weapon at the ready, while Rose's eyes sweep behind them, no doubt to be sure they haven't missed other threats. When she doesn't fixate on anything, Jonathan takes a step back and tries not to think about how easily Jake is wielding a weapon Jonathan himself cannot even name.
Jonathan pulls Haley to drag her back, too, but she doesn't come with him.
She lurches forward instead.
"Marty!" she cries, and suddenly she's broken free of Jonathan to throw her arms around the being of death and magic that is apparently more friend than foe.
With a twirl of the wrist—well away from Haley, thankfully—the scythe vanishes, and the Grim Reaper (Marty, apparently) hugs her back. "Hey there, kiddo," he says, ruffling her hair. Jake and Rose straighten up. Though they don't move apart, the weapon is lifted to resume what is presumably its resting position rather than kept at the ready as Jonathan walks to stand beside his son. "I heard how things went down, and—"
"We can't destroy them tonight," she interrupts. "What I told Fu was wrong; we're still missing one of the skulls. Besides the one you have, I mean."
Marty glances at the bag less than five feet away. "You sure about that?" He crosses to it before anyone can react, taking in the contents for himself before pulling a skull from his own pocket—one which very much would not have fit inside said pocket were it not for magic—and placing it inside and closing the bag back up. "You've got twelve," he says as he looks back to Haley. "I can take these with me and see about redistributing them, but the only one missing is the one I gave you earlier."
Rose inhales sharply. "Then they have it. The thirteenth skull. They have it with them."
Marty doesn't ask who she means, doesn't even question who she and Jake are or why they're here, but maybe he really does know as much as the rest of them.
Or maybe, if the curl of dread in Jonathan's gut is any indication, he knows more.
"Look, I'm not here because of whatever you told Fu." Marty says as he stands again. "I haven't had a chance to talk to him. I've had my network searching for you. Thought that would be faster than trying to get a line on Fu—which it is, if you tried to reach me the same way."
"Why?" Jonathan doesn't know if he can manage any more words than that, but he doubts he needs more; they must know what he's asking. There's only one important question at this point, and it's not why Marty found them faster while searching with his own network rather than reaching out to Fu Dog.
It's why he was looking for them in the first place.
"Because he can find any soul in mortal danger." The quiet answer comes from Jake, not Marty, but Marty doesn't deny it.
Jonathan's stomach plummets past his feet, dropping into some endless abyss within the earth, even as Haley whispers, "Is Mom—?"
Marty huffs out a breath, one that sounds entirely too much like weary resignation to settle Jonathan's nerves. "I haven't gotten the official call yet, but I'm on alert."
Breathe. Jonathan needs to breathe. As soon as he remembers how.
Haley backs into him and latches her arms around his waist again.
He hopes she never lets go.
One of Marty's hands plunges back into his pockets of shadow, and Jonathan isn't sure any of them blink as he withdraws something from its depths that rests in the palms of his hands for all of them to see.
Haley starts to tremble as Marty murmurs something that sends a shiver down Jonathan's own spine even though he can't make out the words. The object begins to glow with a golden light, almost bright enough to blind at this time of night, and Jonathan glances towards Jake and Rose to see what they make of it.
Neither of them is looking away, their attention as ensnared as Haley's.
Maybe they know what this is.
He still doesn't.
It's changing shape even as he looks back at it, something that was once flat like a pocket watch ballooning into the shape of a globe as the symbols on its side spark with power.
A compass, he realizes as his eyes finally manage to track the lines etched into the circumference. A golden compass, bright with power, spinning at dizzying speed.
Haley draws in a sharp breath as the needle—the compass itself, really—stills in Marty's skeletal hands.
Jonathan is familiar enough with compasses to know at a glance that this one isn't going to help them find magnetic north.
Through whatever magic it possesses, it points instead toward a missing piece of his heart.
"My guess?" says Marty as he looks over them all. "She's at the Pantheon."
Rose had been right.
Would things have been different if they'd gone there straight away?
Is he going to be asking himself that question every night for the remainder of his days if this…if it doesn't go well?
There's a horrible beat of silence as Marty passes the compass to Haley, who lets go of Jonathan to take it with trembling hands. Marty's voice is still quiet as he adds, "You guys will want to get there before I have to. Good luck."
