When I had first come to Crossroads, I had thought that I had no actual connection to it. Hell, I thought that I had no real family aside from my father, and that my mother had abandoned us to gallivant off with some new boyfriend.

Then again, I’d also thought that magic and monsters didn’t exist, and I’d been equally completely wrong on every account. I had so many connections to this world. My mother had been a student and then the leader of a rebellion against their genocidal ways. My older brother was a security guard at the school, while my niece was one of my classmates. My older sister had become one of the Heretics at Eden’s Garden. Not to mention my adopted little sister, who had been possessing me for years, and the family that she connected me to.

The point was, I had a hell of a connection to Crossroads and to the Heretic world at large. And now there was this. My grandmother, unbeknownst to almost anyone else in the world, was Virginia Dare. I was literally related to the first English colonist born on the American continent.

Yeah, it cleared a lot of things up. It helped explain how Mom was so important, for one thing. Look at her pedigree. She’d come from the descendent of one of King Arthur’s knights, and from Virginia Dare.

Over the year I’d heard that how effective Heretics were at gaining power, how much we gained from each kill and how useful it was, or even how easily we could become Heretics to begin with, was often affected by our bloodline. Having strong Heretics in your background often made for an easier transition and stronger powers. Not always, and there were exceptions, but it helped.

If that was the case, then no wonder Mom was so strong. She had an incredible family background.

“Eeeeaaarth to Flick. Come in, Flick.”

Startled by the words, I snapped out of my thoughts and focused on my current situation.

I was by the lake at the Atherby camp. Nearby was Brom Bones, the headless man working again to teach me to use my budding necromantic abilities.

It was Saturday, May 12th. A week had passed since that day, the day that should have been meant for family and in the end… Well, I guess it had been for family throughout. It was a Family Day no one would forget, that was for sure.

I still wasn’t being blamed for what had happened, and I couldn’t begin to say how grateful I was for that. And yet, that same gratefulness was tempered heavily by grief and regret. People had died. People died because Mom killed them, even if she had only done so at the orders of Fossor. She was magically bound to obey him, and she had only allowed that to happen because she was protecting me.

So yeah, while I wasn’t being blamed officially for what happened, I was doing an awful lot of blaming myself for at least part of it. But hey, at least Ruthers and his people weren’t using it as an excuse to expel me or anything. That would’ve been pretty hard to work through, considering their idea of expulsion was to wipe my memory and erase my powers.

Now I shook my head. “Sorry, Brom. I guess I’m a little distracted.”

The man’s head, sitting on that little stand of his, gave me a slight smile. “I bet you are. Kind of been through a lot, huh?”

He had no fucking idea. Managing a weak chuckle, I replied, “You could say that. And it doesn’t help that these necromancer powers were pretty useless when Fossor showed up.”

Brom nodded past me, where his body was. A second later, I felt his hand swat me upside the back of the head. “Don’t be an idiot,” the head firmly instructed. “He’s been working on his power for thousands of years. You’ve been a necromancer for about five minutes. Of course you’re not strong enough to do a damn thing to him. But you’ll get there. Maybe you’ll never be strong enough with it to take him in a one-on-one duel. But we’ll get you to the point where you can make some things happen. It’s another bullet in your gun. But you’ve got to practice with it. Not just complain because you’re not perfect right from the start.”

Flushing a little, I nodded while rubbing the back of my head. “Okay, okay, I deserved that. I get it. Practice makes perfect, or at least slightly less terrible. I’m working on it, I promise. Trust me, I want to get this right.”

With that in mind, we kept practicing for a while until our session was interrupted by Tabbris. The little blonde girl came jogging up along the side of the lake, skidding to a stop. Her eyes found mine. “Daddy wants to know if you’re going to stay for lunch.”

For a second, I just looked at the girl. She was doing better now, a week after the event. But on that day, once everything had come out (well, everything she could know), my little sister had felt paralyzed by guilt. The fact that she had been having fun with our father rather than being with me when I, not to mention the rest of her family, needed help, had tormented her. It’d taken me (and the others) a long time to talk her around. She wasn’t responsible for every little bad thing that happened, just because she wasn’t there at the time. It just… took a bit to convince her of that.

At least it was a learning experience. We wouldn’t be relying on just a phone for communication in that kind of emergency. Sariel was teaching us some spells that would help. Even that wasn’t foolproof, of course. But having back-up plans was clearly important. Even if it, again, would take awhile to learn.

“Sure,” I replied, “lunch sounds pretty good, if uhh…” I trailed off, glancing to the nearby head.

“Oh, go on.” Brom used his eyes to gesture, even as his body did the same with his actual hands. “We’ve done enough for now, and you need to refuel anyway.”

Thanking the man for the lesson, and promising to be back soon for another, I headed off with my little sister. As we walked together, I asked, “How’re the volunteers doing with their practice?”

She coughed a bit. “Better now than the first day. They’re learning how to share and… you know, work together.” Pausing, the girl murmured, “It’s pretty new for all of them.”

“Do you think they’ll be ready before the trip next week?” As I asked the question, I thought about what we were actually doing. The trip to Washington was when we would be going for the vault. Dries and the others would be back by then. They were supposed to be here today, actually. There had been some kind of delay with the transport that kept it down a bit longer. But they had worked it out. At least they’d been able to send messages so we weren’t totally lost about what was going on.

In any case, they would be back by the time the trip happened. So we would have help getting into that vault, and past any surprises the Seosten put in our way. And I had no doubt there would be plenty of those. They weren’t just going to give up and roll over because we had both Avalon and Tangle. They would put an army between us and that vault if they had to.

Which was why we would be going in with an army of our own. We weren’t leaving anything to chance. Not only would we have our team along with anyone else involved, like the Moons, Koren, Miranda, and so on, we were also preparing our volunteers. Those were Atherby camp people who agreed to have some of the freed Seosten possess them. The former prisoners were going to be hiding that way, not only providing tips and other information about fighting their own people when the time came, but also ambushing them using their own tactics. If the enemy thought they were facing ten opponents, it would actually be twenty.

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But for that to work, we had to get the Atherby people and the Seosten on the same page. Thus this couple-week course in working together. Tabbris was helping her mother teach that, which I really thought was helping both of them bond and spent time with each other.

My question made the other girl hesitate a little before giving a slight nod. “I think so. I hope so. It’s a lot to get used to, but they’re trying.”

We reached Dad’s cabin then, and I nudged her. “I bet you’re teaching them a lot, Miss Expert.”

I was rewarded with a deep blush from the girl, who stammered “I’m just helping Mama.”

Grinning at that reaction, I teased, “Helping an awful lot from what I hear. Vanessa and Tristan said those guys would need a couple months to be ready if it wasn’t for you.”

The blushing, embarrassed girl was spared having to answer as the cabin door opened and Dad stepped out. “There’s my girls,” he announced before stepping down to embrace me.

Once that was done, he leaned back with a smile. “So, I was thinking we could go out for lunch. Get to some small town somewhere and find a little restaurant. Just the three of us, what do you think?”

My own smile matched his. “That sounds good, but how do we get there, exactly? Did you already bribe Berlin?”

Dad chuckled. “I guess you do know me too well. Yes, he’s waiting inside, if we want to go. He’ll give us an hour or so there and then pick us up.”

Glancing toward Tabbris until the girl gave a quick, eager nod, I then turned back to Dad. “Well, what are we waiting for?

“Let’s go eat, I’m starving.”

******

“You weren’t a teacher when Mom went here,” I announced later that day while Professor Dare, Koren, and I were sitting in her otherwise empty classroom. It was a private and quiet place to have a conversation. We had been having a lot of those over the past week, as Koren and I came to terms with the truth along with the fact that we had to keep it from everyone else, for the sake of the world.

Dare shook her head. “No, I… I didn’t trust myself to be around my daughter like that. Her finding out about me and retaining that information… it would have destroyed the spell.”

Koren spoke up. “But we found out, and we remember. I mean, the spell was hurt, sure. But it didn’t break.“

“It was still a risk,” the woman reminded us, “and the spell was more unstable back then. It hadn’t had time to settle in properly. Disturbing it with something as large as my daughter finding out about me? That would have broken it. I couldn’t let that happen, not after Joshua…” Her voice cracked a little bit and she looked away briefly. “No matter how much I wanted to be with our daughter, I couldn’t let Joshua’s sacrifice be for nothing. I couldn’t risk that.“

“That must’ve been really hard,” I murmured. “All of it must’ve been really hard, actually. You didn’t go to her when she started this whole rebellion thing either. You had to sit there and watch her fight. You had to sit there and watch everything they did.”

Dare’s eyes closed. “That’s why I had to be there for you. Even if you didn’t know who I was, I had to be the one to bring you into this world. I had to be the one to start teaching you about it. I just… I just wanted to be involved. It was a risk, and I knew that. I probably shouldn’t have done it. But I couldn’t let bad things happen to you too. I knew they would happen. But I had to try to help.”

She looked to Koren then. “I am so sorry about what happened to your father. I would have done anything to change it. I had no idea there was a Fomorian that close to you.”

Koren, for her part, swallowed hard. Her eyes were damp as she blinked a few times to clear them. “It’s… it’s not like you haven’t lost people too. The Fomorians just fucking suck.”

“That is a succinct way of putting it,” Dare confirmed.

“Lots of people suck,” Koren added. “Especially Fossor.”

There was a brief moment of silence, as the three of us looked at one another. We were obviously all thinking about the same thing. Or the same person, rather. I was the first to find my voice. “We’re sorry. Sorry we couldn’t stop Ammon before… before you had to…”

“Don’t.” Dare held up a hand. “Don’t say that. Don’t think it. I was in a rush to get to you. I knew you were in danger, but not exactly what the danger was. I let myself end up there… and then I had to deal with the situation. If there had been another way, if I could have stopped him and still saved him…”

“Fossor broke him,” I insisted. “He broke and killed the boy that Ammon was a long time before we ever knew about him.”

“Yes,” Dare replied, “that’s something you need to remember as well, Felicity. The Ammon you knew was a monster who deserved and needed to be put down. Regardless of how he got to that point. Remember what Avalon told you. Don’t let that guilt you feel about not ‘fixing’ him blind you to the fact that his death is a good thing. He…” She trailed off them, shaking her head firmly. “I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear that. It’s done with. It’s just… been quite awhile since I had anyone other than Gaia who knew the whole truth.”

“Is that the real reason why you’re hesitant about this thing with Hisao?” I asked. “Because he can’t know the full truth about you?” I knew that had to be hard. Keeping a big part of herself like that secret from a man that she clearly cared that much about was probably pretty awful. I felt bad enough about lying to Avalon and Shiori about the whole Jophiel situation.

“Yes,” she confirmed softly, with a sigh. “I can’t risk that, not even with him. You saw what happened. Everyone saw what happened.”

It was true. The colors in the sky, the weird organ cloud things, the shaking, it had been all over the place. Everyone had felt and seen it, though humans only remembered it as a series of earthquakes all over the world.

It was a big enough deal that Crossroads had decided that it had something to do with the rope being stolen. They thought whoever had taken it was using it for some kind of ritual, which had started with… all that.

I almost wanted to tell them that those two things were only tangentially related, but oh well. Either way, it had them up in a tizzy. There were Heretic teams scouring the Earth for that rope, along with any sign of whoever had taken it. I really didn’t want to be anyone who happened to get in their way, given the enormous freak out they were having about it.

I also still really hoped that the rumors about Eden’s Garden having something to do with it didn’t gain any more traction. Because again, that kind of conflict was something none of us needed to deal with. And I had to wonder how much of that might have been stoked by Seosten spies, who probably wouldn’t mind having an excuse for powerful Heretics from both places to go missing.

Koren spoke up. “Keeping this secret from Mom, that’s hard enough. I mean, I know why we have to, and I will. But still, I can’t imagine keeping a secret for that long. Staying away from your own daughter, leaving all your friends and other people you care about? That must’ve been awful.”

“It does explain one thing though,” I realized. “You were the one who had Lyell Atherby’s journal, weren’t you? You put it in the library where we would find it. You wanted us to learn about him, wanted to… start us on that.”

Dare bowed her head slightly in acknowledgment. “I did want to give you a little bit of a boost, yes. And I also wanted to give you girls a chance to look into it together. I didn’t know if it would be enough, but I thought a slight nudge might help.”

Well, that was one mystery of the year solved. No wonder we had just happened to pick up a book with all that stuff about Lyell in it. Hell, she was the one who had assigned us the project that led to that to begin with. Now that I thought about it that way, it was pretty obvious.

“You’ve been helping as much as you could all year,” I murmured aloud. “You’ve been doing everything you could without risking the spell. Hell, even Wyatt being here…”

“I asked Gaia to bring him in,” Dare confirmed. “With you and Koren both here… I thought it was time. Even if I couldn’t be there for you the way that I wanted to, I wanted you all to be able to be there for each other. She agreed.”

Koren raised a hand. “I have a question. How did Deveron get assigned it to be their team mentor? I mean you and Gaia didn’t know who he was at that point, right?”

Dare chuckled softly. “That was actually Percival. He asked Gaia to assign the boy to that team. We thought Deveron was playing spy for him, but it was better than someone who might have been spying for Ruthers.”

The woman glanced to the phone on her desk then before clearing her throat. “Are you girls ready to meet the others? It’s time.”

Right. Time for Athena, Apollo, and the rest to show up. Which meant it was time for Avalon to meet Dries. And that would be… interesting.

Koren and I stood together. “Sure,” I replied.

“It’s been a few days since the last reunion, I guess we’re overdue for another one.”