I had to work hard to suppress the grimace I wanted to make when I first saw Mateo. He looked tiny, the expanse of hospital bed simply dwarfing him. His pallor was washed out. The dark rings under his eyes made him look older, more careworn, and the cast on his arm looked uncomfortable. I’d broken a few bones along the way, so I was sympathetic. Gran had sped along my healing when training accidents occurred, but she was far less understanding when my youthful recklessness left me injured. I’d healed a broken arm the long way around once upon a time. Yet, despite the tiredness and discomfort, Mateo was still a little boy. His eyes locked onto Gabriella’s hand in mine and a kind of manic glee gave his eyes an almost unnatural shine.

“Gabby’s got a boyfriend! Gabby’s got a boyfriend!” He shouted, using his good hand to point at our hands.

Gabby turned bright red at her bother’s accusation and dropped my hand like it was made of white-hot metal. For my part, I was torn between mild amusement and mild exasperation. I’d never had any brothers or sisters, so this kind of teasing was something I’d only witnessed as an observer. I’d never gotten to participate. I knew that some kids formed deep attachments with each other, getting so close that they might as well have been family, but I hadn’t been one of them. There had always been a distance, partly born of innate distrust when I was very young. Later, it was a distance born out of the gulf created by my unfortunate insider knowledge. You couldn’t get too close to normal people when you literally couldn’t tell them about how you spent most of your time. Gran and Bill had both been very clear about what could happen when you revealed that knowledge to outsiders.

Some long-dormant impish streak in me surfaced at that moment, and I shot Gabriella a wicked grin. “Yeah, girlfriend, where’s my kiss?”

For a brief moment, Gabriella’s eyes went very wide and her mouth dropped open. Then, her face went through a complex series of transformations that started with getting even redder, then assuming a vaguely betrayed look, and finally descending into annoyance. After all of that, she glared at me and punched me in the shoulder.

“Ouch,” I said, massaging the spot where she hit me.

“That’s what you get for teasing me,” she said, drawing herself up with whatever dignity she had left.

I kept chuckling but swiftly raised my hands in surrender when she glared at me again. “Alright, alright, that’s fair. How are you doing Mateo?”

Mateo tried to shrug and then winced a little. “My arm hurts.”

I nodded. “Yeah, it’ll be like that for a while. But, the good news is that does get better. Plus, you can get people to write on your cast.”

Mateo looked at his cast with new eyes. “Really? Do you want to write on it?”

“Maybe in a few days. It has to finish hardening.”

Mateo’s face fell. “Oh. Well, okay. Gabby, when can we go home?”

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Gabby glanced over at me, and I gave her a nod. She sat down on Mateo’s bed and explained the situation to him. Well, she gave him the highlights. Mateo frowned at that.

“But why can’t we go to our house?” He complained.

“We can’t go back until the police say it’s okay.”

“How long will that take? It’s not like they’ll do anything.”

“It may take a little while,” Gabriella admitted. “George isn’t coming back, though.”

“He’s not?”

Mateo sounded like he’d gotten 500 Christmas presents all at once. It’s a special kind of hate when someone is that happy that you’re gone. Gabby smiled and nodded.

“Yeah, he’s really gone. The police are looking for him. If anyone finds him or sees him, he’s going straight to jail for hurting Mom.”

“Good,” said Mateo with infinite satisfaction, before his expression turned pensive. “But where will we go?”

The poor kid sounded lost and even a touch afraid. I suppose when a shitty home is your only home, the prospect of not having it to go back to would seem frightening. That was probably particularly true for young kids, who lacked any real control over where they went or even who they went there with. I didn’t miss that lack of autonomy. Yeah, life might hand me some crap choices, but I got to decide how to deal with them. If I didn’t like where I lived, I could leave. I could work harder and move somewhere nicer. Hell, I could just hop a bus and start over somewhere. It might not be easy, but the choices were all mine. When you’re seven, you just got told.

Gabby gave him a gentle smile. “Jericho said we could stay with him for a while. If everything works out okay, at any rate.”

The kid eyed me for a little while before he gave what he probably meant to look like a nonchalant shrug. He was clearly trying to put on some kind of jaded adult mask.

“Okay,” he said.

I grinned at him. “I love the enthusiasm.”

Gabby snorted and even Mateo smiled a little. I hung out with them for a while, mostly doing my part to entertain Mateo and give Abby a break for fill-in parenting. Plus, it let her go check on her mom. When she came back from that adventure, she looked a little pale. She waved at me from the door to join her in the hall. I gave Mateo another big grin. Although, he looked so drowsy that I’m not sure he even noticed.

“Hey man, I think I’m going to go track down a soda. You want something.”

He yawned and shook his head. “No. Not thirsty.”

“Okay. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I glanced back when I got to the door and the kid was already fast asleep. I suppose he probably needed it. He hadn’t taken quite the same kind of beating that I had with the Raven’s Court, but healing is still hard work. I stepped out into the hall and found Gabriella leaning against a wall. She looked like she wanted to puke.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Mom is in really, really bad shape. Worse than they thought. She’s going to be here for a while. Weeks probably.”

I grimaced. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was one thing when I thought we’d just be at your place for a few days, but weeks. We can’t be there for weeks.”

“Yeah, you can. One, you need somewhere to go. Two, do you really think I’d let my girlfriend go somewhere else after all of this?”

That got the ghost of a smile out of her, at least.

“You’re as bad as Mateo,” she said. “Still, thank you. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

“Oh God, not with the repayment talk. You want to pay me back? Graduate. Go to college. Build a better life for yourself. Okay?”

“Okay.”

It took a while, but a social worker who struck me as profoundly overworked eventually turned up. I say she was overworked because we didn’t even need to do much convincing. Once she established that Mateo knew me, liked me well enough, and that my place was in the same school district, she was sold. I have no idea if it was kosher, but everyone walked away relatively happy. I chalked that one up in what had recently been my very empty win column.