Page 95 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“Minnie!” Ella shouted, from the couch. “I made my parents bring me here, when the news started! My keys still worked!”

I ran across the living room to meet her, same as if Sylas had floated me there. “Of course they did!” I yelled, throwing myself into her arms.

She hugged me at once, then made a face. “Oh my god—why are you so stinky?”

“Dead people!” I said. “It’s a long story?—”

“I’ve been following!” She held up her phone where I could see the screen, and it showed helicopters flying over the Rho Rho Phi cabin. “And what’s on your face?”

It’d been so long since I’d put the blue eyeshadow on, I’d almost forgotten. “Battle paint,” I said, and Ella broke out into the world’s biggest grin. “I love you,” I told her.

“And I love you too.”

I heard Sylas making a soft sound behind me, and Ella’s eyes flashed up.

“This is Sylas. He’s my boyfriend—he helped me rescue you.”

“I’m also the father of our baby,” Sylas intoned, very seriously.

Ella’s eyes about fell out of her head—and I started shaking mine. “We’ll get our own place soon. I swear.”

“Uhh—but if you do, how can I be your platonic life partner? We had plans, Mina,” she said with a laugh. “Joking-not-joking.”

I laughed back. “I mean, I’m down—it takes a village and all that? Plus, I don’t have any idea what the fuck I’m doing, and I don’t think I want to be a doctor anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t gone to any of my classes this semester, for one thing. And I only picked that because it was what my parents wanted. I don’t really know what I want anymore, except to be here. With the both of you,” I said, looking between them.

“Then that sounds like a great place to start—after you take a shower.”

“Only if you order pizza?” I said.

“I’m on it,” Ella said, giving me a salute with her phone, before I turned to Sylas.

“And as for you, my king,” I said, biting my lip and grabbing his hands, pulling him toward the bathroom, “you’re coming with me.”

72

MINA

Seven Months Later

“Do babies really require all this?”Sylas said, looking around at the small mountain of gifts we’d received, after the last guest at the baby shower had gone home.

I was daunted too. “I don’t really know.” I didn’t know anyone else who had a kid, and I was an only child. Now that I was seven months in, women in lines at the grocery store wanted to know my birth plan, and the truth was I didn’t have any.

Step one: have the kid.

Step two: don’t accidentally break it.

Step three: shower it with love, and be prepared to not sleep much for three years.

Which didn’t seem like it rose to the occasion of this many plastic doodads? And pee-pee teepees, in case it was a boy? I hadn’t evenknown those existed, until one of Sylas’s coworkers’ wives had given us some.

“All right,” Ella said, emerging from the back, from where she’d been putting dishes into our dishwasher. “I’ve gotta run to work! Have fun!” she said, escaping out the front door of our shared house.

I knew she’d been trying to give us maximal time alone lately, seeing as in roughly two months we would never get to be. It turned out when there was Monster Security Agency wet work to be done, it was compensatedverywell, and Sylas had been on enough jobs that we could afford averynice place.

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