The four of them filed back outside and into the house. The light had drained enough inside that the front room was halfway to dark, and Tyla cupped his hands together like he was shaping clay and produced a ball of soft white light, which he set on the coffee table. It threw a warm circle across the wood and caught the underside of everyone's faces. 

“Should you be using magic?” Malyn murmured.

“I’m okay,” Tyla murmured back.

Finch perched on the arm of the couch while everyone else found their seats. "So. Pros and cons. I'll start. Being around Luther for longer than we have to is a pretty fucking big con." 

"Having six people on a single bus is quite close quarters," Adin said, "even without considering who those six people are." 

“But if it’s safer for Malyn…” Tyla argued.

“Could be,” Finch said. “Could be worse. Katrina might just forget about us as soon as she has to go to any trouble to find us. She won’t forget about Luther.”

“I don’t think what’s safest for me matters much,” Malyn said. “Like, yeah, we probably do have to skip town, but I’m okay with my life being kinda dangerous. It always has been.”

“There is one major pro to staying with Luther,” Adin said. “The original plan wasn’t to go anywhere in particular. It was simply to stay wherever we ended up. Travelling with Luther keeps that door open. We could change our minds and leave whenever we liked, which means we could afford to be choosy about where we stopped. If we instead leave as soon as possible, we end up where we end up, and that decision can’t be reversed. Luther will be gone.”

“Fuck,” Finch hissed. “That’s a really good point.”

Adin offered him a tight-lipped smile. “Unfortunately.”

"Well. Okay. Raise your hand if you're in favour of staying with Luther." Finch had his own up before he'd finished the sentence. The others followed, one by one, none of them looking thrilled about it. He sighed and let his hand drop. "Guess we don't need a vote for against, then. Though for the record, I'd have raised my hand for that one too." 

“Just remember that we can ditch him literally whenever,” Malyn said. “We could just pull over to the side of the road and leave in the middle of the day, and what’s he going to do about it?”

“Tempting,” Finch said. “Unfortunately, that would also be bad for Shadow, and I’m kind of attached to him at this point.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Malyn said. “Don’t think I didn’t see you holding his hand last night.”

“I was comforting him. I’m allowed to comfort people.”

“Uh huh. You’ve never comforted me by holding my hand.”

“Different people need different things. Unlike you, he’s not a very verbal person.”

“Hey, I can be touchy!”

"Yeah." Finch's eyes cut to Tyla, but he kept his comments to himself. Alone with Malyn, he'd have said exactly what he was thinking, but there was a difference between needling Malyn and loudly inserting himself into the middle of whatever dramatic romantic mess they had going on. "Anyway. I guess we should go talk to Luther again." 

By the time they entered the bus again, it was apparently officially night, because Luther was up and sitting across from Shadow at the small table.

Finch leant back against the kitchen cabinets and crossed his arms. "We've decided to take you up on your offer to travel with you. But there are conditions." 

Luther’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh?”

“You’re not drinking any of our blood,” Finch said. “And that includes Shadow’s.”

"And do I get to counter with a boundary of my own?" When Finch just stared at him, arms still folded, Luther went on. "I have never bitten Shadow. I don't intend to. I—we—do not need you to police our relationship."

Shadow nodded along.

Finch ignored Luther and turned to Shadow instead. "Sorry. You haven't said much to me, but you did tell me he's never bitten you, and I did listen. It's just… I guess you became part of our family while you were staying with us, and I'm very protective of my family." 

"And that's wonderful," Luther said. "But he's my family too, and he was mine first. I'm happy to share. I expect you to do the same." 

“Fine.”

“Any other conditions?”

“That we can leave at any time, but I assume that was obvious,” Finch said, and Luther nodded. “Malyn and I can take turns driving the bike tonight, but we’ll need to get a rack for it. You’re paying.”

“Am I?”

"If we pay for it, we'll feel like we have to stick around so we don't waste the money. If you pay for it…" Finch shrugged. "Maybe it'll motivate you to act like someone we'd actually want to travel with." 

"Why do I get the feeling you're deliberately making this a terrible deal so that I'll say no?" 

“Because I don’t like you very much, Luther.”

Luther inclined his head, accepting the point. “I regret the way I treated you when you were younger, if that helps at all. Or even if it doesn’t. I’ve felt that regret privately, to myself, even if I haven’t truly addressed it between us. If I’m honest, it’s embarrassing. At the time, I was still trying to figure out if I was a monster like Katrina. Or if I was becoming one. I processed that confusion by becoming a bully. At least to the outside world. At the same time, I was trying to earn the trust of the reclusive child who had taken up residence in my house.”

“Well then, I guess I’m glad you saved the bullying for me.”

"No one being bullied would have been preferable," Luther said. "I still have trouble understanding what other people feel, but I've learnt that you don't always need to understand. I don't understand how a refrigerator works either, and yet I know it needs power to run, and I can give it that." 

“Human beings are about as emotionally complex as refrigerators, so I’m sure that’s fine.”

“I see that the important parts of this conversation have passed,” Adin said. “I’ll start getting our things together so that we can leave. I have some old clothes here as well that we may as well take with us. Including some of yours, Finch.”

“The hospital gave me pants,” Malyn said, patting the legs of the sweatpants he was wearing. “But I don’t have any shoes.”

"We'll put some distance between us and this place, grab food, then find somewhere to pick up clothes and shit," Finch said. 

"Think they'll even let us into a clothing shop with no shoes?" Malyn asked. "Some places won't. It could be a whole shoe-buying paradox. You need shoes to get into the shop to buy the shoes." 

"Tell them that you're shoeless because your house burnt down," Luther said. "You all still smell of smoke, though perhaps a human would need to take a closer sniff of you to tell. They would feel too socially uncomfortable to send you away." 

"Genius. So I'll just get the shop assistants to sniff me," Malyn said. "That'll sort it right out." 

Luther smiled. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

Finch went back inside the cabin, dug out a flashlight, and started picking through the cupboards for anything worth salvaging. There wasn't much. Adin had never owned a lot to begin with, and he'd taken most of what there was when they'd moved into their little house in the suburbs. 

He'd been so young, the first time he'd seen this place. The first time he'd laid eyes on Adin. Back then he hadn't trusted a single soul, but he'd been hungry, and within about a week of landing in this world he'd started trailing people around for food. He'd liked the weird ones, the people who didn't quite fit, and Adin had been the weirdest of the lot. After Finch had followed someone up here to the cabin once, he'd kept coming back. 

Some of the other people had tried to trick and trap him—in retrospect, probably for his own good—but Adin had realised that wouldn’t work and had just started leaving the door unlocked instead. 

Picking up the language had been easy enough, survivably functional within a few months, but understanding why Adin kept putting up with him had taken significantly longer. Finch still wasn't entirely sure he'd cracked it. He'd been a nightmare, honestly. Ungrateful, rude, paranoid about everything—had stolen half the pantry on principle, had refused every single thing he was asked just to see what would happen, and had generally made himself as difficult as possible because he'd been so certain he'd get thrown out eventually that he figured he might as well speed the process along. Adin hadn’t thrown him out. He'd kept not throwing him out, and Finch had kept not being able to explain it. 

And then one day, Adin had asked him to help plant a lemon tree in the front garden, and for the first time, Finch had done something that had been asked of him. He'd helped plant it and watched it grow, and he hadn't wanted to break it the way he'd broken so many other things. Sometimes he'd even watered it when Adin wasn't looking. He had desperately clung to the one beautiful, innocent thing he’d had a part in.

Adin had been the original owner of the breach tracker Finch had used throughout his teenage years, the one they still had tucked in the saddlebag on Malyn's motorcycle. Finch had been fourteen the first time Adin had taken him out into the deep woods, following a faint signal. Remote breaches sometimes went ignored, Adin had explained; if someone came through in the middle of nowhere and no one came to find them, they could die out there. 

It had been Finch who had found her, tucked so deep into the undergrowth that he'd nearly walked right past. A baby, barely old enough to walk, dressed in scraps of animal hide, her face smeared with someone else's blood. Finch had been wearing a jacket, so it had been him who'd tucked her in close against his chest and carried her back. 

When they reached the cabin, Finch had sat down on the front step and held her and cried. He'd let himself hurt for that child in ways he had never, not once, let himself hurt for himself. When it was him, he could package it up. Shove it down. Tell himself it didn't matter, that he was fine, that he'd survived it and survival was enough. But he couldn't look at a baby who'd come through a breach covered in blood and tell himself she deserved any of the things that had happened to her. And the thought he could no longer outrun—the one that had kept circling back no matter how hard he tried to dodge it—was that he hadn't deserved them either. 

Adin had called someone to come and take her, of course. She was young enough to be adopted, to find a proper family, a real life. Finch hadn't been jealous. He'd had Adin, and Adin was all the family he'd needed.

Or at least he'd thought so, until a few years later when he'd met Malyn. And then much later, Tyla as well.

When Finch stepped back outside, Shadow was helping Adin pick lemons from the tree. The two of them moved together without speaking, Shadow reaching for the lower branches while Adin handled the higher ones, neither of them seeming to mind the silence. Finch leant in the doorway and watched them for a moment, flashlight hanging loose at his side.

He was glad they'd be staying with Shadow a little longer.