The Things We Water

I blinked at the two furry faces currently staring at me from their spot on top of my bed.

So different and yet so alike. One was dark, with a short coat, long and narrow features, and brilliant red eyes. The other the complete opposite with a pale, longer coat, shorter and fluffier, and bright blue eyes. One loved me, and the other… let me do her hair sometimes. They both blinked at me again.

One of the things I had never, ever considered was how often—as a guardian—I was going to be stuck being stared at by a bored face, expecting me to help entertain it. I was well aware that I was lucky Duncan enjoyed watching TV, wasn’t high-energy, and napped a good amount throughout the day.

But every once in a while, he got ants in his imaginary pants, which was going on at that moment. Only it wasn’t just one set of puppy dog eyes boring a hole straight into my soul, it was two.

Neither one of them were vocalizing that they wanted to do something, but words were unnecessary.

I could feel what they were asking for, and that was for me to figure out something to keep them busy.

It was the weekend, after all.

And maybe they didn’t need to forget things that were going on in their lives, but I wouldn’t have minded.

It had been a long week, and I’d spent more time trying not to think about men than I ever would have imagined. Men as in Henri, Franklin, Ilya from Alaska, and Franklin’s freaking brother. When I’d been younger and dumber, boy problems would have sounded like fun.

They weren’t.

But I’d been trying my best not to let any of them get me down—I had promised my parents after all when we spoke on the phone for an hour after my conversation with Franklin—which meant I’d been keeping myself as busy as possible since the night that had changed everything and nothing at the same time.

“It’s only eleven. Do you want to go for a walk?” I suggested, standing in the doorway between the bathroom and the bedroom.

Nothing.

I tried again. “What about an ATV ride? We can have a picnic, play hide-and-seek?” They both had such good noses, it wasn’t exactly challenging, but Duncan hadn’t outgrown the game yet.

My donut stared at me, but I felt his “yes”after a moment.

One down, one to go. “What do you say, Agnes? Want to come?” I asked her.

How she managed to be able to glare at me despite being in her mini wolf form was honestly a talent, but she was doing it. Her short, little growl, I took as a yes.

Phew. “All right, let’s go then,” I told them, cocking my head toward the door before they changed their minds.

Both pups took flying leaps off the bed, and I winced when Duncan’s was a little less than graceful and he landed sprawled out on his stomach, but he got up like nothing happened. Agnes disappeared through the small door, but he waited for me. A two-year-old magical boy was the most reliable male in my life—my dad not included. It made me love him even more somehow.

After brushing my teeth, smoothing on some deodorant, and taking a quick pee, I put my boots on and slipped my phone into the fanny pack I had hanging off the doorknob, clipping it on and giving Dunky a scratch behind the ear before we took the staircase where Agnes waited on the landing. We had just gotten to the first floor when both puppies’ heads cocked to the right a moment before the clip-clopping of feet echoed and a satyr woman appeared around the corner from the direction of the kitchen.

It was Phoebe.

The frantic expression on her face put me on alert. “Have you seen Shiloh?” she called out in a shaky voice.

Since Agnes and Duncan couldn’t exactly answer, I did. “Hi, Phoebe. No. Not today.” After school yesterday, sure.

“Pascal?” Phoebe tried.

I shook my head, hoping this wasn’t going where it seemed like it was.

She managed to look even more sick, and her hands went to her face. “Do you know where Randall or Ani are?”

Nothing good could come from her asking for two of the ranch’s security people. “No.” It had only been us three at breakfast, Franklin and Henri had both been pretty scarce lately, and I let that thought go as soon as it entered my head. “What happened? Can I help?” I asked.

Phoebe sniffled, her big brown eyes widening. “I can’t find Shiloh or Pascal. They were playing outside of the house while I was on the phone with my sister…. I can’t find them. They didn’t warn me they were going anywhere, and I checked Pascal’s, but no one was there because I said I would watch him… but now I can’t find them.”

I walked right up to her, barely containing the urge to hug her or put my hands on her shoulders to tell her everything was going to be okay. “I would be freaking out too. I’ll help you look for them, all right?” I glanced over at the puppies. “You two will help, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Duncan answered as Agnes stared at me with her bright blue eyes.

“I don’t know where anyone is right now, but I’m sure someone will help you find them faster than they would help me if I asked. I’ll start looking with these two, and you can get other people to help.” I took her hands. “We’ll find them. How long do you think it’s been since you saw them?”

She whimpered, clutching my fingers tightly. “I don’t know, Nina. We were on the phone longer than I’d expected.”

“It’s okay. I have my phone. I’ll come back in an hour if I don’t come across them, and we can reconvene here. Sound good?”

We would try our best. I had a baby wolf and a baby Duncan, and they could smell things from much further away than I was able to. When he was even younger, Duncan had found some stuff that was genuinely impressive—if you could be impressed by finding dead animals.

“We’ll start looking. Please call me if you find them, all right?” I told her.

Phoebe nodded quickly, and in no time, she was down the opposite hallway, close to where the nursery was. Meanwhile, the pups and I headed down the main hall that went by the living area and out the back door toward the vehicle warehouse.

Agnes stopped for no reason, the air around her changing before her human form appeared.

“Do you want to stay?” I asked.

“I told them not to go,” she blurted out, managing to look grim in gummy bear pajamas and two pigtails that were half undone.

“Not to go where?”

“To look for the waterfall.”

“What waterfall?” I’d never heard about a waterfall.

“The waterfall.” The way she said it made it seem like I was an idiot for asking for specifics. Like there was one that I should’ve known about.

I crouched. We could talk about the waterfall later. “You think that’s where they went?”

The unflappable menace didn’t look so unflappable. She started wringing her hands. “Maybe.”

Maybe wasn’t “no.”

I nodded. “Do you know how to get there? Or know what direction it’s in? We can take the ATV. And even in this form, you can smell better than I can, so you can help me find them, if you want to go.” I looked at Duncan. “You smell too and tell me if you sense them close, okay, Donut?”

“Yes,” Duncan agreed, his tail swinging behind him.

“Are they gonna get in trouble?” the little girl asked.

“I have no idea,” I told her. “But it would be better for them to get in a little bit of trouble than get hurt, or worse. Right?”

I’d known she was a logical child, but I definitely knew it when she agreed almost instantly.

When we got to the warehouse, there were a few vehicles missing, which wasn’t uncommon since it was the weekend. I got into the first one that fit four to six people. Agnes jumped on the bench seat to my right, and Duncan got in too, opting for the floorboard. I didn’t see a single person after I pulled out of the garage, so I tried to call Henri. He didn’t answer, and his voicemail was full. I tried calling Phoebe, but she didn’t answer either, so I left a voicemail.

“Hi, Phoebe, there’s a chance the boys might have gone looking for a waterfall. I don’t know where that’s at, but I’m going to follow Agnes’s lead. Please call me. Bye,” I rattled off before hanging up. I guess it was just going to be us. “Point where you think they might have gone, Mini Wolf,” I instructed the girl buckled into the seat next to me.

Duncan would figure out a way to tell me if he noticed anything, that went unsaid.

She pointed straight out into the woods to the side of the warehouse, but what was I going to do? Ask her if she was sure? I had no idea where to start, and one place was just as good as any other when we had no other leads, I figured.

Shiloh and Pascal were going to be dead meat, and I couldn’t say they weren’t going to deserve it.

With my two companions sniffing the air, we were off down the gravel road, going in the direction that Henri and Randall had both taken me on the times we’d ventured out into the more remote parts of the forest. Fortunately, the vehicle we were in was electric and quiet, other than the tires going over small rocks and loose branches too small to be relocated.

“Pascal! Shiloh!” I started yelling once we’d gotten some distance from the clubhouse. The road was getting less maintained and more dirt-packed but still visible enough to follow. Duncan and I hadn’t come out in this direction much when we went for walks. The paths were rougher over here than they were everywhere else on the ranch. “Do you smell them?” I asked the kids.

Agnes’s eyes swept the area. “Not close.”

“No,” Duncan answered.

I slowed down and stuck to the road that was getting narrower and bumpier the further we got from the residential part of the ranch. The trees were becoming slimmer and in thicker clusters, the magic in the air getting sweeter.

A small hand touched my arm eventually. “Around here.”

I let the UTV come to a stop, and Agnes unbuckled her seat belt and got out before I did the same, Duncan following. Agnes moved through the trees like she knew each and every one of them by name, taking big inhales through her nose as she walked forward a little bit, then turned one direction then another, visibly sniffing. Her face was pinched in concentration.

“Shiloh! Pascal!” I yelled again.

“This way,” Agnes instructed, her hand rising to point, before frowning. She looked so much like Henri making that face, it would have made me smile under any other circumstances.

Duncan and I followed her, walking on and on and on, further and further from the UTV. I really hoped I could remember where I’d left it. Eventually, we came up to a river. It was raging, gurgling over half-buried boulders, pushing an unimaginable amount of water every second.

“What are they doing coming out here by themselves?” I asked. “Why are they looking for the waterfall? Because they’re bored?”

That got her to glance at me, her eyes wider than normal.

“I just want to know. I’m not going to ground them. They’re already busted.”

She didn’t answer, but she did keep going, waiting a little bit before muttering something under her breath.

I asked her to repeat herself. “I’m not going to get them in trouble, Agnes. I promise. I just want to understand why they keep wandering off into the woods.”

“They want to see the waterfall,” she answered in a huff.

The urge to ask whatfreaking waterfall was on the tip of my tongue again. Matti, not Henri, nobody had ever brought up a waterfall of any kind. But the kids wanting to see it… that made sense. If no one wanted to take them… I could put the dots together.

I wanted to see the dang waterfall now.

“Is that what you all went looking for before? The day you came across the swamp thing?”

She didn’t hesitate to answer that. “Yup.”noveldrama

Hm. “Is it a nice waterfall?”

“Yes, Nina.” She slowed down to side-eye me. “It’s the magic one.”

A magical waterfall?

I blinked.

How could a waterfall be magical? The trees here looked different, sure. I’d noticed during my walks with Duncan in the past that their trunks had kind of a glittery sheen to them, their leaves ranging in shades of green, and even Henri had suggested that things were special because of the magic in the land. Maybe the trees around the waterfall were more epic? Maybe there were magical fish in it?

I definitely wanted to see it now too.

Agnes stopped so abruptly it was like she ran into an invisible wall.

“What is it?” I leaned around her and squinted into the distance.

But I didn’t need to look far.

Spencer the sasquatch was leaning against a tall pine, looking about as pissed off as he had the other times I’d run into him.

“The dumbasses are in the river,” he growled in that inhumanly deep voice.

I was about to argue that they weren’t dumb and that he was being rude, but the hairy mythical being huffed.

“If the river doesn’t get ’em, I will, their wailing’s that annoying. I was trying to take a nap,” he grumbled. “I’d get to them soon if I were you.”

The urge to argue with him was on the tip of my tongue again, but he was warning me for a reason.

I didn’t miss that part.

Spencer deserved to have someone explain to him why he should care about children, but that person wasn’t going to be me.

“Thank you,” I told the sasquatch with an attitude problem, twisting my body enough to see through the split in the tree line. Light glinted off the surface of the river to our right, the sounds of the water rushing so much louder now. The river seemed even wider in this spot.

Agnes, Duncan, and I all started moving again, even faster that time. Soon, Agnes’s hand went up, and she violently gestured ahead. “There! They’re over there!” she shouted just as a scream pierced through the forest.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the bright flame of Duncan’s tail go vertical.

“Help!” a shrill voice wailed.

I recognized it, and that alone had me pointing violently at the ground, making brief eye contact with both Agnes and Duncan, who looked as freaked out as I suddenly felt. “Stay here!” I commanded before I turned and ran parallel to the river. If I went down to the embankment, I’d lose too much time and not be able to cover the distance as fast.

The shouting got louder, shriller, and more frantic, and I tried to find where it was coming from, but there were so many trees, and I was the wrong person to run in the forest in a panic. But I was the only person in the forest other than Spencer, and I wasn’t about to expect him to turn into anyone’s hero.

“Help!” a clear, high-pitched voice shrieked.

I ran. I ran and I ran like my life depended on it. I’d looked on the map shortly after we’d moved here, and now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember seeing any bodies of water so close to where the actual ranch was. There was a river further away by where the nature preserve part of the property was, but that wasn’t close. And that was something to wonder over later… when I wasn’t running toward a river raging in early fall, when every other one I’d ever seen had usually been starved from rainfall and snowmelt by this point in the year. But why should that surprise me? Since when had this place made any sense to begin with?

My legs pumped under me, and I was pretty sure I heard trampling from behind, but I couldn’t worry about Agnes and Duncan when they were more responsible than Pascal and Shiloh, at this point. Just as I was about to yell at them to stay again, a figure appeared by the riverbank.

And my stomach sank a split second later when I cut down to it.

Shiloh stood on a boulder just shy of the edge of the river, shivering and soaked, and Pascal….

Pascal was balanced on a rock jutting out of the water, maybe a couple inches at the most. In the middle of the fucking river. A river that had no business flowing the way it did, like it was early spring after a heavy winter. Pascal’s teeth were visibly clenched, his arms were at his sides for balance, and he confirmed he was the one screaming when he let another piercing one out.

“What the fuck?” I hissed under my breath, not wanting to yell and scare either of them. But they must have smelled me or heard me because they both looked over.

I wanted to hold up my arms and ask what they were thinking, but I realized then why Spencer had said what he’d said.

If Pascal fell into the river….

I couldn’t let that happen.

Leaves and bushes rustled along my legs, and just to the side of them were Duncan and Agnes. They had followed me. My ride or die and the girl who I was pretty sure saw him as a little brother.

I would die before I let anything happen to them.

“Stay. Here,” I repeated, pointing at the ground. “Please. Don’t go in the water for any reason. Do you understand? No matter what happens, you don’t go in.”

“Yes,” Agnes answered.

“Yes,” Duncan told me, meeting me with those bright red eyes. He was worried.

“Please.I’m serious. Stay here where it’s safe. I love you so much. I love you both,” I said, taking my phone out of my pocket and thrusting it toward Agnes. “Stay here,” I repeated as Shiloh shouted something that sounded really close to “Shit!”

Forcing myself not to look behind me—because I had to trust them; I did trust them—I scrambled closer to the river where Shiloh was, the bank grassy and muddy and getting steeper the further down river I went. I moved from one rock to another, some boulder-sized, some barely big enough to fit my toes, but I didn’t have time to worry about busting my ass.

It was faster to get to a shaking Shiloh than I’d expected, but I figured being led by pure panic helped. When I got close enough, I reached out. “Grab my hand, Shiloh,” I called out.

The little boy shook from his spot maybe two feet from the bank. “I’m scared!”

The water was high and looked deep, even though he wasn’t that far in, and I didn’t blame him, but… “It’s okay. See? I can reach you.”

Opening my hand, I coaxed him to grab it, trying to ignore Pascal wobbling on the rock he was perched on. One kid at a time. I couldn’t freak out this soon.

“You can do it. Come on, Shiloh!” I egged him on.

His little hand trembled, but he stretched, reached out, and grabbed me. “On the count of three, jump, okay?” I told him. “One! Two!”

I didn’t get to three and almost slipped when he jumped early and I wasn’t ready, but I managed to pull him into me with his momentum, and we both stumbled when he landed in my arms.

We didn’t have time to celebrate though.

I picked him up, set him higher up on the bank, and ordered, “Don’t move an inch.”

Damn, that water is high, I thought when I was facing the river again. It didn’t help it was muddy, which made it impossible to see the bottom.

Eyeing the distance between us, there was no safe way to get across to Pascal that way. My legs weren’t long enough to safely jump to where he was. I wasn’t even sure how he’d managed it. There was a log halfway jutting out of the water thirty feet along the river, but it was way too far to reach him from it….

“Nina! I’m scared!” the little boy wailed in a frantic voice that was probably going to give me nightmares.

“I’m coming!” I yelled back as Shiloh made a distressed sound, but I couldn’t reassure him. I had to act fast. Act now.

But I swear I decided right then, that if I died, I was going to come back and haunt Pascal when he was older and it would be less traumatizing

I can’t let that happen. I couldn’t leave Duncan. I didn’t want to never speak to my parents again. I didn’t want to miss out on Matti and Sienna’s lives. And damn it, I wanted Henri to mark me again with his cheek on my throat.

Before I could waste more time or overthink this crap more than I already had, I leapt to get to where Shiloh had been perched. The water flowed aggressively around my feet, but I couldn’t focus on it. Holding my breath, I hopscotched the last few embedded boulders I could reach before the wide gap that separated me from Pascal. And that was when he screamed again, thrusting his hands out at his sides to keep his balance.

“Nina!” he hollered, wobbling so hard he almost fell in.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I had to act. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and someone with better survival instincts was more than likely going to call me an idiot, but… I squatted until my butt hovered over the surface of the water and called out, “I’m going to try and walk over to you. If I get swept away, don’t jump in after me, Pascal. Stay right where you are as long as you can. Do you hear me?”

His face was white, his expression so totally different from the cocky, mischievous boy that cackled over the weirdest stuff. “Yes!”

“If I get to you, I want you to get on my back, and we’re going to try and get to that log over there. You see where I’m pointing? The fallen one halfway across the river?”

“Yes!”

This had to be the worst idea I’d ever had. Why didn’t I have rope? Why wasn’t this river low?

What the hell had they been thinking trying to cross it?

“If you fall off—” I started.

“What!” he screeched. “I’m gonna fall?”

He was making this worse. “If you fall off of me, if, I want you to float on your back with your legs up and try to grab onto a branch or swim to the side with your arms. But only if you fall into the river, do you hear me?” I yelled, trying not to get angry he’d gotten us into this situation.

How in the world had he managed to get all the way into the middle of the river in the first place?

“Yes!” He was so scared his shaking was visible, but that wasn’t going to stop me from wringing his neck if no one else did.

“And nobody jump into the water if anything happens to me, okay?” It was my turn to shriek—sounding deranged—so that hopefully Duncan would hear me. He was the only one I was worried would risk his life to help me if something happened.

Someone shot back a “yes,” and I was going to take it. I didn’t have time not to. Knowing I was more than likely going to regret this, I settled my butt on the rock beneath me and slid my legs into the water, gritting my teeth the whole time. It was so cold.I touched bottom sooner than I’d expected, but the power of the water rushed between and around my legs. It was only about waist high, but the current was strong. Too strong.

“I got this. I got this. I got this,” I said out loud to myself as I started my journey with a single step. Which I realized was a strong word when I twisted around to see how far it had gotten me. It was more like… a small shuffle. A very small shuffle. My feet grazed the slippery pebbles beneath them, not wanting to break too much contact with the bottom. The last thing anyone needed was for me to trip over something, and the current was hard enough to ignore in the first place.

I took another small step with the same leg, then dragged the other one forward.

Careful.

It was so freaking hard to move. I held my arms out at my sides to keep my balance, my legs slightly bent.

This was a horrible idea, and maybe I was descended from Rumpelstiltskin, because this kid was going to owe me his firstborn, I decided at some point.

Something hit me in the calf, but I managed to keep standing. I shuffled, then shuffled a little more, regretting so much right then. I couldn’t decide what in the hell I’d been thinking doing this. Getting into the water, Nina? Dumb, dumb, dumb. I was pretty sure that was the first thing every single raft guide I’d ever met had stressed: do not stay in the water.

And you know what? Pascal wasn’t just going to owe me his firstborn. I was going to get his second and his third, and every child his children had. This was going to be my supervillain origin story. I was going to start claiming children’s lives and futures after this. They were all going to owe me.

My foot slipped, and I had to wave my hands in the air to keep from going under, my heart fluttering. Someone from the direction of the bank yelled as Pascal started crying louder, but I had to ignore them all. I had to focus. I had to get to him and make it back.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I could do this. I could do this. This was a magical river. Maybe it would give me nicer skin or add a couple years to my life the longer I was in it. People paid a lot of money for cold therapy bathtubs, and here I had this river for free.

It’s not that cold, I tried to lie to myself.

What felt like ten minutes later, with water rushing at my hips and my entire back soaked, I made it to Pascal, who was still making a scene with his tears and sobs. Snot ran down his mouth, literal tracks of tears down his cheeks, and he was wailing louder than La Llorona I’d heard once when I’d stayed by a river in Texas. I never went there again.

“Get on my back, Pascal,” I told him in a voice that would have impressed Henri, refusing to meet his eyes because I had to stay focused. If I thought about it too much, I was going to get scared. It wasn’t just my life I had to worry about.

The little boy didn’t hesitate; he jumped on my back so fast and aggressively I almost lost my balance. But Pascal didn’t stop there, even though that was exactly what I’d asked for. He climbed me like a jungle gym. Knobby knees hit either side of my face as he scurried up my body instead of just piggyback riding me. This is going to be harder than I thought. The other bank was closer, but then how was I going to cross over again? We were going to have to go back the way we’d come. It was our only option.

“We’re okay. We’re okay,” I repeated out loud as Pascal’s fingers gripped the sides of my face so tight, I was sure I looked like I’d had bad plastic surgery. I wanted to tell him to crawl back down a little because doing this with him wrapped around the middle of my body would make it easier for me to distribute his weight but knowing him, he’d poke me in the eye or make the situation worse than it already was somehow if he tried getting off my shoulders. That would be when he fell into the water, dang it.

I managed two shuffle-steps before everything went to shit.

Agnes yelled at the exact same time Duncan went “awoo” a second before something hit me on the butt. So hard on the butt, I flailed for a second before what had to be a big branch or a log took my legs out from under me because there was nowhere else for it to go with the force of the current being what it was.

I fell backward. Hands gripped my head and my hair for dear life as multiple voices screamed. The river gushed over my face as I went under.

Fear took over my soul as I sucked in water, and something else in the river hit me as I tried to get my legs under me, but fortunately whatever it was, it wasn’t as big, so it wasn’t as painful. I came up sputtering and gasping, and somehow, Pascal was still on my shoulders as he ripped hair out of my head to hang on. He was shrieking at the top of his lungs. And I must have been under longer than I’d thought because when my head broke the surface, we were coming up to the fallen log that now seemed like a hazard instead of help.

If I face-planted the trunk….

LOVE! I tried to send Duncan. “Grab it!” I shouted out loud to Pascal. “Grab the log!” I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want Pascal to die more than I wanted to live.

That just meant we had to nail this.

Because I didn’t want this to be what took me out. I wanted to hug Duncan again. I wanted to grow old with Sienna and help Matti wipe his butt when we were elderly if I had to, and Henri⁠—

With all my strength, I reached up, sinking beneath the water with the shift of my weight, and literally tried to toss Pascal toward the tree. His weight left my shoulders, and I had to pray he’d made it as I blindly reached up the moment after he was gone and scrambled to grab something.

And grab something I did.

It was a broken-off branch that might have impaled me if I hadn’t gone under water when I had, but I held on for dear life with one hand as I went under again before using it to pull myself up.I sucked in a big breath and reached for something else, thanking the universe that the trunk must have not been in the water long because it wasn’t slick with algae or moss, like it should have been.

I was gasping and panting, and my hand hurt, but I found a short, thick stub, and clung to it with my other hand.

“Pascal?” I coughed.

It was the whimper I heard first, then, “Ninaaaa!” really close by. Over the top of the tree, a wet, dark head of hair appeared, and looking like a drowned rat, Pascal’s small face was one of the best things I’d ever seen. There was a cut on his cheek, but he looked fine.

He was alive. Everything else he could heal from. The urge to cry hit me just as strongly as panic had when I’d gone underwater.

But this wasn’t the time. We weren’t safe yet.

“As fast as you can, crawl off the trunk,” I told him.

There was an “awooo” that spurred me into finding another broken branch along the trunk, then another as I managed to get my legs under me, my feet grazing the pebbled bottom.

Pascal’s face disappeared, leaving me there, but I watched him crawl across the trunk in the time it took me to move a foot closer to land. When he finally made it to the bank, I clung to the damn tree, ignoring the way sharp nubs and tree bark dug into and scraped my chest and stomach, but there was no way I was relaxing my grip and risking falling back in. Slowly, I shuffled one leg after another, the water shallowing to midthigh, then my knee, and finally my ankle, and I let out the most violent shudder of my whole life.

My legs gave out on the muddy and rocky slope, and I propped myself up with my hands as I panted. That had been close. That had been way too damn close.

Arms wrapped around my waist as a wet body pretty much tackled me, sobbing, “Nina,” and from the other side, a warm, furry body slammed into me too.

“Love, love, love,” Duncan told me as my arms shook and he wound his frame—on his belly—around them like a cat.

I was crying, I realized. I was crying. Water dripping from my face onto the rocks wasn’t from the river; it was from my eyes.

A lick at my cheek, at my chin had me sucking in the breath I hadn’t been able to take before. Wrapping an arm around Duncan, who was making this frantic sound in his chest, I set my hand on Pascal, tears blurring my vision.

As I rolled onto my butt, both of them climbed on top of me, and another set of arms wrapped around my neck. It was Shiloh, I thought, and from the sound of it, he was crying too.

“I’m sorry,” Shiloh whimpered.

“I’m sorry,” Pascal hiccupped, crying so loud it was hard to tell what he was saying.

“You okay?” Agnes asked a moment before she must have patted the top of my head.

“Love,” Duncan told me, licking my cheek before licking my other cheek, so frantically. “Love, love, love.”

I’d been so damn scared.

So freaking, freaking scared, I could finally admit it in my head. I clung to the kids just as tightly as they held on to me.

It took me a minute to notice they weren’t the only ones shaking. I was shaking like a dang leaf too.

And if that was what fear felt like, I never wanted to experience it again.