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She gave him a wink before running off in search of her next target.

“You know, I think Basanti was flirting with you,” I told him as we fought back the enemies advancing on us.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And that felt…weird.”

“As weird as your having breasts?” I teased him.

“Weirder.”

We continued to fell enemy after enemy. And they just kept coming at us, like there was no end to them.

“The Guardians gathered a much larger army than we thought,” I commented.

“They have been amassing this army for thousands of years,” Nero reminded me.

“Yeah, I know. But we took out a big chunk of their forces three years ago.”

“Or so we thought,” he said.

“Hmm,” I said, chewing on that unpleasant thought.

Magic rippled across my skin, and then my foster family was right beside us. Tessa must have teleported them here.

“Did someone call for backup?” Tessa asked.

I smiled at my family. “You’re right on time.”

Zane wiggled his fingers at the encroaching enemies, and they dropped to the ground, clutching their heads, overcome with dizziness. He must have picked up that trick from Vertigo.

Meanwhile, Calli shot the enemy soldiers down with her perfect aim, hitting every evil target. And Gin unleashed a swarm of metallic robots on them. There were so many robots.

Robots that looked like spiders, scuttling across the floor at super speeds. They scaled the walls, picking off the enemies hiding in the balcony boxes.

There were flying robots too. They looked like metal hornets, buzzing through the air, seeking and destroying aerial targets.

Tessa worked with Gin, teleporting enemies into the robots’ paths. Bit by bit, we were whittling the Guardians’ forces down, but they didn’t give up. And they didn’t slow down. They attacked us hard and furious, fueled by envy, driven by hate.

But envy and hate were no match for love and magic and that big pain-in-the-ass Angel of Chaos. All together, united, we werebreaking through millennia of scheming and stewing, plots and ploys.

“The enemy is fleeing!” Aerilyn declared loudly, tacking a war cry onto the end of her words.

Grace led the demons against the enemy soldiers fleeing from the scene. Aerilyn rode on her pet dragon, cackling as she unleashed fire on them. And finally—with fire and steel and a hard-earned harmony between the forces of light and dark—we defeated the enemy who’d dedicated most of their energy, most of their very existence, to devising our demise.

The Guardians—and their alliance of ill-content gods and demons—were gone.

“We won,” I said quietly, looking across the broken battleground.

Stones littered the floor, there was a dragon-sized hole in the side of the castle, and half the ceiling was missing. And yet I’d never seen anything so beautiful. Because it meant it was over. This was all over. And my daughter was safe. We were all safe.

“We really won,” I sighed.

Sierra blinked at me. “Time for crayons now?”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “I think so.”

She handed me the box. I retrieved a handful of crayons from it and thew them up, high into the sky. They exploded like fireworks, color and light and magic forming a million different pictures, drawn from my fondest memories.

Meeting Nero for the first time.