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“We’ll stop her,” he declared.

“Stop her? But I’ve already helped her!” I looked at the sixteen rings in my hands. “I thought I was stopping Lavinia by getting those rings and defeating the beasts, but I wasn’t. I was actually activating them for her. I was giving her everything that she needs.”

CHAPTER 9

FAMILY

Ifelt so incredibly stupid. I’d thought I was playing the hero, that I was stopping the bad guy, but it was just a trick, a manipulation. Lavinia had tricked me into killing those super-powered ancient supernaturals. She’d tricked me into helping her.

But that’s not what my dad was lecturing me about right now.

“Sierra, you must exercise more self-discipline in battle,” he said. “Not everyone is as resilient as you are.”

“Meaning?”

“I saw the singe marks on Troy Fireswift’s shoelaces. Friendly fire is a very real possibility when you’re too zealous with your magic.”

I could have told him that it was actually Troy’s fault that his shoelaces got burnt, but I was too annoyed with myself right now to argue with my dad. Actually, he was probably only critiquing my battlefield performance to distract me from the fact that I’d screwed up big time.

I sighed.

“I know how you’re feeling,” Mom said, setting a hand on my shoulder.

“I doubt it.” I shrugged her off. I didn’t deserve to be comforted, not after what I’d done. “I let Troy egg me on. And why? Honestly, because I was bored and arrogant. I thought I knew better than the armies of heaven and hell. I thought I was hot shit. I wanted to be the one to solve this, to be the hero, like in all the stories you and Dad have told me. I wanted to do important, impossible things, just like you. Instead, I messed up. This whole thing is all my fault.”

“Hey, your dad and I messed up plenty of times,” she said. “It isn’t your fault that bad people do bad things.”

“If I hadn’t helped her—if I hadn’t killed the sixteen beasts—the rings’ true power would still be locked.”

“And if I hadn’t thwarted Lavinia’s plans to be Queen all those years ago, she wouldn’t have gone after the rings in the first place,” she countered. “So, you see, if you’re going to blame yourself, Sierra, you might as well blame me too.”

Her words made sense, but even so, they didn’t make me feel any better. “Don’t you understand? This was supposed to be my big thing, my debut. My story. My victory.” A heavy sigh seized my chest. “And instead I helped the bad guy. I defeated the beasts. I activated the rings. I put the universe in danger. I might as well get myself a villain t-shirt and make it official. I’m evil.”

“You are not evil.” Mom wrapped her arm around me, and this time she wouldn’t let me squirm away. “Good and evil are not as simple as black and white. You made a mistake. I’ve made plenty, and I’ll keep making them. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough to make the world a better place. You will find a way to make this right. I promise. And that journey starts here.”

I’d been so caught up in my worries that I hadn’t noticed where we were going until we were standing there, right outside Calli’s house in Purgatory.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Family dinner,” Mom told me.

I shook my head. “This is no time for dinner parties.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong, Sierra. This is precisely the time for that.” She rang the doorbell. “In bad times, families have to come together. Besides, maybe this will be a nice distraction from everything that’s troubling you.”

“I very much doubt I can be distracted.”

“I learned long ago that there’s no point in arguing with your mother when she’s made up her mind,” Dad told me.

Mom smirked at him. The door opened, and Aunt Gin ushered us inside. Aunt Tessa and Aunt Bella were there too and Uncle Zane. Then Calli came out of the kitchen carrying a bowl of hot dinner rolls, fresh out of the oven. We moved into the dining room, and as we sat down to dinner and dug into the good food and banter, I had to admit that some of the gloom was lifting from my mind.

It was all just sonormalcompared to everything else that was going on in my life. The taste of gossip was far sweeter than the bitter worry that weighed on me when the future of the whole universe was in the balance.

Halfway through dinner, General Silverstar arrived. The archangel was ancient. He was so old, he was practically a living fossil.

“You would know. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth when you were a kid,” I teased my great-grandfather when he made one of his usual statements about the depravity of modern society.

“Yes, and I must say, I look quite good for someone who is over 200 million years old,” he replied.