Supernova

Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen: A Family as Real as Any Other

Piece by piece, the family was getting back together. Not all of it was my doing, not even most of it really, but I was reaping the benefits and more than incredibly grateful for it.

I still didn't know what the fuck Elias was up to, but I was a little less worried about him with Demon around. I didn't really understand the whole dynamic that Elias and Leo had going on. I mean, I didn't really know Leo, despite the brief time him and I had spent together, but Demon was surely a good buffer, right? I mean, they had been friends once. Before he started shit talking his wife basically constantly and fallen in love with his brother than he hated. But. You know.

That was a problem for later. As of right now, they were being given refuge and buffer time to stay here and I decided that maybe we should take another group visit to the Stronghold residence and just be teenagers for a little while.

It did feel that way, it really did, until we got up to the house that had once given me so much emotional turmoil and I couldn't get in. It didn't read my eye on the scanner. It didn't even try to read my hand. No security bracelet popped out. None of this was in my name. The panic started to hit. Was I about to get fucked over a whole second time?

The only thing that remained was the Contact Resident button. I nearly broke the screen hitting it.

It was a long while before I heard anything.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, how do I work this thing?" came out of the speaker. "Is someone there?"

It helped that she was still there, but just barely.

"Mom, what the fuck?" I said into the speaker, not at all mindful of everyone behind me. Not even being able to use mom in a significant way was softening the blow. Everything had just fallen away. "You took away my security clearance?"

"Oh Cassie, would you relax?" scolded back through the speaker. "I took away everyone's security clearance. The walls of this house are high enough. I'll let you in."

The buzzer sounded and the front gate slid open. It made me uneasy, stepping over the threshold without a bracelet to protect me from the security measures that even I had come to fear, but it made me even more nervous to bring people much more fragile than I over into it.

"Fancy," Elias commented, the first one to step forward. I didn't even have the chance to wonder if he was being a little shit about it.

My arm shot out in front of him in pure instinct. "Me first."

He stopped walking, smiled, motioned for me to go ahead.

It felt like it took forever, that first step. It used to be a party trick. I could open up the gate on my own clearance, whether here or back home, and then throw an apple or anything else not wearing a bracelet through the gate to get stabbed and shot and lasered and poison darted or whatever else my father had set up and was in the mood for. He'd prided himself so much on it, and I had as well.

For the first time, it felt more sad than it did funny when I remembered it.

I stepped across. And then nothing happened. I just stepped onto the walkway, from the no man's land of the street onto the very Stronghold space that we occupied. A Stronghold I might have been, but I didn't know what the rules were.

I turned back towards everyone else on the other side of the gate. Shrugged. I still didn't know what to make of it.

Momo laughed. The way she used to and still did. Behind a folded hand held to her mouth.

"That's a first," she said, stepping forward.

"No," I said, holding my hands out to stop her. "Demon first."