They arrived in the hours before night turns to morning, the province of bad-news phone calls and home invasions. Initially there was no need for talk, just time for Magenta and Audrey to hold each other wordlessly, for Arts to stand silently over the sleeping toddler Susanna.

The travelers were marked by their journey. Magenta appeared harder and thinner, the line of her jaw more pronounced; and her eyes held far less laughter than they once had. Artsblood, thin to begin with, appeared to have aged (although that is clearly impossible), as if the constant battering of refusal and rejection had somehow lined her unlined features.

There had clearly been trouble, as well. Both women bore wounds still in the process of healing, and certainly all of the blood that stiffened their clothes was not their own.

Finally talk was necessary. As Audrey fired up a cigarette against the dark hour, Magenta began.

"They refused us, ladylove. One and all and every. We went to each of Mother's connections in turn, and I discovered she has many. But talk as we would, reason as I might and threaten as she did, none would agree to stand with us in Susie's defense. It shames me to find such superstition still infecting those who have surely lived long enough to discard it. But one and all, they said no."

Audrey, seated next to her wife, still almost unable to believe in the return, in the familiar scent that filled her nostrils and the voice so long unheard that now surrounded her, took a puff, found the cigarette strangely tasteless, and stubbed it out.

"What does that mean?" She said.

Here Artsblood spoke up for the first time, her little ruined voice soft in the room otherwise sweetened by this child's murmurs in sleep.

"It means what they suspected they now know is true," she said, the anger in her words hard as obsidian, made sharp by breaking.

"It means that someone will come."