Archive of Our Own ^beta

Parker wakes up in a hotel room, Eliot’s back pressing against her and her arm flung across a warm spot. She feels – unbalanced. Something’s wrong, uncomfortable, like she has the beginning of a cold.

Hardison’s voice is coming from outside. He’s on the phone and pacing, his voice louder as he passes in front of the window, then muffled again. He’s saying, “Listen, I understand that no one has reported an issue, but – listen. I’m the one reporting the issue! There’s been water damage in our apartment. No, we’re not home, but we have a security camera in the next room over. I’m serious, send someone to check on our upstairs neighbor. Mrs., uh, Mrs. Claybourne? Her water must’ve been on all night, she might not be okay.”

Parker sits up, more alert, and touches the amulet around her neck. It’s tied to the wards she put up around their place, scribbled on windows and around doorways. If something’s wrong at their apartment, like an intruder, the amulet would have at least pinged against her magic – but the amulet is colder than her skin, ungrounded.

Hardison’s laptop is open on the table, showing the feed of their living room. It has little squares of static along the edge of the video, where the cameras of their kitchen and front door should be.

Eliot sits up all at once, taking a sharp breath in through his nose, looking like he’s feeling five different emotions all at once before settling on being furious. He says, “The threshold’s completely gone,” and on the laptop Parker sees rivulets of water running around the corner toward the front door. Running water washes magic away, and if it crossed their front door –

their defenses would just blink out of existence –

Emotionally charged magic bounces back and forth between Eliot and Parker where they’re touching, so quickly that she can’t begin to curb it. The laptop’s screen goes fuzzy and then blank.

Hardison’s voice cuts off outside, and he stomps back to the door of the hotel room. He opens it and sticks his head inside to tell them, “Don’t you go zapping all my babies again--”

But their emotions are already running hot, and the outside lightbulb blinks, steadies, and then crashes into darkness.

Hardison sighs, the moonlight glancing across his hair as he shakes his head at them. He crosses to the microwave that he uses for a faraday cage, asks, “Are you two finished?” and then pulls out a functioning phone. “I’m serious, calm down, we can fix this,” he tells them, and starts dialing.

Eliot grumbles and flops back down onto the bed to sulk, and Parker pulls some power into the diamond on her thumb ring to see by. She rolls out of bed, digs her notebook out of her backpack, and starts thinking.

--

They’re half an hour out of landing back in Portland when Hardison says, “Mrs. Claybourne just left her water on and forgot,” for the fourth time, just as disgusted as the first.

Parker says, “People can be forgetful,” because it’s her turn. Eliot did it the first three times. She’s sketching concentric circles and ceiling supports on paper, because the attendants made her put away the little tablet that Hardison lets her scribble on when she’s in a good mood.

“People don’t accidentally leave every faucet on in their apartment for twelve hours,” Hardison argues. He’s not going to be done with this anytime soon. “The whole ceiling! collapsed!”

“And it flowed right over the threshold,” Eliot chimes in, apparently not done with it either. His chest rumbles against her shoulder, warm. “Yeah. But magic’s always vulnerable to flowing water.”

Hardison waves his hands around, encompassing every inch of frustrated anxiety that he hasn’t expressed yet. If they weren’t in first class, he’d be putting out someone’s eye. “But flowing water shouldn’t be a concern in an apartment!”

“Apartments get water damage all the time,” Eliot offers. He does not exactly sound convinced.

Parker is drawing spirals now. Line-arc-line, magic drawn into the center.

Glancing around the cabin, Hardison huffs, “It’s goddamn sabotage.”

Eliot growls back, “Thresholds are weak to sabotage,” which is not actually a no.

Parker charges her drawing with a little bit of magic and it snaps into place; proof of concept. “We need an engineer,” she tells Hardison.

“Ma’am,” a flight attendant whispers to her, “we’re about to land. We really do need you to sit in your own seat?”

Parker looks at the attendant sharply and the man recoils, but Eliot also manhandles her off his lap, so that’s that.

--

The apartment is like a battlefield or a ghost town. It’s eerily familiar, but so different that it makes Parker a little queasy. There’s a man in construction gear who won’t let them inside the apartment until they put on hard hats, as though walking in their own apartment is as dangerous as walking in outer space.

Eliot looks at the kitchen for less than three seconds and then just walks away, going to their bedroom to pack. Parker’s shoulders are tight, a spring winding up, ticking as it gets tighter.

Their kitchen is where Eliot made her escargot just because she’d never had it before. The cabinet next to the sink has three parallel gouges from where a fork went flying when Hardison accidentally messed up a warding sigil and gave himself a repellent magnetic charge. Their kitchen smells like eggs and waffles and soup, sometimes all at once, and it’s almost always too warm to wear jeans.

But this kitchen is a ruin. There are wide sections of waterlogged sheet rock, disintegrating plaster, and splintered spans of wood sticking out of the crushed remains of the island countertop, the cabinets, the kitchen table.

No more parallel fork gouges.

Hardison is still out in the hallway, staring at the threshold, the carpet spongy-damp and surrounded by three huge dehumidifying fans. The boundary doesn’t look like anything, magically speaking. When they left three days ago, their threshold had been an elastic, breathing ribbon, winding around their feet like a cat, rubbing against them with familiar crests and valleys of trust and affection. Now that it’s been broken, it’s just a strip of wood.

Hardison steps across the threshold, then back out into the hall, and his face pinches inward. He clumsily knocks off his hard hat to hand it back to the guy, and looks beyond weirded out.

From beyond the damage, deep in the hallway, Eliot calls, “Hey! Is anyone helping me pack, or what?”

Hardison looks at Parker from the hallway, eyes wide, and he doesn’t move to step into the apartment again.

She tells him, “Seriously, we need to call an engineer, because I have designs for how to fix the ceiling to make it stronger,” and when he blinks at her, she adds, “Like. With magic?”

When Hardison gets it and pulls out his phone to throw himself at the problem, Parker calls to Eliot, “I’m coming!”

Eliot is in their bedroom, with their largest suitcase spread across the bed, folding shirts and pants into the bottom of it. Neat corners, sharp creases.

Parker goes for the shoes and gear. They took the basics with them to the job, but some things are important to have around. She tosses the 300-foot climbing rope over her shoulder and it sprawls across the clothes, coils fanning out.

Eliot frowns at it, and then tosses it back into the closet around her hip without looking at her.

Parker retrieves it and lobs it again, arcing it over his arm as he folds another shirt, so it lands in the suitcase.

Eliot picks it up and brandishes it at her. “Parker. Essentials only.”

“It is essential,” Parker says, wounded. Okay, maybe she doesn’t know when she’ll need it, but it’s important to have, okay? She’s had it at all her home bases for the last decade. She can’t evacuate and not take it.

Eliot glares at her and bites out, “You can come back for it. This is just for a few nights.”

She crosses her arms at him. “What if we need to escape out the window?” She shifts her weight, testing the balls of her feet, elastic. “We don’t have a threshold,” she says, quieter. “Anyone could come for us.”

“Parker,” he says, and sighs.

He packs the rope.

--

They get a room at a hotel on the next block from their apartment building, but it turns out that their upstairs neighbor wasn’t so lucky. She’s in a moderate three-star hotel near the edge of town, which is a little nicer than the renter’s insurance is generally willing to cover.

Parker knocks on the motel door, because Eliot looks too scary and Hardison looks scary in an entirely different way that no one can adequately explain to her.

An older lady answers, smiling and just fixing her glasses to peer at them. Her smile drops, and she says, “Oh no, you poor dears. This is about your apartment?”

“Hello, Mrs. Claybourne,” Eliot says, with his weird and fleeting Southern manners.

“You recognize us?” Parker says suspiciously.

“I’ve seen you around the building,” Mrs. Claybourne says, pointing to Parker, “but I didn’t know what number you were in. I’ve seen Alec and Eliot around all over. In the gym,” she says, and winks at Eliot.

Eliot shuffles his feet. “You better still be getting in your morning walk somehow,” he says, slightly threatening the way he is with people he likes.

Parker blinks at him. And at Mrs. Claybourne.

Hardison leans up against her shoulder and whispers, “You’d know her, too, if you didn’t always use the fire escape,” and then his fingers creep up around her elbow for a moment, comforting.

“Can we take you out for coffee,” Parker asks Mrs. Claybourne, maybe forgetting to make it a question. “We wanted to check in and see that you’re all right after the… unfortunate accident.” She’s getting the hang of this point-man stuff. A beat too late, she remembers to smile.

Mrs. Claybourne answers, “Oh, I can’t have coffee after three in the afternoon. It’ll keep me up all hours. You can buy me a beer, though.”

Eliot snorts despite himself and, well, they take Mrs. Claybourne to the brew pub.

--

“I can’t believe how forgetful I was,” Mrs. Claybourne says apologetically over her second beer. “I’ve never been so absentminded before.”

Hardison makes a face at Parker like he wants to agree that it’s literally not credible that she would leave so much water running. But instead he asks, “Why did you need water? Were you filling the bath? Or thirsty, maybe?”

Mrs. Claybourne takes a moment to think about it. “I guess I had to… fill a vase?”

“A vase,” Hardison prompts, nonplussed.

“Of flowers?” the old woman hazards. “It’s fuzzy. I really needed to get those poor flowers some water. They had started to wilt, you see.”

Eliot leans forward to put his elbows on the table, sets his chest to his crossed arms. “Gloria,” he starts.

Gloria? Parker mouths at Hardison.

Hardison mouths back, There’s a front door, babe.

“Gloria,” Eliot repeats more forcefully, having caught their entire exchange. “Which faucet did you use?”

“Which…?” Mrs. Claybourne echoes him, and looks confused.

“What sink?” Eliot tries again. “Like, did you fill the vase at the kitchen sink, or in the bathroom? The tub faucet?”

She scowls at him, and takes off her glasses, and scowls at those too while she wipes at them. “Which faucet,” she says, upset. “I think… every faucet? Now, why would I have done that?”

Right. That seals it. Parker asks, “Who gave you the flowers?”

“A reporter,” Mrs. Claybourne says. “He wanted to know what the city was like before the dot-com bubble in the 90s. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Did he give you a card?” Eliot asks, avid.

--

They see Mrs. Claybourne back to her hotel. The place is honestly not that bad; better than Parker would expect for someone who relies on controlled rent to keep her place. Parker asks, “Can we help you cover the bill for this room?” She repeats a favorite line of Sophie’s: “I hate to think that an innocent accident is costing you so much.”

Hardison and Eliot simultaneously look at each other and then away, trying to stifle laughter. That line might need more practice.

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” Mrs. Claybourne says, waving her hand, “my insurance is covering the whole thing.”

“Wait,” Hardison says, “what about your deductible?”

“They didn’t say anything about my deductible.” She shrugs. “I guess it’s covered?”

Hardison makes very wide and urgent eyes at Parker.

--

The instant that get back to their car, Hardison is pulling out his phone. “What the hell kind of insurance doesn’t mention a deductible,” he mutters. “How suspicious can you even get?”

“Forget that,” Parker says, “I’m getting that vase of flowers out of her apartment. It sounds like a classic impulse charm with a memory wipe bundled into it.”

“Her apartment doesn’t have a floor right now, hun,” Eliot points out. “Plus, it’s basically a crime scene.”

She sighs and puts her hand on the gear shift, so that Eliot has to hold it when he changes to second after a red light. “First of all, I’m great at breaking into crime scenes,” she tells him.

“I know,” he says, his hand heavy on hers. “Just. Want you to be careful.”

Parker grins at him. “Well, in that case, how can I pass up a chance to use my very essential climbing rope?”

Eliot laughs and lifts up her hand to kiss her fingers. He concedes, “Then I guess I’m following up on this reporter guy.”

From the back seat, Hardison says, “Okay, and Parker, you have a meeting with the engineer tomorrow,” and Parker hooks her elbow over her headrest so that he can hold her hand, too.

--

Parker brings her proof-of-concept notes to the apartment the next morning for her meeting. The doorway is blocked off with yellow caution tape like cobwebs. There are construction guys inside, sifting through the damage and cleaning up to start over new.

The engineer, a middle-aged woman with her fuzzy hair cropped close under her hard hat, looks at Parker’s drawings and says, “Okay, wait. Easily ninety percent of these supports are redundant and not load-bearing. There’s a reason that concentric circles are only used in, you know, domes.”

Parker says, “This is the way I want it. It’s important.”

The engineer gives Parker a careful, assessing look. “The guy who hired me. Alec Hardison. He got in contact through his grandmother.”

“Nana,” Parker says, and nods.

“That lady has quite the reputation,” the engineer suggests leadingly.

Parker cuts through the subtlety and just lays it out. “Nana’s the most powerful hearth witch I’ve ever met. The water damage washed out our threshold and magical defenses. We need an engineer who can help us rebuild stronger.”

The engineer sucks a breath in through her teeth, and then nods. “I’m mundane myself,” she offers, “but I know a wizard in Eugene, he grows magic-reactive trees. I can source your lumber from there.”

“Perfect,” Parker says, and smiles at her. “Nana was right about you.”

“She’s never wrong,” the engineer says, writing notes. “This isn’t going to be cheap, mind you.”

Parker just nods, looking through her doorway at their life.

“When are these guys taking lunch?” she asks.

--

She gets into Mrs. Claybourne’s apartment through the fire escape, entering at the living room. There’s old furniture and an outdated TV, regular people decorations. The area rug is flipped up at one corner where the floor gave way underneath it and someone moved it away from the hole into their apartment below.

Parker sets her foot down on the floor cautiously. This part of the floor doesn’t look like it was soaked. The floorboards about ten feet away are unevenly stained and warped, though. The kitchen, or what’s left of it, is on the other side of the hole in the floor. The hallway that leads to the bedrooms and bathroom opens right off of the collapsed area.

Okay. Parker knew the extent of the damage, from looking up from their own kitchen, but this is a whole new perspective. Mrs. Claybourne’s island countertop is just missing – it dropped right through and onto their own, indistinguishable in the wreckage. She needs the reminder that Mrs. Claybourne has lost a lot because of whoever set this in motion, not just them.

But she’s here for a reason. She doesn’t see a vase out in the main rooms, so she’ll have to go through the hallway, above the floor.

She calls her power into her emerald pinky ring, and lines it up with earth magic. She focuses on sap, on winters and summers, on roots. The inner mind of trees.

She can feel them all around her. Masked by rubbery paint, nailed in behind drywall. Magic sparks out from her ring and grounds itself in the wood, so that when Parker opens her Sight, the studs and roof beams are picked out in bright guiding lights.

She takes out her climbing gear and starts tying clove hitches onto anchor points. She eyeballs the spacing as sixteen inches on center, and lays out her slack. When she has six anchors ready, she focuses up her power.

The long lines of the wood tighten and draw in, so that her Sight is concentrated on one point in each stud, high on the wall. Then she takes the topaz grounding point of an anchor, charges it, and lets it fly into her chosen anchor point. The other anchors fixed into the rope are tugged in its wake and snap into their own places, thunk-thunk-thunk. She holds her breath, but there is no noise from down in their apartment; all the contractors are still out to lunch.

And there, that’s a well-fixed rope that can get her around the corner to the hallway. She feels a little bad about her spiky crampons digging hedgehog-holes in the wallpaper, but, well. Mrs. Claybourne wasn’t getting her deposit back, and they’ll help her redecorate and put things back in order, anyway.

The bathroom is soaked and collapsed, so she climbs right on past it. Even six feet beyond the visible damage, Parker doesn’t trust the hallway floor, and she keeps her harness anchored to the hallway’s wall studs on either side. She does not want to explain to her boys why she fell through another ceiling.

There’s no sign of a vase in the guest room, so she moves on to the master – yep. Right on the nightstand beside the bed. It’s a concentrated knot of purple and hazy grey that emanates from the glass. Parker blinks away her Sight, to see that without the magic being visible, the flowers are a mix of orange and blue, and they don’t look wilted at all. She changes her climbing gloves out for magic-nullifying ones before she picks the vase up.

She climbs back out of Mrs. Claybourne’s apartment, trying not to look at anything, not wanting to invade the woman’s privacy any more than she needs to.

--

Parker takes the vase down to the sub-basement level below the brew pub. It’s a space that triples as her magical library, Eliot’s brewing laboratory, and Hardison’s magic-proofed electronics storage.

Hardison is there already, typing away on his computer closed inside the interlocking bars of a large faraday cage. He looks around at her with his mouth open to say something, but then he switches gears and asks her, “Was it bad?”

“It’s fine,” Parker says, and beelines over to set the vase on her workspace, inside of a copper circle. She fights out of her magic-null gloves and yanks opens a drawer to find some of her cornerstones.

Hardison comes to the door of his cage, but lingers inside it. “Babe,” he calls to her, gently.

She drops her stones into position, at the points of a star, and her magic snaps them into perfect alignment. The containment hovers over the vase and flowers, and she actually feels like she can breathe.

“Parker,” Hardison calls to her again.

Reluctantly, she turns to face him, and comes closer to the faraday cage without touching it. The whole point of the cage is that it protects the computers from wild emotional magic. They’ve been in this position before; he can’t open the cage unless she calms down, and she can’t calm down when she feels cut off from him.

Hardison leans his forehead against a metal bar and he looks at her so gently and he asks, “Tell me about it?”

Parker hugs her arms across her body. Slowly, she admits, “Mrs. Claybourne’s lost a lot, because of this. Not just us.”

“I know.” Hardison sighs. “I’m working on it. She’s going to get help with rebuilding and replacing stuff. Putting her life back together. She’s not on her own, you know? We’ll look out for her.”

Parker takes a deep breath in, lets it out slowly. Feeling childish, she whines, “I hate how easy it was for someone to get the upper hand like this.”

“Of course,” he says, like it’s completely fine and she’s not being petulant. He jerks his chin back at his computer. “I can tell you about the insurance thing? I think I have a lead on the guy?”

“Okay,” Parker agrees. She takes a deep breath, tries to figure herself out. She’s not a lot calmer, yet. She waves at Hardison to keep talking and turns around to get her diagnostic supplies. She sets out bottles of fire ash, spring water, sea salt, and about a dozen other things.

Hardison, meanwhile, starts his usual rambling rundown. “So, Mrs. Claybourne’s insurance company is, in fact, aware of her claim. That part is real. It looks like someone is spoofing her email account and intercepting her mail. I have said this before, but we really need to be screening our mail delivery people. This person, they’re posing as Mrs. Claybourne to the insurance company, and they’re posing as an insurance agent handling her case to Mrs. Claybourne. It means they’re still physically in Portland.”

Parker nods to show that she’s listening, and blows a pinch of sage to rain down on the vase and flowers. In a moment, the flowers wilt; when she rejects the sage out of her magical containment, the flowers spring back to full health. Hmm.

Hardison trails off, craning his head to see over her shoulder. He’s not very magical himself, and he always wants to see it done. Parker steps out of his line of sight, but gives him a look to keep him talking.

He clears his throat. “Well, so, the insurance. And the magical flowers, that’s another independent confirmation of foul play. I would guess that they’re putting Mrs. Claybourne up out of pocket so that she doesn’t have any complaints for the insurance, and the insurance never tries to look too closely at the cause of the water damage? Since it really quickly won’t add up for mundanes.”

That’s when the basement door opens at the top of the stairs, and Eliot thuds down toward them. “Thought I’d find you here.” He trades nods with Hardison, and checks Parker over for injuries. “Your ear piece is fried, hun. You okay?”

“It’s fine,” Parker repeats reflexively.

When Hardison coughs, “Bull,” into his fist, she glares at him.

Eliot holds his arm out from his body, offering. She goes to him and faceplants directly into his shoulder, and he squeezes her waist.

She’s not that upset about Mrs. Claybourne’s apartment anymore, though. And they’re dealing with the intruder and their vulnerability. So she just mumbles, “I miss our threshold,” and he hums an agreement, and lets her step away first.

Hardison covers the moment she needs to shake the emotions off by asking, “Hey, man, you got anything on the reporter?”

“Not much,” Eliot answers, and passes a paper full of scratchy notes through the bars to Hardison. “Ben Cook. He’s been freelancing off and on for an online magazine for about six months. They think he’s legit. It’s a pretty solid and easy cover to maintain.”

Parker goes to her workspace and blows another pinch of stuff over the vase – fire ash, this time. The glass vibrates and scrapes half an inch to the left. East-southeast, she figures, from her memory of how the basement is situated. She banishes the ash from her containment, as well, and the vase stays in its new position.

The sound and movement draw Eliot’s attention, and he comes to stand by her. “These the flowers for Mrs. Claybourne?”

“Yeah.” Parker clicks her tongue, lining up her thoughts. “I think the flowers are frozen at perfect bloom until some kind of precondition is met – probably that our apartment below is unoccupied for a certain number of days. Then the flowers wilt, and they need water, right?”

“Hey,” Hardison calls, “can I come out, or what?”

“Of course you can,” Parker says, having almost forgotten that she was the one he was waiting on for permission. She talks over the clanking of his door opening and closing. “When she picks up the vase, the impulse charm makes her really want to turn on the water. She fills it up, sets it down – and when she breaks contact, it makes the water inside disappear and nips her with a disorientation charm. She forgets what she was doing and that the water is on, and sees the flowers, and they’re wilted, and she picks up the vase, and she needs to get water, and goes to turn on another faucet.” She shakes her head, annoyed at how impressed she is by the spellwork. “Mrs. Claybourne probably cycled through all of her faucets a bunch of times before she was too tired and took the vase to her bed and just fell asleep.”

Hardison is standing with them by now, leaning some of his weight into Eliot, the way he does when he kind of wants contact and kind of wants to get a rise out of Eliot, too. He says, “Does the magic linger? Anything we should be worried about with Mrs. Claybourne?”

“I don’t think so.” Parker shrugs.

Eliot barks a laugh, in his low and irritated way. “These flowers that the guy picked. They have a message.”

Hardison perks up in interest. “What? Like that language of flowers stuff?”

Eliot jostles him with his shoulder and otherwise ignores him. “Geraniums, viscaria, larkspur, monkshood, marigolds. It’s a message of smugness about getting one over on us.”

They all glare at the flowers for a few seconds.

“All of this doesn’t actually give us a lot to go on,” Hardison points out.

Parker turns back to them. “Yes, it does,” she argues, and ticks off her points on her fingers. “We know that they’re magical. We know they put planning and effort into this, so they must be someone we know and they want to have the upper hand. And we know that they’re good enough with technology that you haven’t pinpointed them yet, Hardison.”

Hardison takes offense to this, and he tells her so, and she grins at him, and he plants a kiss on her forehead. Then he sighs, gustily, blowing loose strands of hair away from her face. “Well, I’ll give you three guesses who it is, and the first two don’t count.”

Parker and Eliot give each other disgusted looks and say, “Sterling.”

Hardison lets Parker go, and for a second she leans into him to get his arms back around her, but then she sees Eliot’s face.

Hardison slaps Eliot on the back, and says, “To hell with this, we’ve done enough for one day. Let’s get a beer.” He slides his hand up, to the nape of Eliot’s neck, and squeezes at the tension there.

“Yeah,” Eliot grinds out, struggling not to sound furious. “Let’s do that.”

--

In the morning, Parker goes down to the brew pub’s basement for more experiments on the vase. She’s hoping that having a magical object and knowing who charmed it will let her make a connection to Sterling’s location.

Before she gets very far, her new ear piece clicks. “Parker,” Hardison says, faking cheerful patience, “can you come upstairs? Your boyfriend and I are discussing kitchens.”

Uh-oh. Eliot’s only ‘her boyfriend’ when he’s being stubborn.

Parker goes up to the closed and empty brew pub to find every single cupboard in the kitchen open, and every drawer pulled out. Hardison and Eliot are on opposite ends of the long countertop, each of them sulking in their own ways; Hardison on his phone and Eliot stirring something in a pot.

“Hi,” Parker says to them. “This is kind of a mess.”

“Well, everything’s a mess,” Eliot snaps, and then makes a face at his soup or whatever it is. “Sorry,” he tells the soup.

Hardison waves at the disarray of the kitchen, the drawers sitting up on the counters. “I’m trying to figure out how Eliot wants our new kitchen to be.”

Parker glances at Eliot, camping out in front of the stove so that he doesn’t have to look at them. She figures that Hardison already tried asking him directly.

“So I guess all I can do is compare this one to our old one,” Hardison says, talking with his hands.

Eliot snorts at him.

Hardison points at Eliot and does outraged eyebrows at Parker.

She frowns at each of them, and then says, “Give me a second,” and closes her eyes to think better.

Eliot lives in the kitchen. They can barely talk him into sitting down to watch a movie or play with them. He walked around the old kitchen like he owned it, like it was an extension of himself. It was the beating heart of their household and it was the main source of strength for their threshold, with all the time and the care and the love in it.

The brew pub is a labor of love, but it is a labor. The kitchen is cut off from the actual pub part. The pots and utensils are all situated so that employees will know where to find them, not to an individual preference. Like the difference between Parker’s personal climbing equipment and a climbing gym.

So, trying to work out what Eliot wants in a kitchen by working backwards from the brew pub is like, a very wrong place to start.

Parker opens her eyes. Hardison looks more relaxed now that she’s working the problem instead. Eliot is still hunched over the stove, defensive.

“Eliot,” she asks, trying to be sympathetic or soft or something. “Was there anything wrong with the old kitchen?”

“No,” he says immediately.

“Anything that bothered you? That you wished was different?”

He growls, “It was fine as it was.”

Hardison challenges, “Even though you complained about pantry storage space?”

Eliot glares at him. “I did not.”

“You did,” Parker tells him. “And about the spice rack. You can design a rack from scratch, now.”

Eliot wheels around to face them and shouts, “I don’t want to! The old kitchen was perfect!”

Hardison shakes his head, frustrated all over again. “We’re all upset about the threshold, man, but there’s no reason to be like this.”

Eliot spins back to turn the stove off and sets the pot aside on a cool, unused burner. He stands with his hands on the counter, leaning his weight there.

Slowly, lining her words up, Parker says, “We’ve all had to start over a lot. And we all know that when you have to rebuild, you build it better and stronger than before.” She bites her lower lip. “And this time, we’re building it to last, right?”

Eliot hangs his head and nods, all the fight leaving him at once.

She catches Hardison’s eye and makes a quick gesture at the disarray of the kitchen, and they both start closing cabinets and putting away drawers as quietly as they can.

After a few minutes, Eliot says hoarsely, “Sorry.” Then he coughs hard and forces a more pleasant tone to say, “Anyway, I made lunch,” and starts dishing out the soup.

--

Once the dishes are washed, Parker drags Eliot back downstairs so he can scry with her. She’s better with grounding points and touchstones, for wind and earth magic. Eliot’s better at ephemerals, like fire and people.

“It’s not ‘people magic’, Parker,” he corrects her, long-suffering.

“Whatever. Connection stuff,” she says with a shrug. “You have the map?”

Eliot unfolds the map of Portland between them. He beckons with his hand for the vase.

Parker carefully doesn’t apply too much pressure to her containment stones as her magic walks them over to his side. Inside the spell, the vase is tugged along, suspended at the center of the stones.

Eliot takes out his sewing kit, which doubles for most of his workings when he’s not in a fight. He picks out a royal blue thread that matches the monkshood flowers in the vase and draws out an arm’s length, then bites it to sever the thread from the spool.

Parker holds out his larger pair of magic-null gloves, and he tugs them on, juggling the thread from hand to hand. Then he reaches for her containment field. She lets him in, and the touch of him against her magic is nice, like it always is.

Eliot ties the end of the thread at the base of one of the monkshood blooms. He twists the other end into a loop, charges it with a silvery edge of power, and slips it around the stem. When he pulls the thread tight, it slices through the stem like a garrote. The flower is left dangling on the thread that Eliot withdraws from the rest of the bouquet.

Once it’s clear, Eliot blows out a held breath, as if he cracked a safe. Then he shifts his posture and nods at Parker. “Okay, how do you want to do this?”

Parker studies the map and taps their building. “We know that he’s still close enough to get the mail.” She taps Mrs. Claybourne’s hotel. “And at the outside, he’d want to keep an eye on Mrs. Claybourne. Set that as the radius, do you think?”

Eliot nods his assent and fixes the flower’s thread to a lantern hook bent over the map. He bites the fingers of his gloves to tug them off, and sets them beside his sewing kit. Next, he pulls out a dark orange thread, measures a length out and bites it off the spool, then lays it down in a circle that covers perhaps a third of the mapped city.

“Let’s go,” he says, and gives the blue thread with the monkshood flower a jolt of magic.

The flower swings like a pendulum, bouncing off the orange boundary thread at each side. It swivels on the fifth pass into a sort of orbit, then rolls around and around, trying to make a connection to its parent magic. The flower wobbles on a point – falls into another pass around – and stops on that point.

Eliot checks the cross streets and makes a disgusted noise. “I really hate this guy,” he informs her, like it’s news.

--

They meet Sterling in 10 Barrel Brewery, a direct competitor to the brewpub, because of course. Of course that’s where he’s waiting for them.

He’s sitting in a booth at the back, calmly sipping at a beer, looking for all the world as if he sat down five minutes ago. They can’t approach him three abreast, which is irritating, so Parker goes first. She looms over Sterling in his seat and lets Hardison slide in the booth first, then she gets in the middle, and Eliot bookends her in.

Sterling says, “How nice to see you. Shall we order a round?” He waves at a waiter.

“We’re here to tell you to stay away from us,” Parker tells him, flat.

“That’s an interesting reaction to someone doing you a favor,” Sterling remarks as if he’s commenting on the weather.

Eliot’s arm muscles bunch up and he leans forward, threatening. “A favor?” he asks, hard and dangerous. “You destroyed our home.”

Sterling sneers, “I showed you a security gap. It took me two minutes of research on your neighbor and a day of casting to put all of you back on your heels.”

“Yeah, well, don’t do it again,” Hardison warns him. “Uneasy truces hold up a lot better if you don’t mount an assault on our castle.”

“With Nathan retired, someone’s got to look out for you,” Sterling says, laying a hand to his chest. “Just take the advice gracefully. Your defenses were weak. I’ve given you a chance to set them up properly this time.”

“Jim,” Parker says, channeling Nate, “let’s put it this way. Get the hell out of Portland.”

Sterling sighs and lays down some cash for his drink. “Everybody’s a critic,” he mourns.

As he walks away, Parker calls, “And you’re paying to fix our neighbor’s place!”

He waves over his shoulder at the door, so maybe that will work itself out.

--

The apartment is finished in two weeks. The engineer and contractor walk through with them, pointing out their work. The concentric circles of the ceiling reach out from the center, locking down kind of like Hardison’s faraday cage, but for magic. The kitchen looks a lot like the old kitchen, but with some Eliot-approved reconfigurations.

In the end, they all sign the final papers, write the last check, and they usher the others out the door.

All three of them are left alone, looking at each other and at their old-new home.

“What now?” Parker asks. The threshold isn’t suddenly restored. The ceiling is like a missile silo, unassailable, but otherwise the apartment has no personality, no breathing rhythm.

Eliot checks his watch. “Well, I ordered groceries. They’ll be here in about an hour. Then I can get dinner started, and we can settle in a little more.”

Hardison runs his hand up Eliot’s back, then all the way down it to give his ass a squeeze. “An hour, huh? I vote that we start getting settled in right away.”

Later, they’ll laugh about how their alone time in the bedroom got their new threshold started, but Eliot’s cooking is what set it into place like a broken bone.