And although that was probably true, it didn’t stop that heart-squeezing wail from jumbling all my insides. Nor did it stop my eyes from transmutating from human to serpentine. I focused on her with moon-powered nocturnal vision that gave me a sharper, silver-tinged view of her body.

Jupe bent over her and hauled her into his arms. “All right, I’m sorry. Enough playing.” He walked her over to us and peeled her arms from around his neck. Lon was closer, so he got the pass. She fell on him in a fit of quivering, jerking sobs.

“Da-a-a-ddy,” she cried. “Jupe hurt me.”

Jupe’s mouth fell open in mock offense. “I didn’t even touch you.”

“Shhh,” Lon said, rubbing her back as she clung to him. “You’re going to live.”

I sat up and inspected her as she cried her eyes out all over Lon’s chest. One barely skinned knee and some grass stains on her dress and palm. Switching knacks, I pushed my senses a little further into her body to make sure nothing was broken. Everything seemed to be in order, so I rubbed my fingers over her knee to heal up the scrape.

“All better,” I said.

Lon pushed her hair back. “See? Mommy fixed you. It’s all fine.”

She wasn’t ready to stop crying, so I reached over to heal up any other scrapes on her other knee, and that’s when I found the weapon locked in her plump grip.

“Who gave her the pencil?” I said. It wasn’t sharpened, but it served its purpose well enough. She’d started with the shocking a few weeks ago—without any prompt from me, I might add—and I’d been freaked out that she was going to hurt herself. So I showed her how to release Heka through pencils.

Huge mistake. Last week, I had to round up every pencil in the house.

“Jesus, Jupe,” I complained. “She could’ve poked her eye out when she fell.”

“Come on, it’s not like they were scissors.”

“It’s my fault,” a girl’s voice said.

Leticia strode up behind Jupe. “Jupe’s art teacher left her present next to the grill. She tore into it before I could stop her. It’s an art kit with a bunch of crayons and stuff, but she went straight for the pencil.” She handed me an unopened birthday card.

I stuffed it into my sweater pocket and made a mental note to add it to the thank-you list. “She can sniff out graphite a mile away,” I said, tugging the knotted sleeves around her neck and slipping off her impromptu cape. “But don’t let her run with stuff in her hands, okay, Jupe?”

“Got it—my sister is clumsy.”

She raised her head and stopped crying long enough to say, “Am not!”

Jupe grinned and rubbed his arm. “Well, nothing like electrocution to end a party. We’re out of here.”

The tears suddenly shut off as if she’d turned a spigot. “Don’t go!” she pleaded.

“I have to,” he said, mussing up her hair. “Movie starts in half an hour, and I want to get a good parking space before the drive-in fills up.”

“What are you seeing?” I asked as she pouted, burying her face in Lon’s shirt.

“An American Werewolf in London. From 1981, directed by John Landis.” Jupe pretended to bite Leticia on the neck. She punched him in the arm where his sister had shocked him, and he feigned injury.

Looking at him now, I was amazed at how much and how little he’d changed since I first saw him standing in Lon’s doorway. He was still long and skinny, but the seventeen-year-old was all lean muscle now, thanks to two seasons of being the top midfielder on La Sirena High’s soccer team.

And although he’d somehow sprouted up several inches and morphed from a boy to almost a man while I wasn’t looking—a painfully good-looking man who attracted stares wherever he went—he was still the same old cocky, overly optimistic, filterless Motormouth.

“Be back by one,” Lon said

“One? It’s Saturday, and I have to drive a half hour to take Leticia back to Morella, then a half hour back. That’s an hour right there, and the movie doesn’t let out until midnight. I’d have to speed to get home in time.”

“I’m not paying for another ticket or a jacked-up insurance bill,” Lon said. “Figure it out.”

I held up two fingers.

Jupe grinned while his dad mumbled under his breath.

“No later, okay? And please don’t speed. I don’t want to sit around here worrying about seeing a smashed purple GTO showing up on the late news.” He’d finished fixing it up two months before he turned sixteen and then promptly dented the back end—the tree next to the garage “looked farther away after it got pruned” and several other ridiculous defenses. It took him three additional months to fix the damage; the tree still had electric purple paint wedged into the scrape marks on the bark.

“I’ll never speed again,” he promised. A lie if I’d ever heard one. I pointed to my lips. He leaned down and kissed me, mumbling, “Thank you.”

“Good night,” Leticia said.

“Thanks for helping me with the decorations.”

“Anytime. See you on Wednesday at the shop.”

I grinned and gave her a thumbs-up as she ran to catch up with Jupe. Turned out Leticia was a surprisingly good apprentice and wasn’t half bad at making medicinals.

As the GTO rumbled to life in the distance, the bundle in Lon’s arm let out an exhausted sigh. Laughing, crying, and now fast asleep, all in the span of five minutes. He carefully removed her cardboard pirate hat and set it on the grass, then tucked his chin to his chest and picked a stray piece of confetti out of her hair.