"I try," Talia said, wrapping her arm around Nat's shoulder's while the near-invulnerable woman rested her head on the lycanthrope's shoulder.

Down the tunnel...

Jane and Red lay next to each other in a thick silence. Jane had gone numb after making the decision to go home. It was kind of Like having butterflies in your stomach to an extreme degree. It was one thing to have nightmares, but it was another to seek them out in the holes they dwelled and facing them. Her head was lying in the crook of Red's arm, but it was not an act of intimacy. She barely knew that the red-headed woman was there.

Red was searching the corridors of her mind, trying to find words of comfort or encouragement or . . . or anything. They were a sorry pair, with Red covered in bandages and Jane with an arm in a cast and the remnants of intensive bruising on her face. And soon, they would be leaving the place Red had called home for the last ten years to go to . . . to wherever it is that Jane had once called home, where the powerful but unstable young woman might very well rip her stepfather apart. And Red wasn't sure if she should try and stop that from happening. She wasn't sure if she wanted to.

"Stop thinking," Jane said softly.

"Your brain is loud . . . like an alley cat stuck in a trashcan, trying to get out." She felt a tear form at the corner of her eye.

“I'm sorry Red. I'm sorry for everything I've done, and everything I brought upon the Strays."

Red kissed the top of Jane's head.

"We were fighting this war before you arrived. The Shoggoth would've come after us sooner or later anyway. But I know I won't convince you of that. You'll have to come to terms with it on your own." She felt a warm tingle as Jane cuddled closer to her.

“Jane, when we get to where we're going, what do you want me to do?"

Jane closed her eyes.

“Just be there."

Even as Jane vanquishes one demon, another appears.

Red was a lycanthrope . . . a powerful creature whose physical existence shifted between her human form and a half-human, half puma entity. She wasn't meant for or fond of enclosed spaces. The inside of a passenger train definitely counted as “enclosed.” But nevertheless, she found herself sandwiched between an elderly gentleman who smelled faintly of mothballs and a pretty young woman with her arm in a sling. It was this latter creature . . . Jane, who had brought Red to this place.

A few months earlier, Red had simply been worried about hellspawn activity in the underworld of Springfield, California. Since then, Jane had showed up, helped save Red's brother (another lycanthrope), manifested a powerful magical Talent, been almost killed twice and had fought an ancient and evil creature, almost losing her life and sanity in the process. Jane had come to the Strays a fragile and breakable creature, and the Shoggoth had preyed upon that and fed upon her growing mental instability. It had come so close to devouring Jane's soul that Red shuddered to think about it. Now, Red was escorting the woman she had unexpectedly and secretly come to love back to where she had grown up. And more importantly, she was taking Jane back to the thing Jane had been running from for years ... the thing that had broken her spirit and sense of self-worth the man, if he could be called that, that had hurt Jane so very badly so very long ago.

Jane could feel herself getting closer to her home town with every jostle of the car, and she felt a chill creeping down from her brain and infesting the rest of her body. ‘Do I really want to do this?’ she asked of herself. ‘No, I'm pretty sure I don't,’ she thought.

"But I need to.' Her arm crept around Red's and she rested her head on the woman's shoulder. She knew the lycanthrope was uncomfortable leaving the Den in such a time of turmoil.

"It'll be dark when we get there," Jane said absently. They would take the bus from the train station to the sleepy little town she had once called home.

"If you want, you could get some sleep now and..."

“No, that's okay," Red replied, pulling her girlfriend closer.

“I don't think I could sleep now anyway." She paused.

"Are we going straight there?" She didn't need to explain where "there" meant.

"Yes," Jane whispered, almost fearfully. She still didn't know what she was going to do when she saw her stepfather. She hadn't seen Jack in many years . . . not since she had run away. It occurred to her that she hadn't even considered what she would do if she saw her mother. Jane's feelings about her mother were . . . complicated.

The two women slipped back into silence. It would all be over soon enough.