"Good plan." She sets the duffel bag down next to the desk.

Down the stairs Rebecca trots.

Mrs. Blake is still in the sitting room. She has fixed her hair so it isn't falling apart anymore, but still looks wildly out of place in her own home.

"Hey, uh. Do you have an idea... of what sort of favor... you are going to want from me."

"There are a lot of possible answers to that question," she says. "If you want me to come up with a number and say you owe me that amount of money, I can do that, but the number is probably going to be pretty jaw-dropping for a teenage single mother. If you'd rather learn magic and help out doing useful magic stuff for us, that would suit me just fine. There's an option here where you renounce your birth family and become an adopted Blake but I don't really expect you to pick it, most people wouldn't, and it has its own complications anyway. I'm not going to ask you to wear maid outfits and polish silverware because the point isn't that I want this to cost you, it's that I want it to benefit us, if you see the difference? And money and magic benefit me but teenage girls in maid outfits really don't."

"Huh. I could learn magic? I didn't realize that was a thing. I guess if that's what you need done it's better than owing you a million dollars."

"And it leaves you knowing magic, which owing me a million dollars wouldn't," she agrees.

"Which does sound kind of cool if it doesn't mean consorting with demons or anything!"

A slight, wry smile. "Consorting with demons is a terrible idea, generally speaking. I wouldn't recommend it and I certainly wouldn't ask someone to do it on my behalf."

"Oh... good?" says Rebecca uncertainly, in the voice of someone who didn't actually expect that to be on the table.

"The magic we use around here is mostly ritual magic," she says. "Lots of looking things up in books and calculating how to adjust based on environmental conditions and then making sure you have everything set up so you can follow the recipe exactly, a little bit like very precise and high-stakes baking. If that doesn't sound like it's your speed, there are a few other things you can learn, but there'll be no demons involved in any of it."

"I'm... okay at baking? I'm not sure I'm precise and high stakes good at baking."

"You can try it and see, and if it doesn't work out you'll learn something else that suits you better," Mrs. Blake says with a shrug. "There's runes if you're good at drawing, druidry if you like plants... you asked about a piano, do you like music? I'm no expert in bardic magic but my sister's dabbled in it, we could try you on that."

"There's music magic? I wanna do that."

Mrs. Blake smiles. "I'll introduce you to my sister, then."

Squee!

Awwww.

"So, with that question dealt with, there remains the question of how to safely get you to and from school. Staying home is an option, but we'd want you to keep up with classes, and I get the impression that's harder when you're not going to them. Unfortunately, there aren't very many good solutions for preventing your family from starting mundane legal trouble without messing with their heads even more, and it'd be pretty reasonable of you to not want that."

"- yeah, I guess they might, uh, help the Capris kidnap me? If the Capris don't have any hesitations about messing with them."

"That, and even if the Capris stopped messing with them, they wouldn't necessarily understand why you needed to be protected from the Capris, and might insist that you stay at their house even though it's a much softer target than mine. You know your parents better than I do; assuming their heads weren't being messed with by anyone at all, could you convince them that it was very important that you stay here, without explaining anything about magic? 'The Capris want to kidnap me and take my baby' is fine; 'because my baby is an egg' is not fine."

"I'm not totally sure my parents wouldn't appreciate it if the baby disappeared into the Capri family and wasn't around embarrassing them with how stupid I was! I could tell them the Capris actually want me to abort and would be trying to make that happen? - not sure why that means I have to stay with you though."

"Well," she smiles slightly, "I'm mysterious and spooky and the Capris don't want to tick me off by kidnapping someone from my house. But, yes, I agree that's a weak point in this argument."

"Yeah. Uh. I could tell them that I want to start - supporting myself, to be ready for the baby - and that you gave me a job. A live-in job. Plus the thing about the Capris wanting to kill the baby."

"That suits me fine. And we can in fact pay you to do work around here, to sell the story better."

"Wow, this is so much better than the silverware polishing idea."

"I agree!" She smiles slightly. "Silverware just doesn't need polishing that often!"