You could hear the party two blocks away.

  Bass rattled windows, thunder rolled in sync with synths, and the smell of ozone mixed with beer and grilled meat. The old South Pier warehouse hadn’t seen this much life since the ‘80s, and even then, probably with less fur, fangs, and general chaos.

  No one planned the party. It just happened organically. Word spread through the underground like wildfire—Curator’s gone. The files are open. We’re free.

  And so, the Alterkind came to celebrate freedom and life, as only the supernatural can. They came from all walks of life: trolls, dryads, vampires, gremlins, banshees, and at least one guy who claimed to be an animatronic from a closed theme park. The unfiled. My people.

  Thorvald had done the lighting, of course. Every strobe burst carried a hint of lightning, every bass drop punctuated by thunder crawling across the rafters.

  Tin Can guarded the kegs like a dragon protecting its hoard, holding court with a pair of raccoons perched on his shoulders. Was he trying to outdo Willard?

  Someone had painted HERO across an overturned cargo crate in fluorescent spray paint. The word looked fresh enough to still be wet.

  When I walked in with Lily, Eury, and Elly beside me, the whole place stopped.

  Cheers erupted. Glasses clinked. At least one bottle was smashed triumphantly. Someone screamed my name like I was fronting a rock band.

  I tried to wave it off, but Zorka—still limping, still terrifyingly cute—whistled sharp enough to shatter the awkwardness. “Speech!” she shouted, grinning.

  Everyone took up the chant, and how do you say no to that?

  Axemaster appeared from the crowd with a beer in one hand and a microphone in the other. “C’mon, Dumps,” he slurred happily, “say words!”

  I climbed onto the crate, accepting the microphone as the lights dimmed just enough to spotlight me. “Uh,” I began eloquently, “hi.”

  A few scattered laughs. Someone in the back yelled, “We love you, Daniel Mercer!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Love you too… probably made out with you once or twice even…”

  The laughter rolled, easy and real.

  “I’m not great at speeches,” I continued. “But I wanted to say this—what we did? All that shit wasn’t luck. That was guts. It was pain. It was the whole lot of you refusing to get filed away like receipts. We fought like hell, and somehow, we won. I’m not exactly sure how we did it, but it all worked out. So, even if the universe keeps trying to catalog us, we’ll keep scribbling in the margins.”

  The crowd roared. Thorvald banged a thunderclap for applause. I raised my drink. “To the unfiled!”

  “To the unfiled!” they answered.

  The roar of voices became music again, laughter spilling through it like light through glass.

  The night blurred in snapshots after that. Thorvald flirted with Elly until she threatened to hex his thunder “where it counts.” He took it as foreplay.

  AxeMaster slow danced with a siren who hummed just loud enough to keep everyone slightly lovestruck but not suicidal.

  Zorka sat on a stack of crates surrounded by her werewolf entourage, puffing a cigarette and flicking ashes into a beer bottle. “Don’t say I never bring party favors,” she said when I passed.

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  Sélis was alternating between dancing with one of their mirror selves and splitting themself to dance with two different people at once. They seemed to be having a good time, enjoying being whole again, or multiple wholes, however they saw themselves. I couldn’t pretend to understand the whole multiplicity thing. I have a hard enough time dealing with a single mind and body.

  The DJ from the club—the club, the one with the cardiac arrest inducing orgy—had returned, spinning tracks so deep the floor trembled. He blew me a kiss between gyrating beats. “Still not joining, hero?” he teased. “Your loss.”

  Willard and his rats ran the bar, pouring drinks and collecting IOUs that I suspected would turn into tiny future crimes. No one said anything about Reeva the Rat Queen’s underage offspring pouring. After all, what was 19 or 20 years in rat years?

  SilentWatcher’s blood-stained notebook floated near the DJ booth, pages fluttering in rhythm. No one knew who had brought it, but no one dared move it either. It was part of the décor now, probably even sentient after all it had seen.

  Halfway through the night, three sleek suits arrived. Jade’s people. They looked painfully normal. They wore mirrored glasses, carried briefcases, and wore expressions that could kill awkward conversation at fifty paces.

  One of them handed me a sealed envelope. “With compliments and no strings, per Lady Jade,” the woman said, then vanished into the crowd like a ghost.

  I pocketed it. I’d read it later. Maybe.

  Elly found me leaning against a wall, watching Thorvald power the lightshow by sticking his finger directly into an outlet. “Why does this look like the world’s most illegal rave?” she asked.

  “Because it is,” I said. “The liquor license alone would kill a man.”

  She smiled faintly. “You know, you actually did it. You saved people.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We did. Weird, huh?”

  “Not really.” She looked up at me, eyes catching the glow. “You’ve always been the kind of idiot who runs toward the fire.”

  Before I could answer, Axemaster barreled in, half-drunk, half-wise. He slapped me on the back so hard my spine popped. “You did good, boss,” he said. “But you have to know that this wasn’t a one-time gig… not for me and not for any of these people.”

  “Oh, please don’t say that,” I groaned.

  “I mean, ‘To the Unified’? That was some team building if I’ve ever seen any.”

  I shook my head. “It just came out…”

  He grinned. “You got the instincts for it—the nose for weird, the knack for surviving it. You should make this whole thing official.”

  Lily, never one to miss a punchline, chimed in, “You mean start a supernatural extermination service?”

  “Nah,” Axemaster said. “A fixer. A mediator. Someone who handles the messes between worlds. We need someone who knows both sides and doesn’t owe anyone.”

  Elly raised her drink, smiling like she already knew what I was thinking.

  “Call it Error Solutions. Problem Solvers for the Problematic.”

  Everyone nearby laughed—but I didn’t.

  It stuck in my brain like a good riff. Error Solutions.

  Ridiculous. Perfect.

  Eury joined us, hair and petrifying gaze half-asleep from too much warmth and beer. “You look like a man thinking too hard,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “That happens when people suggest I start a business based on my most dangerous life choices ever.”

  Lily smirked. “Oh, so, like, every business ever?”

  “Exactly.”

  Later, I stepped outside for air.

  The night was cool and sharp, the city skyline faintly glowing. Music thumped behind me—Thorvald’s lightning flared blue across the windows like the storm was dancing with the beat.

  Elly followed, barefoot, holding two drinks. She handed me one. “To surviving gods, bureaucrats, and emotional whiplash,” she said.

  “To friends,” I replied.

  We clinked glasses.

  From inside came the unmistakable sound of Thorvald blowing a fuse, followed by Zorka shouting, “I said no thunderstorms indoors, you Scandinavian himbo!”

  I grinned. “Think we’ll ever have a quiet night?”

  “Wouldn’t bet on it,” Elly said. “But that’s not really us, is it?”

  “Guess not.”

  She leaned against the railing, hair glowing faintly in the reflected storm light. “What now, Daniel?”

  “Now?” I exhaled. “I pay it back. All of it. The blood, the bruises, the people who followed me into the dark.”

  She tilted her head. “How?”

  I looked down at the city lights, the pulse of it, alive again. “No idea. Maybe I help clean up the messes. Keep the world from eating itself.”

  Elly smiled. “You mean start that business?”

  “I mean maybe start something,” I said. “Something real. No more running, no more collecting debts. Just solving problems before they get bloody.”

  Behind us, the crowd erupted in cheers—someone had just crowd-surfed a gargoyle.

  Elly touched my arm. “Then do it,” she said softly. “Build something good. You know we’ll all be there to help you.”

  I stared out at the skyline.

  Maybe this was what normal felt like, for us. Lightning in the distance. Music in the air. A thousand monsters dancing without fear.

  “Error Solutions,” I murmured. “Yeah. Has a ring to it.”

  The door burst open behind us. AxeMaster leaned out, grinning. “Dumps! Someone challenged Thorvald to beer pong with live current! We might need a medic or a priest!”

  “Or a fire truck,” I sighed.

  Elly snorted into her drink. “Boss life.”

  “Yeah,” I said, finishing mine. “Welcome to Error Solutions.”

  Only, I wasn’t really kidding. I think they had something here.