The Bear and Barnacle

It was Dora's insistence that returns them to Margate with such a specific deadline. She's not going to miss spending Valentine's Day with Val, but not in the way most people would expect, unless they saw the two children last year, dressed in black and passing out black paper hearts labeled "Death".

She doesn't know when they got in, having fallen asleep draped over Iago's shoulder on the train from France and barely stirring as Iago hefted her and their backpacks, Teddy securely fastened to Dora's. She slept on through the car ride and even through Iago and Jack's hushed exchange at the door of the latter's house.

But she wakes up hot, and tangled with Val and his wings. Probably deafening Val with her squeal of joy, she latched onto him, heedless at first of the unseasonable heat.

Breakfast at the very full Harkness-Grayweir house on Valentine's Day was filled with Jack's pancakes and Dora rambling, and rambling, and rambling at length about all the places they visited, the lack of being arrested or put into a brothel in Morocco, the sisters they met in the Alps but the lack of goats to chase there, and the weeks spent in Venice where Dora talked Paulo the gondolier into letting her steer, resulting-- unsurprisingly-- in a fall into a canal and a subsequent-- potentially unrelated-- illness.

She's still babbling when Zel is volunteered to take Val and her-- both matching and dressed in black, Dora with fake black wings-- out into the sweltering heat of Margate to pass out their "anti-valentines"-- upgraded to include "agony", "putrescence", "sorrow", and "loneliness" this year-- to the unsuspecting populace. And she only stops talking when her voice gives out.