No evil! Just Lily, her face scrunched up and sweaty. The scream is trailing off but she still doesn't seem to be really awake; she's whimpering "no" over and over, her arms over her head as though she's trying to fend off an invisible person. 

Evelyn reaches the room. Oh no, Iomedae and Alfirin are both awake and look really freaked out. "- It's okay, she's okay, she has bad dreams, nobody's in danger here -"

"Bad dreams sometimes mean bad things."

Alfirin does not know what a 'dream' is or why having bad ones around isn't itself a bad thing.

"- no Evil. Evelyn claims that Lily cried out because her sleep is troubled."

"It's because bad things happened to her before and she has bad memories," Evelyn says, which is not technically something she knows for sure but one can make certain assumptions. 

(Lily has not, once, asked when she was going home to her birth family. Evelyn...can infer kind of a lot, from that. Kids her age almost always want to go home more than anything else in the world.) 

She forges into the room and turns on the bedside lamp and sits down on the side of the bed. "Lily, love, wake up," she says calmly. "You're in your bedroom at Evelyn's house. You're having a bad dream." 

Lily does seem to wake up. She does not really seem to be less upset. 

Evelyn stays where she is, sitting on the side of the bed. "You girls go back to bed, okay?" she says to Iomedae and Alfirin. "You need your sleep." 

Lily scrambles up frantically, trying to free herself from the blankets. "I s'eepd'r! NO bad." 

*"I sleep there!" 

"...Lily, you can't sleep in Iomedae's room tonight. You can go say hi in the morning, but this is your bed and your room and nothing bad is going to happen here." 

"H'wa'ere! Wa'RY'ere!" 

*"He was here! Was RIGHT here!" 

"- Nobody was here, Lily. You had a bad dream." And she has a much better idea of who 'he' is, now. Probably not a demon, if only demons hurt children the world would be so much simpler. "He's - far away, and doesn't know where you live anymore, and he's never going to hurt you again, I promise." 

"She can sleep with us. If he come to get her, I stop him."

Alfirin nods. She doesn't mind sharing more, though she is kind of kicking herself about not keeping the knife with her overnight and she should not go get it if Lily is in the same room.

"This my fault because Lily tell me go stop him but I could not understand her saying how to find. I can a small thing keep her safe."

Aaahhhh??!! Okay technically this is not new information, and also it was clearly deluding herself to vaguely hope that Iomedae would be distracted by the many things going on and drop the matter, but aaaaah. At least she still doesn't, in fact, know where Lily's grandfather lives? ...Evelyn is too tired for this right now. 

It's...definitely not fostering best practices to let kids sleep in each other's rooms. Usually she wouldn't even consider it, because it would also be clearly a bad idea, but - in this case, she does actually just trust Iomedae with Lily, and - has more mixed feelings about Alfirin, who she still feels like she barely knows, and who definitely just ran over here from Iomedae's room and not her own - but honestly she also trusts Iomedae to make sure that's fine. Her gut feeling is that this is, very clearly, the right thing for Lily right now, and also - something Iomedae needs. The only thing standing in her way is that it's weird and she would be embarrassed about explaining it to Diel. (And that it would be utterly awful if something bad did somehow happen and it was her fault, but she cannot, actually, think what that would be. Iomedae knows better than to have her pocketknife out around Lily.)

Also, it feels like tomorrow is going to be impossible to face unless she gets some sleep tonight. The chronic sleep deprivation during her first couple of weeks with Lily was bearable because Lily was her only placement, and also at school all day. Maybe she's getting too old for this, but it's the situation she's in. 

Right. Figuring out if she has to explain this in her log notes can be tomorrow-Evelyn's problem. 

"...Okay. He's not going to show up here, he doesn't know where we live, but - I think Lily would sleep better if you were there, so she can sleep in your room just for tonight, if you're sure you don't mind." 

Wow. Lily was not at all expecting that to work. She flings her arms around Evelyn. "TA'you Mummy." 

*"Thank you." 

Awwww. 

Evelyn hugs Lily back and strokes her hair, and then stands up carefully, with Lily still glommed onto her like a limpet, and carries her over to Iomedae. Lily will obediently transfer her grip to Iomedae's shoulders and burrow her head into Iomedae's chest, sniffling.

(Which is also awwwwwwwwww. And - something about it, this one quiet moment at almost 3 am on a Tuesday morning, standing in pajamas in the hallway, makes it feel like maybe, somehow, this is going to be all right.) 

"Thank you, Iomedae," she says quietly. 

Iomedae in her more petty and childish moments resents that Lily has been told they are sisters, but she would never resent a cursed child frightened of a man who did unsayable things to her for wanting to sleep in a room full of people like a normal person and not in an isolated box like Americans, or for wanting a paladin between her and her enemies.

"God will help me if bad man comes," she tells Lily.

(Look, strictly speaking Evelyn did not at any point tell Lily that Iomedae was her sister. Evelyn never does that. She said a big girl was coming to live in the house with them, and Lily made her own stubborn determination of what that meant.) 

She goes back to bed. 

Lily clings. She's a lot calmer now, though. Nobody seems angry at each other right now and so maybe this house is an okay safe house again. 

It has not at all occurred to Alfirin that they might not be allowed to share a room, so she follows Iomedae back to her floor.

"You want the bed or the floor?" she asks Lily. "We will all be hugs if the floor."

"F'oor'ugs," Lily says drowsily. "...Y'n'mada Mummy n'more?" 

*"Floor hugs. You're not mad at Mummy anymore?"