Chapter 16 - Caitlynn
The nausea arrived before she was fully awake.
It threaded itself into her consciousness while she was still mostly asleep, while the morning was gray at the edges.
The compound outside was just beginning to make its first sounds—boots on gravel, a door somewhere, the low exchange of wolves changing shift.
Caitlynn lay on her side with her knees drawn up and waited, the way she’d learned to wait for bad things, very still, as though stillness might convince it to pass her over.
It didn’t pass her over.
She made it to the bathroom with four seconds to spare and knelt on the cold tile and was comprehensively, wretchedly sick, and when it was done, she pressed her forehead to the side of the tub and breathed through her mouth until the cold porcelain stopped the spinning.
Food poisoning, she thought. Elena’s chicken last night. Something.
She stood. Rinsed her mouth. Looked at her reflection—pale, freckled, eyes too dark, the auburn of her hair lank against her neck. She looked like she’d been awake for thirty-six hours. She’d been asleep for eight.
Fine, she told the woman in the mirror. You’re fine. Stop making that face.
She went back to bed and lay very still until her pulse slowed, and after twenty minutes the nausea receded to a low hum at the base of her throat—present, watchful, not gone.
She got up carefully. Dressed slowly. Sat on the edge of the bed for a moment with her hands in her lap while the room considered tilting.
That was when the glass broke.
It didn’t fall. It didn’t crack. One second, it sat on the nightstand with its inch of water, catching the weak morning light; the next, it was six separate pieces of itself, scattered across the wood, water spreading in a slow dark stain between the shards. No vibration. No tremor. Nothing.
Caitlynn stared at it.
Her magic didn’t misfire like this anymore.
That had been the early days—the flickering lights and the singed curtains and the small involuntary detonations of a power she’d spent twenty-four years trying to convince herself didn’t exist. She’d been training for weeks now, working through the texts with Olivia, learning to find the edges of it, hold it, direct it. She was better. She was careful.
She pressed her fingers to her sternum. The magic sat inside her chest where it always did, a coiled warmth—but it felt strange. Not angry. Not frightened. Unsettled, the way a compass needle unsettled near something that disrupted the field.
She cleaned up the glass, got rid of the evidence, and told herself it was a fluke.
She moved to the kitchen quickly. A cup of tea—that was what she wanted.
The smell hit her the moment the steam rose—sharp and grassy, the same tea she’d drunk every morning for the past six weeks—and her stomach lurched hard.
She set the cup down fast enough that it sloshed onto the counter, then stood very still with her hands braced on either side of it and breathed through her nose until the wave passed.
Elena, at the far end of the kitchen counter, said nothing. But Caitlynn felt her eyes.
“Don’t,” Caitlynn said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
Elena turned back to her bread dough. “I was going to offer you toast.”
She couldn’t face the toast either, as it turned out.
She managed half a glass of water and sat at the kitchen table while the compound woke up around her, watching the morning move through the windows, trying to eat a piece of plain bread and failing at the fourth bite.
The bread sat in her stomach like something that hadn’t decided what it was going to do yet.
She taught her fire practice at nine and got through it by pure stubbornness, standing in the back yard with the training markers and moving the flame from hand to hand, building and releasing, building and releasing.
The magic came easily, as it always did now—too easily, almost. It wanted to run.
She kept pulling it back, keeping it tight, and the effort of the containment made her temples pound.
By eleven, the nausea had returned with reinforcements.
The bathroom off the second-floor hallway was the most private one in the house.
It was around two corners and at the end of a short corridor that led nowhere useful, the kind of room a building accumulated by accident rather than design, half-forgotten and therefore rarely used.
Caitlynn had located it in her first week, in the methodical, quiet way she mapped every place she was put—because you never knew how long you’d be staying. It was better to know the exits.
She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up when Olivia found her.
Olivia took one look at her and came in and closed the door.
She sat on the floor opposite—cross-legged, back against the bathtub, no fanfare, no performance of concern.
Just the unceremonious settling of a woman who had decided this was where she was going to be and had no objection to the tile.
It was, Caitlynn had come to understand, one of the things she liked best about Kahn’s sister: she never needed the room to be arranged around her arrival.
“You look terrible,” Olivia said.
“Thank you. That’s very useful.”
“How long?”
Caitlynn turned her head against the wall to look at her. “Since this morning. It’s been coming and going.”
“The tea.”
“Elena told you.”
“Elena noticed. There’s a difference.” Olivia’s voice was even. The voice of a woman approaching the edge of a conclusion carefully, from the safest angle. “A glass broke in your room.”
“Magic misfire. It hasn’t happened in—” She stopped. Started again. “It’s been a while.”
“What did it feel like? The magic, right before.”
Caitlynn thought about the compass needle. The unsettled pull of something tugging the familiar warmth inside her chest sideways, off its axis. “Different,” she said. “Not wrong. Just—off. Like it was responding to something I wasn’t aware of.”
Olivia was quiet for a beat. Not the quiet of someone considering what to say—the quiet of someone who had already said it in their head and was giving the other person time to catch up.
Caitlynn watched her face, and something cold began its slow descent from her sternum to the pit of her stomach.
“When was your last cycle?” Olivia asked.
The question landed in the small room and didn’t move.
Caitlynn tried to count backward. Past the past two weeks of training.
Past the nights, she’d stopped bothering to keep track of which side of the bed was hers.
Past the archive work and the texts and the long arguments that had started turning into something else in the seconds after they ended.
She hit a wall and climbed over it and hit another one, and her fingers went cold against her kneecaps.
“Six weeks,” she said. Her voice came out flat, which was better than the alternative. “Maybe seven.”
Olivia said, “There’s a way to be sure. Pack healers use it—it’s old magic, older than any test. It reads the bond. Whether it’s expanded. Whether there’s a new signature in it.”
The cold was in Caitlynn’s hands now, at her wrists, running up the inside of her arms. “Do it.”
Olivia moved closer and took both of Caitlynn’s hands, turning them palm-up, her grip warm and firm.
She spoke—old words, guttural consonants in a language Caitlynn had heard in the texts but never spoken aloud.
Something woke at the sound of them. A light built in Olivia’s palms, silver-white, different from Caitlynn’s own gold—softer, older, the light of a full moon on water rather than fire.
It spread from Olivia’s hands into hers.
Traveled up her arms with the unhurried certainty of something that had done this before and knew where it was going.
It gathered at the center of her chest, paused—and then dropped.
A slow, deliberate descent through her body, sinking low, pooling in the space below her navel, the way liquid found the lowest point of a vessel.
It pulsed.
Once.
A breath of silence.
Twice. And then a third time—steady, distinct, synced to nothing inside her own body. A rhythm she hadn’t put there.
Olivia released her hands. The silver faded. The room was very quiet.
“You’re pregnant,” Olivia said, her tone carrying a note of wonder. Her face broke open in a grin. “Which means I’m about to be an aunt.”
The smile disappeared as quickly as it appeared. “If… you’re happy about this, right?”
The world didn’t spin. That was what surprised her. She’d expected spinning—the cinematic kind, the kind that preceded fainting or crying or some other visible evidence of a person receiving news that rearranged everything.
Instead, everything went very still.
Caitlynn sat on the floor of a bathroom in a house that wasn’t hers in a territory she hadn’t asked to be brought to.
The information settled into her like a stone dropped into deep water—no splash, just the small, irreversible impact and then the long, slow sinking of it, layer by layer, all the way to the bottom.
Pregnant.
A baby meant permanence. It meant roots sunk so deep into this soil, these people, these walls that she could never pull them up.
It meant the running was done—the foster-home running, the apartment-to-apartment running, the moving before anyone could move her first, the art of never quite unpacking because unpacking was something you only did when you believed you’d stay.
A baby was the one tether you couldn’t cut without becoming the exact thing you’d spent your whole life swearing you’d never be.
The person who left. The person who decided that staying was someone else’s problem.
Her mother’s face surfaced. Not the photograph. The dream version—the woman in the fire with her palms open, reaching, trying to close a distance of seventeen years with her hands.
What if I’m terrible at it?