Chapter 4
FOUR
The exhaustion hit the moment I shut the front door behind me—a suffocating collapse of the scaffolding holding me upright. The house was silent, Eamon not yet home, but the residue of the day’s violence clung to my skin like a film I couldn’t wash off fast enough.
The hallway of my Dad’s house was narrow, smelling of lemon polish and the still, heavy air of a place that had remained unchanged for decades.
To my left, the living room and dining area stretched back towards the kitchen, a layout I could navigate blind.
It was a home maintained with a detective’s obsessive precision, yet every piece of furniture showed its age.
He had retired overnight ten years ago, coming home with a crushed right hand and claiming a botched raid meant he was getting too old for active duty, but the rigid habits of the job had never left him.
The velvet on the high-backed armchairs was worn smooth at the armrests, and the dining table bore the faint scratches and rings from years of files and cold tea.
This was the house where Eamon had raised me since I was five, a space where time seemed to have stopped.
Every frame on the mantle and every cushion on the sofa sat exactly where it had been when I moved out.
The physical toll of the magic settled deep in my limbs, a dead weight dragging at my muscles as I climbed the narrow staircase. The wood groaned under my boots. On the landing, the weak bulb above the bathroom wavered, casting jumping shadows as I pushed the door open.
I twisted the shower handle until the water thundered out scalding. Steam filled the room within seconds, fogging the mirror completely. I stripped quickly, dropping my damp clothes into the hamper, and wiped a hand across the glass to check the damage.
My reflection stared back—red-haired, eyes dark.
It was the same body I’d always had, though it felt foreign tonight.
Tall, with hips that sat on the curvier side of normal and a chest that had been a logistical nightmare for uniform fittings since I was seventeen.
Practicality had always been a struggle against biology, but tonight, I was just… exposed. Vulnerable.
I craned my neck to see my back in the reflection.
My gaze dropped instantly to my left shoulder blade.
The scar remained exactly as it always had—a silvery web, raised against my skin.
The “Great Barbecue Incident,” according to Dad.
A childhood burn from when I was little.
It was the story I’d told doctors, lovers, and friends my entire life. Innocent. Dead tissue.
But beneath the skin, a low purr travelled down my nerve endings. I touched it, fingers tracing the familiar ridges. Cool to the touch.
“Liar,” I whispered to the reflection.
It was gaslighting me. It lay dormant, but I knew what I had felt today. It woke up in that warehouse. It reacted to that metal. And now it wouldn’t go back to sleep.
I turned away from the mirror before I started spiralling and stepped under the spray.
The heat hit like a physical blow, shocking the chill from my bones.
I scrubbed at my skin, trying to wash away the metallic taste of the warehouse and the stale, coffee-stained grind of the station.
By the time I came out, wrapped in a towel, the steam had softened the sharp edges of the day, but the ache remained.
My old bedroom waited just a few steps down the hall. It was more of a guest room now, but still mine in the way childhood things linger. The air smelled exactly as I remembered—old paper, lavender from a sachet tucked into a drawer years ago, and the faint trace of warm cedar.
I dropped my bag by the door and sank onto the edge of the mattress. The springs gave a long, exhausted groan. Everything was exactly where it had been left… and somehow nothing fit anymore. The band posters peeling at the corners. The stack of notebooks filled with spiralling doodles.
My eyes drifted to the bookshelf.
I stood before I’d decided to. Most of the shelves held what you’d expect: battered fantasy paperbacks, old school readers. But my hand went straight to the middle shelf where a small book waited.
The Little Sun and the Little Moon.
The front cover had vanished sometime during my childhood—torn off by careless hands long before I was old enough to notice.
The title and author were long gone, stripped away and lost to the bin years ago.
Only the back cover remained, holding the pages together by a thread.
But I didn’t need the label. That story had been read to me so many times, for so many years, that the missing cover was irrelevant.
Dad always said it was one of her favourites, one she read to me whenever she could.
Liora. My mother.
I lifted it carefully. Inside, the watercolours were soft and fading: a gold-dusted sun-child dancing through meadows, a silver moon-child drifting over shadowed fields.
I didn’t remember her reading it to me—five is too young for memories to stick properly—but looking at the illustrations made my chest ache with a phantom nostalgia for a voice I couldn’t quite hear.
Dad filled the silence she left behind. He used to call me his “Little Sun”, tapping the golden girl on the page and swearing I had the same fire. It was a nickname that stuck long after I grew out of bedtime stories.
I turned to the verse my mother loved best—at least, that was what Dad always said.
“The first was a brilliance, like gold at the dawn,
She danced through the meadows and painted the morn.
The Dayfolk adored her; they called her their own—
A sun-sparkle spirit, with laughter fully grown.”
A tightness gathered beneath my ribs. I closed the book gently. As I slid it back, something else caught my eye. A spine I’d never noticed before. Slim. Neat. Out of place among the dog-eared paperbacks.
I eased it free.
The Tides Beyond the Veil — by Liora Rowan.
My chest tightened. I ran my thumb over the silver lettering pressed into deep-blue linen.
I knew she wrote, of course; Dad always told me about her time at the Ravenholt Archives, how she spent her days cataloguing the city’s history and her nights dreaming up her own.
She loved inventing forgotten civilisations and sea myths, scribbling folklore into notebooks while the city slept.
But this one was new to the shelf. It must have found its way here after I moved out, perhaps when Eamon finally cleared out the boxes from the attic. It felt… private. Deliberate. Quietly beautiful in a way I wouldn’t have noticed as a kid.
I opened it. The pages were cream, rough-edged. I skimmed a passage.
“On the nights when the sea turned silver, some claimed the Aetherkind walked the tide-paths, figures shaped from mist and moonlight, appearing only when the world held its breath.”
Aetherkind.
Weird little word. It tasted like fantasy. The sort of thing she’d whisper in the dark to chase away nightmares—a gilded lie to make the world seem less sharp. I ran my thumb over the text. But even as I told myself it was just a story, the words felt significant, weighted with more than just ink.
I closed the book softly and slid it back between the others, hiding it away again. A silent fragment of a woman I barely knew—half-forgotten myths and quiet mysteries—tucked neatly into the room I once called mine.
The front door opened downstairs. Heavy footsteps echoed in the hall.
Eamon was home.
I stiffened. The peace of the room fractured. I had questions—about the case, about the twenty-year-old files, and the silence he’d kept. Faye’s slip at the station had opened a door I couldn’t unsee, and I wasn’t going to let the night end until I had the truth.
I pushed off the bed and headed downstairs, each creak of the old wooden steps marking the descent into a conversation I already knew wouldn’t end well.
He was in the hallway, his back to me as he shrugged off his rain-soaked jacket. Even from behind, his broad, sturdy frame seemed to fill the narrow room, casting a shadow that swallowed the dim light of the corridor. He hung the thick coat on the hook with a weary slowness, then turned.
Exhaustion carved deep lines around his eyes, jaw set tight beneath a practical crop of salt-and-pepper hair.
“You’re home late,” he said, voice flat.
“So are you.” I leaned against the doorway, arms crossed.
His gaze swept over me in that old, clinical way—the cop stare that weighed and measured and catalogued. He saw the tension in my frame, the way I favoured my left side.
“We caught a bad one today,” I said. “Riverforge Docks.”
He brushed past me towards the kitchen and filled the kettle, the domestic ritual a barrier he put between us. “They’re all bad ones, Selene.”
“This was different.” I kept my eyes on his back, watching the tension gather across his spine. “A young woman. Calysteri. She was drained, Dad. Empty. No magic left, not even residue. Like someone hollowed her out.”
The kettle clicked on. He said nothing.
“She’s the sixth one in a month,” I pressed. “The ACD has been sweeping the others under the rug, calling them anomalies. But the victim, Talia Merrin… they branded her. A sigil burned into her forearm while she still breathed.”
I paused, letting the weight of it sink in. “And we found a shard. A piece of evidence Morrow tried to bury before we could even log it. But his own analyst—Faye Solstice—slipped up. She recognised the brand.”
His hand stilled on the counter. A fraction of a second—but enough. My instincts flared, brushing against him. The kitchen air turned frigid. His terror washed over me, settling in my bones, but beneath the panic lay a tremor of suppressed anger.
“She called them the ‘Purge Cases’,” I said quietly. “From two decades ago.”
His back stiffened. A tiny, involuntary betrayal.