Chapter 7
SEVEN
Dane’s car turned the corner, the red blur of taillights vanishing into the mist.
I stood alone on the wet concrete of the stoop, the key digging into my palm, but I didn’t move to unlock the door.
Dane had offered to come in—a low, rough question asked through the open window—but I had sent him away.
I couldn’t handle his concern. I couldn’t handle the questions I knew were waiting behind his eyes.
I clutched the volume against my chest. The leather felt slick under my fingers, yet the weight of it pressed against my ribs like a hot coal. A three-hundred-year-old book. A lie bound in leather.
Rain dripped from the gutter above, tapping a steady, maddening cadence against the stone. I stared at the dark wood of the door, a cold knot of dread already pulling tight in my stomach.
I shoved the key into the lock. The mechanism clicked, a distinct sound in the damp air. I pushed the door open and stepped into the dark hallway.
Eamon stood at the stove, stirring a pot of tomato soup—my favourite, the one he only made when he knew I’d had a hell of a week. He’d even set out the bread for toasties.
It was safe. It was domestic. It was a lie.
He turned, a tired smile forming on his lips, but it died the moment he saw my face. He saw the book in my hands, and his posture changed instantly. The warmth vanished. He went still, waiting for the blow.
I marched forward and dropped the volume onto the table. It landed with a crack. I flipped it open to the author portrait. To her face.
“Who was she?” My voice cracked. “Who was my mother?”
His gaze dropped to the photograph. He didn’t look surprised. He just looked exhausted, having waited twenty years for this specific moment.
“Selene, please. Sit down.”
“No.” I shoved the table, rattling the silverware. “I’m done sitting. You told me she was human. You told me she died young.” I stabbed a finger at the date printed on the page. “This book is three centuries old. She looks exactly the same in this photo as she did the day she died. How?”
He closed his eyes. A long, heavy breath escaped him. “It’s complicated.”
“Try me,” I snapped. “I’ve spent my life believing I was a half-blood question mark. That my mother was a fragile human woman. But she’s in a history book, and you are a brick wall of secrets. So I’ll ask you again. Who are you? Who was she? And who the hell am I?”
The quiet stretched, taut.
He finally met my stare. The weariness in his eyes was profound. “Your mother wasn’t human.”
The air left the room.
“What?”
“And I,” he said softly, “am not Calysteri.”
My head spun. The kitchen, the smell of basil, the radio—it all tilted. If she wasn’t human, and he wasn’t Calysteri… then the math of my own existence dissolved.
“What are you?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer immediately. He just watched me, his face a mask of regret.
A new question formed, the worst one of all. It clawed its way out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Am I even yours?”
The pain that flashed across his face was real. “Not by blood,” he admitted, his voice thick. “But by choice. Always by choice.”
The words hit like a physical blow. He wasn’t my blood.
But he was the one who taught me to ride a bike.
He sat up through every fever, who cheered the loudest at my graduation, patched up scraped knees and broken hearts.
He had chosen me every day for twenty years.
And he had lied to me for every single one of them.
“Then whose am I?” I took a step back, the distance between us suddenly infinite.
The question tore open a wound I hadn’t realised I was carrying.
For years, I’d felt like a glitch. Other half-bloods I knew were stable, their magic a manageable hum.
Mine was a riot—chaotic, overpowering, and always on the verge of spilling over.
I had spent my life thinking I was just wrong.
A genetic mismatch. A strange, volatile anomaly in a world of orderly magic.
But if the lie was the foundation… maybe the chaos wasn’t a defect.
“What am I?” I whispered, the fear finally catching up to the confusion.
He slumped against the counter, the fight draining out of him. “Sit down, Selene. I will tell you everything.”
The legs of the kitchen chair scraped against the floor tiles as he dragged it out for me. A gesture he’d made a thousand times—an offer of tea, biscuits, a peaceful moment. But tonight, it was an order. A command to brace for impact.
I sank into the seat, my body moving on autopilot while my mind spun in the vast, silent vacuum he had created. He sat opposite. The table lay between us like a chasm.
“To answer that,” he began, his voice rough with the weight of the truth, “you have to understand your origins.”
He took a breath, the sound rattling in his chest. “Liora and I… we belonged to a different time. A different nature. The old stories called us Aetherkind.”
Aetherkind.
The word resonated, pulling a specific memory from the back of my mind.
The Tides Beyond the Veil—the deep-blue linen volume currently sitting on the bookshelf in my room upstairs.
I had read that exact term only yesterday, buried in a passage about figures shaped from mist and moonlight walking the tide-paths.
A folklore book. A gilded story she invented with magic creatures.
But looking at Eamon’s face, the grey exhaustion etched into his features, I understood the reality. She had been writing a history.
He leaned forward, placing his hands flat on the table.
“We do not age as humans do, Selene. We walk the centuries, not the decades. That photo you saw in the Archives? It was taken when she was already centuries old.”
My head spun. Living for hundreds of years. That suddenly explained why he still looked at least a decade younger than the sixty-two he claimed to be.
“We lived in the quiet spaces,” he continued, his eyes unfocused, seeing a world I couldn’t imagine.
“We had to. Our kind was powerful, but we were rare. And we were hunted. Not just by humans who feared what they couldn’t control, but by our own kind.
Those who sought to consume power rather than share it. ”
He looked at me, his expression softening into a heartbreaking vulnerability.
“And Liora… she was my wife. But she was also something far more vital. We were bound.” He looked down at his hands, his voice dropping to a whisper.
“Our souls were threaded together, Selene. We were one entity across two bodies. Inseparable. In a bond like that, when one half is cut, the other unravels. The other follows.”
His gaze lifted, meeting mine, and for the first time, I saw the ghost of an agony so deep it had no name.
My heart stuttered. The logic was brutal. Clinical.
“If she is gone, why are you still here?” The question came out as a shard of ice.
Pain, pure and devastating, flashed in his eyes.
“Because she didn’t let me. The moment before she died, she cut the thread herself.
” He made a small gesture with his hand.
A severing. “She tore away a piece of her own soul and forced it away from mine. She broke the bond so I wouldn’t follow. So I could stay. For you.”
The confession landed, and my breath caught. The scale of the sacrifice was too immense to grasp. He didn’t just lose her. He was forcibly left behind. For me.
All these years, he had been walking through the world with half a soul. A living ghost.
It made terrifying sense now why his appearance had aged so rapidly since I was a child, weathering far quicker than any normal Calysteri lifespan should allow. The severed bond was actively unravelling him.
“It shattered me,” he whispered, the admission costing him everything. He looked down at his hands, his scarred right hand curling into a fist. “It still does.”
The kitchen was silent save for the hum of the refrigerator. The room felt thin, the air brittle. My own body was a foreign country. Everything I thought was solid ground was quicksand.
I reached back, my fingers tracing the faded, silvery pattern on my left scapula, hidden beneath my jumper. The one constant in my life. A small, familiar imperfection. Another lie.
“The scar,” I said, my voice flattening into something brittle. “The one you said I got when the barbecue went wrong.”
Eamon’s head snapped up. The exhaustion draining him moments ago was replaced by something sharper—grief edged with guilt.
“There was no barbecue accident, Selene.”
Of course there wasn’t.
“It appeared the night she died.” He spoke slowly, building the memory brick by painful brick. “That day, your magic erupted. A violent awakening. It would have burned you out from the inside. It would have been a beacon to every hunter in the city.”
My hand dropped from my shoulder. A cold numbness spread through my arm.
“Liora saw the fire consuming you, and she made a choice. A trade.” He met my stare, desperate for me to understand.
“She was a catalyst. I had seen her contain vast amounts of power in the past. That day, she drew that awakening out of you and into herself. But there was too much power. She couldn’t just extinguish it. She had to seal it.”
He gestured to the brand. “The act of forcing it back inside you… it burned through her. That mark is where she poured the last of her life into saving yours.”
The kitchen shrank, suddenly too small.
My scar wasn’t a scar. It was a tombstone. It was the lock on a cage. It was my mother’s final act, branded into my skin.
The phantom ache in my joint ignited, a fierce, live-wire burn that vibrated in time with my heart.
“She kept you hidden,” he continued, his voice rough. “Contained. Your power, your presence… all of it, locked away behind that seal. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you. Not until it was vital. Not until the seal began to fail.”
He looked at me, and his eyes widened. A new fear dawned on his face, supplanting the old grief. “Selene…”