CHAPTER 8
Time Begins to Fracture—Lainie
The kitchen smelled like chocolate cake.
The full, deep, three-layer-with-ganache smell from the night before, when Bruno had eaten two slices standing at the counter and Ash had eaten three sitting on the counter, which Lainie would address at some point but not today.
The cake pan sat in the sink, soaking. A fork Bruno had used to eat cake straight from the pan still lay on the counter.
Ash's leather jacket hung over the back of a kitchen chair.
A damp patch darkened the tile near the door to the barn—Frost's ice, still working its way out of the stone floor and under the threshold twelve hours later.
The house was full of supernatural beings, the vineyard was defended by a dragon and a phoenix and a tiger and a fox and a berserker and a marmalade cat, and Lainie was making eggs.
By hand. On the stove. The regular way.
She cracked the third egg into the pan and watched the white spread across the cast iron.
Normal. Ordinary. The kind of thing a woman did on a Sunday morning in February when her kitchen wasn't occupied by four provincial rulers from a book world.
She wanted the sound of the egg hitting the pan.
The smell of butter browning. The small, precise competence of making breakfast without magic, without conjuring, without the watch doing the work for her.
Other women her age were sleeping in on a Sunday. Reading in bed. Getting ready for church. Not scrambling eggs with a pocket watch on their chest while someone rearranged reality around their kitchen. But sure. Normal Sunday.
Her knuckles tightened on the spatula, then loosened.
She pushed the eggs around the pan with a wooden spatula and listened to the house. The floorboards creaked upstairs—Brennon and Hadlee both up, both inside the ward network. The shower ran. Outside, the vineyard was quiet in the mid-morning sun, the vines dark and bare against the February sky.
Footsteps on the stairs. The distinct rhythm of bare feet on hardwood—Jenna's cadence, the one Lainie could pick out of a crowd of footsteps the way she could pick out her daughter's voice in a stadium.
Jenna rounded the corner into the kitchen. Thirteen years old. Pajama pants with tiny cacti on them. Hair a rat's nest. Eyes half-closed.
"Mom, do we still got cereal?"
"Cabinet above the microwave."
Jenna opened the cabinet, grabbed the box of Honey Nut Cheerios, and tipped it into a bowl from the dish rack. Next came milk from the fridge. The exact amount she always poured—too much, pooling around the edges, the way Lainie had given up correcting two years ago.
Lainie watched her. Registered: thirteen. Phone in the waistband of her pajamas. Black nail polish chipping on her left thumb.
This is my daughter. This is now.
The watch was warm. Sawyer sat on the chair in the corner by the window—his usual post, the spot he'd claimed since Kalen gave him the kids to watch. His green eyes tracked Jenna. His tail did not move.
Lainie turned back to the stove. The eggs were done, scrambled to perfection. She slid them onto a plate, pivoted to set them on the counter—
The cereal box was in the cabinet. The door closed. Jenna's bowl sat on the counter, empty. Clean. Dry at the bottom, as if milk had never touched it.
Jenna stood at the cabinet, hand on the door, opening it.
"Mom, do we still got cereal?"
The same sentence. The same pitch. The same tilt of her head, half-closed eyes, bare feet on the kitchen tile.
Lainie's fingers went white on the plate.
She set it down. The ceramic hit the counter harder than she intended. Jenna didn't notice—she was pouring Cheerios into the bowl. The same motion. The same amount tumbling out. Milk pooling at the edges.
The timepiece pulsed once. Not warm. Hot.
A single throb of heat against Lainie's sternum, the relic pressing outward through her shirt.
She opened her mouth—to say what? Did you just do that?
Did that happen?—and the moment passed. Jenna sat at the counter, spoon in the cereal, scrolling her phone with her free hand.
Normal. Eating. As if time had caught on something and restarted.
Sawyer hadn't moved. His green eyes stayed on Jenna—the thirteen-year-old Jenna, the one that was there for everyone else in the room.
Lainie picked up her coffee. Took a sip.
Lukewarm.
She'd poured it from the pot five minutes ago. The pot was still hot—she could hear the burner clicking off. The mug should hold heat for ten minutes, minimum. She wrapped both hands around it, pressing her palms against the sides. Cool.
Stress. That was the word she reached for. Sleep deprivation. The Collector, the summoning, the war council, the allies in her barn—her brain was running on fumes and bad coffee and the residual adrenaline of two days she'd never planned for.
She reheated the lukewarm coffee in the microwave and did not look at the cereal box.
Kalen came in through the kitchen door, bringing in February air and the smell of damp grass along with mud on his boots.
His black shirt—a different one, or the same one washed, she couldn't tell—rolled at the cuffs.
He'd been outside with Charlie. Patrolling wards.
The morning routine of a man who operated on three hours of sleep and dragon metabolism.
His golden eyes swept the room. Jenna at the counter. Sawyer in the chair. Lainie at the stove with a mug in both hands. Something crossed his face—the small crease between his brows that meant he was reading her and not liking what he found.
"You all right?"
She nodded. Set the mug down. "Fine. Just tired."
He held her eyes for a beat longer than the words required. She held his back. She didn't tell him about the cereal. She didn't know how to describe what had happened without sounding like she was losing her mind.
The relic was warm again. Not hot. As if whatever had protested had passed.
The winery office was a small room off the tasting area—a desk, a laptop, a filing cabinet, a window that looked out over the vines.
Lainie sat in the chair and opened the laptop.
Post-event paperwork. Vendor invoices from the grand opening.
A review request from the Altamont Gazette.
A stack of thank-you emails she'd started last night at the kitchen table while Ash worked his way through a third slice of cake and Bruno spread his documents across the other end like a professor grading papers.
She opened her drafts folder. The thank-you to Karen—the one she'd written at eleven p.m., the words she remembered typing because she'd been careful with them, because Karen's hug at the end of the party had been the kind that said I know something is wrong and I'm not going to forget—was gone.
Not in drafts. Not in sent. Not in trash.
She checked each folder. Opened them, scrolled, searched Karen's name.
Nothing. The email did not exist. She had written it at the kitchen table.
She remembered the specific sentence about the wine: “Your face when you tasted the reserve cab was worth every vine I've pruned.” She remembered the cursor blinking. She remembered hitting save.
She wrote it again. Retyped the words from memory, hit send, watched the confirmation bar fill. Sent. She closed the laptop.
Thirty seconds later she opened it to check the invoice folder.
The email to Karen was in drafts. Unsent. The timestamp read last night—11:07 p.m. Her words, her sentences, the vine-pruning line intact. The email had never left the outbox.
The watch seared against her chest. Not a pulse this time. A press—a long, hot weight, the metal radiating through her shirt into her skin. She pressed her hand to the spot where the relic sat. The heat spread across her palm.
She pressed harder, willing the distortions to stop. The metal flared hotter. The watch didn't obey commands about time—it never had. It observed. It waited. It protested. But it didn't fight for her.
A figure appeared in the office doorway.
Frost. Dark coat buttoned. White hair sharp against the collar. His blue eyes were narrower than their default, which was already narrow. He stood with his hands behind his back, and he paused before speaking. For Frost, a pause was an alarm.
"Something is wrong with the field."
Lainie's hand stayed on her chest. "What field?"
"The temporal field. Around the house." Another pause. His blue eyes moved over her face. "Pockets of it are running at different speeds. The signature is inconsistent."
"What does that mean?"
"It means someone is bending time around you." He did not blink. "Not the property. You."
The word landed in the center of her chest. You. Not the vineyard. Not the wards. Not the army of supernatural beings spread across the property doing their jobs. The Collector wasn't attacking the defenses. He was attacking her.
The cereal box back in the cabinet. The email erasing. The lukewarm coffee. Was each one a small tear—not in the wards or the property line, but in her day? Her strange morning. Her experience of what was real and what she'd imagined and what had happened and what hadn't.
The relic bit into her chest through the fabric of her shirt. The watch responded to temporal violation the way it responded to lies—with heat, with protest, with the explicit fire of something that recognized wrongness.
Something in Lainie's chest went cold. Behind her ribs, in the space where her body stored the things she'd learned to recognize over eighteen years.
She knew this feeling.
She knew it the way she knew the sound of the front door closing too hard. The way she knew the silence that came before John told her she was wrong about what she'd just watched happen in front of her. That she'd imagined it. That she was the problem.
You're imagining things. John's favorite sentence. His best weapon. The one that cost nothing and worked every time.