ALICE
The wards were tighter today.
I felt them the moment I opened my eyes. A pressure against my skin that hadn't been there last night, like the house itself had drawn a breath, filling its lungs and holding it.
Aunt Judy had been layering protections since she'd brought me back to her home the night I collapsed at The Purple Fang, and each morning I woke to find a new one pressed against the walls, the windows, the floorboards.
Rosemary bundles over the doorframes. Salt lines at the sills.
And this morning, a new jar on the kitchen counter, labeled in her cramped handwriting: Containment.
That one was for me, specifically.
I wrapped my hands around the mug of chamomile tea she'd made — because chamomile was calming, and Judy wanted me calm — and stared at the pale gold liquid.
Gold.
Everything was gold these days, and honestly, I was sick of it.
The flecks in my eyes. The light that had poured through me like liquid fire as something ancient and terrible spoke through my mouth, while Dae, the male I'd, perhaps stupidly, chosen to trust, held me on the dirty floor of the vampire strip club, his deep brown eyes wide and helpless…
Even this stupid tea.
I took a shaky breath. That was over now. Marcus was gone. And whatever that had been — his last gasp perhaps, the djinn giving one last ditch effort to bring one of his relatives with him— it'd passed through me and burned itself out.
And when I'd woken up in Dae's arms, the thing I'd felt most wasn't fear or even anger.
It was the quiet.
There was no whispering at the edges of my thoughts. No pressure behind my eyes. No sense of something foreign and evil coiled inside my own skin, watching and waiting. There was just peaceful silence. The kind I hadn't felt since before Alex was taken, maybe longer.
I was fine.
Everything was fine.
"You're not eating," Judy said.
I looked up. She stood at the stove with her arms crossed, watching me.
She'd been watching me since I came here, and I was really trying to be patient about it because I understood her fear.
Her short, salt-and-pepper hair was combed back from her lined face, and the reading glasses she finally admitted she needed sat perched on her nose.
But there was no mistaking exactly who and what she was, even wearing an apron with little bees on it.
The power she wore like a second skin told everyone she was the High Priestess of our coven.
"I'm not hungry."
"You've hardly eaten since you got here."
I shrugged one shoulder. "I've been sleeping a lot. Hard to eat when you're asleep."
"And whose idea was all the sleeping?"
Mine. I'd been doing a lot of it, curling up in the guest room all hours of the day and night, pulling the quilt over my head, and letting the heaviness drag me under for as long as I could stay that way.
My body had been through something violent and invasive.
It needed rest. And if the rest kept me from thinking too hard about gold eyes and prophecies and the spell book hidden in my overnight bag three feet from my bed—
Well. That was even better.
"I'm recovering," I said, and took a sip of tea. "You said yourself a possession leaves traces. The body needs time."
Judy's jaw tightened. "I said the body needs monitoring. Which is why I've insisted you stay here with me. Where I can—"
"Watch me."
"Protect you."
"Aunt Judy, you know I appreciate you letting me stay here," I said, picking each word carefully.
I wasn't ungrateful. I really wasn't. My aunt had dropped everything when she'd sensed the magical disturbance at the Purple Fang and had come for me without question.
She'd brought me here and immediately wrapped me in wards so the djinn wouldn't be able to get to me again, forbidding me to leave the house alone.
"I feel fine," I told her. "Better than fine. Whatever happened…it's over. Marcus is gone."
"You don't know that."
"I do. I felt him leave."
"You felt something. That doesn't mean—"
"Aunt Judy." I set the mug down. "I'm telling you I'm okay. I'm asking you to believe me."
Something shifted in her expression, the hard line of her mouth loosening just a bit. She exhaled a long breath, then pulled out the chair across from me and sat, and when she spoke again, her voice was calmer.
"Alice. Sweetheart." She took my hands, and I felt the calluses on hers from decades of gardening and grinding herbs.
"I have watched every witch in this coven walk out my door and into the arms of something I can't fight for them.
Her grip tightened. "And in the end, every single one chose a vampire over their coven, and every one left a hole I can't fill. "
My chest ached. Because she wasn't wrong. This table used to be full. Now half the chairs sat empty at every gathering, because mates came before the coven. Always.
"That's not what this is about," I whispered.
"Isn't it?"
"I'm not — I'm not leaving the coven. I'm not mating with anyone. I just want to go home. To my own apartment and my own things."
Judy studied me with those sharp blue eyes that never missed a trick. "Then why did you run to one when the djinn was inside of you? Instead of coming to me?"
I had no answer for that.
She tilted her head. "Why were you alone with him when I found you if there's nothing going on? And why haven't you mentioned him once since I brought you home?"
Because I thought about him constantly, and every time I did, I also remembered how it felt when Marcus had taken my body to spew his bullshit from my mouth, and the last thing I'd seen before the world went gold was Dae's face filled with raw, desperate terror.
For me. He'd been afraid for me.
I couldn't tell Judy any of that. Just like I couldn't tell her why I was with him.
"I just…," I started, then I shrugged. "Dae and I are friends."
"Alice."
"What?" I tried hard to keep the exasperation out of my voice, and didn't quite succeed.
"You went into vampire territory in the middle of the night and didn't tell me.
" Judy's voice was even, but like me, she couldn't quite hide the angry tremor underneath.
The calm before the storm. "You went there alone.
To see him. And now that vampire is asking everyone about you.
" She let go of my hands. "I'm not stupid. Please don't treat me like I am."
Shame crept up my neck, hot and prickling. She was right. I was a fortress of secrets these days, and the walls were getting harder and harder to hold up.
"I didn't tell you because I knew you'd react exactly like this," I said, hating how small my voice came out. Like I was seven again, and she'd just caught me sneaking a grimoire off the restricted shelf.
"Like what?" she asked. "How am I acting, exactly? Like a woman who's lost nearly all of her family to those damn vampires and doesn't want to lose the only one I have left?"
"They're not damn vampires. They're Killian and Kenya and Jamal and Brogan and Elias and Dae. They have names. And they're part of this now, whether—"
"Part of what?" Judy's blue eyes were bright. Not with tears. My aunt never cried where anyone could see. With something crazy. "My coven?" She sat back in her chair and let out a strange laugh. "They're not part of my coven, Alice. They're the reason it's broken."
The word hit me like a slap in the face. Not evolved. Not expanded. Not strengthened by new bonds…
Is that what she saw when she looked at Lizzy and Killian? At Kenya and Alex? At all the love that had bloomed between the two sides?
"That's not fair," I said.
"I've lost their parents. I buried your mother.
My sister." She slapped her palm over her heart.
"And I practically raised every one of you and held this coven together through everything—" Her voice cracked.
Just a little. Just enough for me to hear the grief under the steel.
"You kids are the only ones I have left.
And I'm tired, Alice. I'm tired of watching my family walk out that door. "
My eyes burned. I wanted to reach for her. Wanted to disappear into her arms the way I had when I was little, when Aunt Judy could fix anything with a cup of tea and a whispered spell and the solid, unshakable certainty that I would always be welcome in her home.
But I wasn't little anymore. And the thing that had come for me wasn't something her wards could stop.
Because it had already been inside.
Had been, I reminded myself. Past tense. It was gone now.
"I'm not walking out," I said. "I'm just asking for some air so I can breathe."
Judy opened her mouth to say something else, then snapped it shut again.
Her whole body went rigid, chin lifting, eyes sharpening the way they did when she caught a shift in the wards. In that moment, she reminded me of the very vampires she hated so much. A predator catching a scent.
"What?" My heart kicked hard against my ribs. "What is it?"
"It's a vampire." She was on her feet, chair scraping the tile, hands already moving, fingers spreading in the gesture I knew from a lifetime of watching her work. She was reading the vibrations in the wards she'd spent decades weaving around this house. "At the outer line."
Dae.
It had to be.
"Stay here," Judy said.
"Aunt Judy—"
"I said stay here."
She left the kitchen. I heard her footsteps cross the hallway, heard the front door open, but not the storm door. It wouldn't matter, anyway. If Judy didn't invite him in, Dae couldn't enter.