ALICE
Coming back through Aunt Judy's wards was like sinking back into deep water.
The magic sealed shut behind me, a curtain I could feel against my skin but never quite see, and everything out there in the night dropped away all at once.
The porch light stopped buzzing. The saxophone from three streets over went muffled and far.
Even the warm press of Dae against my mouth, though still there, humming through my whole body, dulled to something I had to reach for.
I was once again contained. The way my aunt liked things.
I took a few more precious seconds with the paper bag of cold beignets clutched to my chest before I walked down the hall, back to my real life.
"You've got grass on the back of your shirt."
I jumped. Judy sat in the wingback chair by the front window, a shape darker than the dark around her. She hadn't turned on a lamp. She'd just been sitting there in the black, waiting, the way she'd waited up for me when I was seventeen and stupid and sure I was in love with a boy from Baton Rouge.
"I wasn't on the grass," I said.
"Mm."
The single syllable held a whole argument in it. I braced for the rest, the accusations, the “you went to him,” the “after everything I said,” the “I told you to stay in the kitchen.”
But Judy didn't say any of that.
Instead, she just looked at me. And in the thin light coming through the curtains I could see her face, and it wasn't the High Priestess's face. It wasn't the one she wore to lead the coven or seal the wards or stare down a vampire through a screen door. It was the face of an old woman.
"Sit down, Alice," she said, and she sounded tired. "Please."
I didn't want to. Sitting down meant staying, and staying meant talking, and talking meant she'd see everything Dae-Jung had left written on me, the flush I could feel in my cheeks, the swollen ache of my mouth, how my body kept listing toward the door like a compass needle that had found its north…
But who was I kidding? She probably already saw all of that and more.
I set the bag on the side table and sat on the edge of the sofa across from her.
For a long moment neither of us said anything. The grandfather clock in the hall ticked. Somewhere in the walls the wards hummed their low, endless note.
"When your mother was dying," Judy finally said, "she made me promise I'd keep you close."
My throat tightened. She never talked about my mother. Not like this.
"She wasn't as worried about Alex." She gave a sad sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"She knew better. Alex was always going to go tearing off after whatever burned brightest for him at the time.
But you." Judy's eyes found mine. "You were the one who came home.
Every time. Every single time, no matter what, you came back to the coven.
To me." She paused. "You're the last one who does that, you know.
The last of my sister's blood who hasn't crossed that ward line and stayed on the other side. "
"Alex didn't cross anything. He's still—"
"Alex belongs to Kenya now." She said it without cruelty.
Just fact, the same as saying the tide had gone out.
"He's here as much as he can be. But when the sun comes up, he goes home to her.
That's how it's supposed to be. I know that.
" Her hands moved restlessly in her lap, those calloused fingers that had braided my hair and ground my first healing herbs and buried two generations of this family.
"And it's the same with the others. I'm not a fool, Alice.
I've watched it happen enough times now to know the shape of it. "
The clock ticked. I couldn't make myself speak.
"So I'm going to ask you one thing," Judy said, "and I want the truth.
" She leaned forward, and the last of the High Priestess fell away, and it was just my aunt, just the woman who'd raised me, looking at me with naked pain in her eyes.
"Is there anything I can do? Anything at all.
A ward, a working, a word. Is there anything I can say that would keep me from losing you too? "
I thought about lying. It would have been so easy. I don't know what you mean. It was one kiss. It doesn't mean anything. I could lie and give her another night of thinking she hadn't lost all of us.
But she'd asked me for the truth. And she was the woman who'd taught me that you don't lie to the people you love just because the truth will hurt them.
"No," I whispered. "I don't think there is."
Judy didn't flinch when I confirmed what she feared was going to happen. She'd known. She'd known before she asked. But something in her face went very still as I watched her absorb my answer, watched her fold it away with all the other losses she carried and never let anyone see.
"I'm not choosing him over you," I told her quickly.
"I mean that. It's not you or him. It was never you or him.
" I paused and tried to pull myself together as the tears overflowed.
"I don't want this, Aunt Judy," I whispered.
"I don't want this bond between Dae and me, and I wish there was a way to fight it.
I really do. I'm going to try. But I don't know how long I'll be able to keep him safe. "
"I know." She reached across the space between us and took my hand.
Her skin was dry and warm and smelled of rosemary and lavender and the deep green scent of old magic that had lived in her long before I was born.
"That's the part that breaks my heart, sweetheart.
If it were a choice, I could argue with it.
I'm very good at arguing." A ghost of a smile.
"But you can't choose your way out of a fated thing.
I know that better than anyone alive. It's going to catch up to you, sooner or later. "
She turned my hand over in hers and looked at my palm like she could read what fate had planned there. And perhaps she could. Aunt Judy saw more than she ever let on.
"Your mother had this same line," she said softly, tracing it. "Right here. The one that splits." Her thumb pressed the crease at the base of my fingers. "She used to say it meant a divided heart. Loving two things at once and never getting to keep both."
My eyes burned with new tears, but I didn't pull my hand away. I let her hold it, feeling the fine tremor in the grip of this fierce woman who never cried where anyone could see.
"Come here," she said.
I slid off the sofa and knelt in front of her chair the way I had when I was small, and she gathered my head against her knee and stroked my hair back from my face, over and over.
"I'm so tired, Alice," she murmured into the dark. "I'm so tired of loving people I can't keep."
I closed my eyes. "I know."
"I don't think you do. But you will someday." Her hand stilled on my hair. "However, I hope it takes you a long, long time to learn it."
We stayed like that until the clock struck two, two women who loved each other sitting inside a truth neither of us could fix, and for once I didn't try to make it better. I just let it be as terrible as it was.
Then Judy patted my cheek, brisk and dry-eyed again, the softness folded away where it needed to live for her to survive.
"Go to bed. You look like something the cat gave up on.
" She stood, joints cracking, and gathered her cardigan around her.
At the hallway she stopped without turning around.
"That was sweet of him to bring the beignets. "
"It was," I agreed. "We can warm them up for breakfast."
"That would be nice," she said. "Goodnight, my Alice."
"Goodnight, Aunt Judy," I responded softly, and watched her walk slowly down the hall.
I lay in the guest room with the quilt pulled to my chin and the ceiling fan turning slow shadows above me, and I could not stop feeling him.
I felt him everywhere. The obvious places like my mouth, yes, tender and full and still tasting faintly of Dae.
But also the small of my back, where his hand had spread wide and pressed me into him.
The insides of my thighs, where I'd locked my legs around his lean waist and felt the hard heat of him through the thin layers of our clothes.
The line of my jaw. The side of my throat.
My breasts. Between my legs. My whole body was a map of where he'd touched me.
I pressed my thighs together under the quilt, trying to ease the ache he'd left there.
Gods, I could still smell him on my skin and in my hair. But when I turned my face into the pillow to chase the high it gave me I got nothing but Aunt Judy's fabric softener, and something in my chest twisted so hard I almost cried out from the pain.
Yet underneath the wanting was sadness. And anger.
Because I'd pushed him away, and dammit, he'd let me.
That was the memory I couldn't stop reliving. He'd said all the right things, and for one indescribable second I'd believed him, and I'd thought he'd fight for me.
And then he didn't.
Instead he'd walked me into that railing and lifted me onto it and kissed me like he was dying of thirst and I was the only water for a hundred miles.
I'd tasted his fangs and I'd felt the shudder go through his whole big body when I dragged my nails down his stomach.
He'd wanted me. And not just my blood. I wasn't imagining that. You couldn't fake that.
And then he'd stopped, somehow resisting the hunger I knew he felt for me.
Then he'd looked at me like I was something behind glass in a museum, something rare and precious no one was allowed to touch, and he'd kissed my forehead.
My forehead. Like I was a child. Like I was fragile.
Like I was the last good thing in a burning world and he'd decided, all on his own, without asking me, that he was going to be noble about it.
Go inside, yeobo. Before Judy comes out here with a stake.