ALICE
The first thing I noticed was that I was warm.
Not quilt-warm. Not the stuffy, close heat of a room with the radiator clanking under the window that had the sash painted shut forty years ago.
I'd slept in Judy's guest room off and on my whole life, and that room had never once been warm in the winter.
Instead it was normal to see your breath, and there was a draft that came up through the floorboards on the north side.
I lay there with my eyes shut and took inventory, but the warmth wasn't coming from anywhere in particular. It was coming from me.
I opened my eyes.
Late-morning light lay across the quilt. The ceiling fan turned slow. Somewhere below me the house was making its normal noises. Pipes knocking, the grandfather clock in the hall ticking, and under all of it the wards humming their low endless note through the plaster.
And then I felt him.
I felt him everywhere. In my blood. In my bones. Even though he wasn't physically with me, he was there like a hand on my back, steady and heavy and utterly unmoving.
Throwing the quilt back, I sat up, and my whole body sang with happiness.
That was the other thing. Nothing hurt.
I got up and went to the mirror over the dresser.
I looked like a woman who'd been dragged through a graveyard, which is exactly what I was.
There was a leaf in my hair and a swipe of dried mud on my cheek.
My mouth was swollen. And there was a bruise at the top of my arm shaped roughly like a thumb, which I pressed on purpose and enjoyed considerably more than a sensible woman would.
And on the left side of my throat, I searched for two fang marks, but I didn't see anything.
I looked for them for a long time.
Then I gave up and lifted my hand, palm up, and called light into it the way Judy taught me when I was six. It was little more than a parlor trick, but I'd learned over the years that it was also a way to measure the health and mood of the witch producing it.
It came so fast I flinched.
It shouldn't have done that. My light is a candle. It's always been a candle, a soft little wobbling thing I've been quietly embarrassed by for most of my life. What sat in my hand now was a hard white star that lit the entire dresser and made the underside of my face glow in the mirror.
I laughed out loud before I could stop myself.
Then I closed my fingers and shut it off and stood there in the middle of the room with my heart racing as a terrifying thought entered my mind.
You're not more djinn, I told myself. You're mated. That's all this is. It's Dae's blood doing this. Not Marcus's.
Taking a deep breath, I tried to get a grip on the sudden rush of anxiety. I felt like myself. More like myself than I had in a long time, actually. So I got in the shower and stood under water as hot as the pipes would give me and thought about his mouth instead.
When I finally made my way downstairs, Aunt Judy was at the kitchen table with the newspaper she still had delivered spread out before her. A cup of coffee that was probably cold sat beside it.
I knew she'd been up a while. My aunt was an early riser, no matter how late she went to bed.
But I could see that she didn't have herself as put together as she was trying to make me believe.
Her cardigan was buttoned wrong at the bottom, and her short hair looked like it'd been combed with her fingers.
She didn't look up when I came in.
"There's coffee," she said. "But it's not fresh."
"That's okay. Thank you."
I got a mug down as I wondered when the storm was coming. Because she'd know. There was no version of this morning where she didn't know.
I turned around.
Judy was looking at me over the top of her reading glasses, and she'd folded the paper down flat under her hands, and her face was doing absolutely nothing at all.
"Aunt Judy—"
"Sit down and drink your coffee."
I sat.
The clock ticked, and she remained completely silent as she stared at me. It's a thing she does when she wants to get the truth out of you, and it's broken better women than me.
Sooner than I would've expected, she reached across the table and turned her hand over, fingers open, and it took me a second to understand she was asking. I put my hand in hers the way I had a hundred times.
"Aunt Judy?"
"Ask me your question, Alice."
"My question?"
She raised one eyebrow, but didn't elaborate. So I asked the only thing I really wanted to know.
"I want Dae to be able to come here."
She set the cup down.
"No."
I'd expected a fight, sure. But not an outright refusal.
"Aunt Judy—"
"No."
Her hand was still holding mine, and she didn't let go, her answer flat and final.
"That's not fair."
"Probably not, but I'm not required to be fair in my own kitchen.
" She turned my hand over, absently moving her thumb down the center of my palm.
"And I answer to a coven, and the coven answers to me, and there is a line in this city that I did not draw and do not get to erase because my niece is in love. "
"You know he could walk in here right now," I said. "You've already invited him when we were trying to save Alex. There's nothing stopping him except his respect for you."
"I'm aware."
Her thumb stopped moving, and she released my hand.
"Aunt Judy?"
"Drink your coffee," she told me again.
I'm not good at this. Alex is good at this.
Alex would have been out of his chair and halfway through a speech and he'd have been magnificent, and Aunt Judy would've thrown him out of the house and enjoyed every second of it.
But she always let him back in and gave in to whatever he wanted.
I've never once won an argument with my aunt.
Mostly because I don't like to argue, except with Dae, apparently.
With everyone else, I go quiet and small and let other people decide things about me, and I've been doing it so long I didn't know how to do anything else.
So I didn't fight her.
"Okay," I said.
Her blue eyes clashed with mine.
"It's your house," I told her, turning my mug in a slow circle on the table with both hands. "But I need to tell you what happened, because you're going to find out, and I'd rather it came from me sitting right here."
"Alice."
"It's done." I made myself look at her. "The bond. All of it. Both ways."
The newspaper crackled under her hand.
"He asked me first," I said. "And I said yes."
Judy didn't move.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't." Her hand came up off the table, palm out. "Don't you dare apologize to me."
The clock ticked.
Judy sat back in her chair.
She watched me for a long time, and I don't know what she found. The truth, I suppose. Because I was happy, and there was no way I could've hidden it.
Something in her face finally gave way.
"Gods help me," she said.
"Aunt Judy, I'm—"
"He comes to the front door." She held up one finger, and her voice went brisk and hard. "The front. Not the garden, not the gallery, not your window at two in the morning like some tomcat. He knocks. Like a male who respects you."
I nodded fast.
Second finger. "He does not feed in my house. Not you, not anybody, not one drop, I don't care how romantic you think it is."
"But…"
"NO," she told me.
I chewed the inside of my cheek while I thought about how I was going to keep a mated vampire from feeding from his more than willing mate. "But we can still do other things, right? If we're quiet?"
Judy looked at the ceiling. "Gods, please help me," she said again, to no one.
Then she got up, took her cold coffee to the sink, poured it out, and stood there looking through the window over the drainboard at her garden. Her shoulders, under that misbuttoned cardigan, looked like they belonged to a much older woman.
"The wards are holding," she said. "In case you were wondering. Nothing has so much as brushed this house since I put them up."
"I know."
"You're safer here than out there. Even with Dae stuck to your side.
That's the only reason I'm agreeing to any of this, so don't get too comfortable.
" She turned the tap on and rinsed cup she'd just emptied.
"If that thing is coming for you, Alice, and we know it is, then I'd rather have you under this roof. "
I opened my mouth.
"Don't." She cut me off. "I've had enough for one morning." She set the cup upside down on the drainboard. "And please eat something. You look like a woman who's been rolling around in a graveyard."
I nearly choked on my coffee.
Shaking her head, she headed into the other room.
After getting myself something to eat like she'd ordered, I went back upstairs.
I told myself I was going to nap, but I got as far as sitting down on the edge of the bed before my eyes were drawn to the overnight bag slumped against the closet door.
After a lot of silent back and forth with myself, I pulled the bag into my lap and dug down past the tangle of clothes to the towel at the bottom.
Unwinding the towel from the spell book, I laid my bare hand flat on the cover.
It was cool to the touch.
It was just a book.
I opened it to the page I always went to, and waited for everything to start swimming around the page.
But this time, the page held still. All of it. Both scripts. The old witch glyphs I could almost parse and the rust-red djinn marks threaded through them, lying quiet under my eyes.
I made a sound of disbelief.
Not one cluster snatched off the top of a page while my pulse hammered in my ears. Whole passages were right there, running left to right, plain as a recipe card.
And I could read it.
Blood calls to blood.
What was opened may be opened again.
And beneath it, in a hand that had gotten smaller and more hurried, like the woman writing it had been moving faster than her wrist could follow:
A tether laid between two is a road, and a road may be walked in either direction.
That which is welcomed does not need to force the door.
I read them twice. Then I turned the page. And the next.