The morning of the run came in cold and bright, the particular hard blue sky Glenfrost gets maybe a dozen times a winter, frost still silvering the grass on the reserve when I arrived at six to start setting up the water stations. Damian came with me, ostensibly to help carry crates, actually, I understood within about ten minutes, to walk the entire course perimeter twice before a single child arrived, checking sightlines and treelines with the particular thoroughness of a man who had not slept, had never needed to sleep, and was not going to let that fact go to waste this morning.
“You’re doing the thing,” I told him, watching him scan the tree line behind the third water station for the second time.
“I’m helping.”
“You’re doing the thing where you pretend to help while actually casing the entire venue for threats.”
“Both things can be true.” He didn’t smile when he said it, which told me more than the words did. I hadn’t slept much either, if I’m honest. I’d spent most of the night lying rigid beside him, listening to a house that had gone back to sounding perfectly ordinary, replaying the particular stillness of his face in the doorway, something moved through this house tonight and I don’t recognise the scent at all, until exhaustion had finally won out somewhere near dawn. I woke feeling strung together with tape rather than rest, and I spent the drive to the reserve doing the thing I’ve always been good at, which is arranging my face into something that looks entirely fine.
The one genuinely steadying thought I had, the one I kept coming back to every time my chest went tight, was Noah, three streets away in Priya’s kitchen, almost certainly elbow-deep in samosa filling with Arjun by now, gloriously, safely oblivious to any of this. Whatever else was true this morning, my son was exactly where he was supposed to be, wrapped up in nothing more dangerous than too much cumin and a friend who made him laugh. By eight the reserve had filled properly, the whole primary school and half their families turned out in matching event t-shirts, kids doing that particular pre-race hopping that seems to exist purely to burn off nervous energy, parents clutching coffees against the cold.
I ran the registration table on autopilot, checking names off a clipboard, handing out bibs in number order, and felt Damian’s presence the entire time like a hand at the small of my back even when he was fifty metres away, positioned near the second water station where the course cut briefly out of sight of the main field. The starting horn went at nine sharp, three hundred small, determined bodies thundering off down the marked path in a cloud of breath and gravel dust, and for about twenty minutes the whole morning ran exactly the way it should have. I manned the halfway table, cheering on stragglers, refilling cups, and let myself believe, for those twenty minutes, that today might simply be a normal day.
It was Fenella from the PTA who found me at the water table, flustered, apologetic, asking if I’d seen the first-aid kit, because a girl near the back had gone over on the gravel and skinned her knee rather badly, over past the tree break where the course looped closest to the old maintenance shed. I grabbed the kit without thinking twice and jogged the two hundred metres toward the shed, already composing the reassuring things you say to an eight-year-old with a bleeding knee. There was no girl at the tree break. I understood that a half-second too late, the reserve’s noise falling away behind me as the path curved out of sight of the main field, and turned to find a young woman standing very still between the trees, and it took my brain a full, sick second to place the face under all the wrongness that had been added to it.
“Vanessa.” She smiled, and her mouth was full of teeth that had no business being there.
“You remember me.” Her voice had a raw, hungry edge to it that hadn’t been there in life, someone speaking through an appetite rather than around it.
“That’s interesting, isn’t it. Because I remember everything now too. Every single thing he took from me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Damian’s little trick. The one where he reaches into your head and rearranges what you’re allowed to keep.” She stepped closer, and I backed up automatically, the medical kit still stupidly clutched in one hand.
“It doesn’t survive the turning, did you know that? Whatever he smoothed over, whatever he made me forget so I could go on believing some stranger stopped me before I hurt your son, all of it came back the second Octavia gave me these.” She bared the teeth again, savouring my flinch.
“I remember the pool block. I remember exactly what I was trying to do to him, and exactly what your monster did to me for it. Turns out dying and coming back is a wonderful cure for selective memory.”
“Octavia turned you.” I said it slowly, understanding arriving in pieces.
“Why.”
“She wanted to know how her mate died.” Vanessa’s smile didn’t waver.
“Stone, Sarah. Silas turned to actual stone, and nobody who was there could tell her how, except a broken little human girl who’d spent fifteen years fixated on a man who’d never once looked at her twice, and might, with the right encouragement, be persuaded to go digging anyway. I was useful. I still am. And it turns out I hate you enough that being useful to her isn’t even a hardship.”
“I saw you two last night, you know.” Her eyes went hard, something more personal than hunger moving under the words now.
“Through your own window, like an idiot who didn’t even think to draw the curtains. The way he looked at you.” Her lip curled.
“I used to imagine that look. I used to lie awake wondering what I’d done wrong, what I hadn’t given him, why it was never me he looked at like that. And then I finally worked it out, watching you through that glass. Nothing. You haven’t done anything I didn’t do first. You’re just older, and tireder, and somehow that’s what he wanted instead of me.” She was in front of me before I’d registered her moving, one hand closing hard around my jaw, and I felt something sharp drag once, deliberately, across my cheekbone, a thin line of fire that welled hot and wet almost instantly.
“There. Now you’ll have something to remember me by too.”
“There are an awful lot of small, warm things over there,” she added, almost idly, her eyes sliding past me toward the reserve, the field full of children, and something in her face sharpened with an interest that turned my stomach entirely over.
“I haven’t fed today. I’m supposed to be patient about that. I’m not very good at patient yet.”
“Don’t you dare—” She hit me before I finished the sentence. It wasn’t like the alley, and it wasn’t like anything I’d braced myself for. There was no warning, no build, just her hand closing around my throat and my whole body leaving the ground, and then the tree break itself coming up sideways to meet me, my shoulder taking the impact wrong, a white, total pain tearing up through the joint that made the whole morning go briefly and completely silent around me. I hit the ground and she was on me again before I’d finished falling, nails raking down my forearm hard enough to open it, four ragged lines that filled with blood almost faster than I could feel them, and I screamed, properly screamed, the sound tearing out of me raw and undignified, and she laughed at the sound of it, delighted, dragging me up by the hair only to slam me back down against the frozen ground a second time.
“Damian!” It came out broken, barely a word at all. He was there before the echo of it finished, but I understood, even through the pain fogging everything at the edges, that he wasn’t alone in arriving. A second shape dropped down from somewhere above the shed roof at the exact same moment, landing with a stillness that made my already-screaming nerves scream harder. Octavia looked exactly like she had in the cellar, five hundred years unchanged, dark hair, cold assessing eyes, and she didn’t so much as glance at me lying broken in the grass.
“Get away from her.” Damian’s voice came out somewhere below human, no restraint left in it at all, and he had Vanessa off me and into the nearest tree trunk hard enough to crack the bark before I’d finished trying to drag myself backward through the frost. I didn’t make it far. My shoulder wouldn’t take weight, my arm wouldn’t stop bleeding, and every attempt to move sent a fresh, nauseating wave of pain up through my whole side, and I lay there, useless, watching two fights that had suddenly, horribly, become one. Octavia didn’t waste time on words this round. She and Vanessa moved together with a coordination that told me this had been planned, rehearsed, timed for exactly this moment, Vanessa circling wide while Octavia came straight in, and I watched Damian take a blow meant to distract him from one side just long enough for the other to land somewhere I couldn’t see properly, a sound like a rifle shot that I understood, sickly, was a bone. He went down onto one knee.
“Sarah, run.” His voice came out strangled, the first time in either book I’d ever heard him sound frightened for himself rather than for me.
“Get up and run, now—” I couldn’t run. I could barely lift my head. I watched Octavia’s boot come down on his outstretched wrist and heard the sound it made, and I watched Vanessa’s hand close around his throat from behind, both of them working him between them with the terrible, patient efficiency of people who had done this exact thing to someone else before, and I understood, lying broken in the frozen grass with my own blood soaking dark into the ground beneath me, that for the second time since I’d known him, Damian was losing.