I woke to a steady, insistent beeping, and it took me a groggy, disoriented moment to place it, a small plastic clip pinching my index finger, wired to a monitor tracking my own heartbeat back at me in electronic chirps. The light in the room had changed completely, hard and white and properly morning, nothing at all like the dim, early-evening hush Nana Flo had walked into the night before. Damian wasn’t in his chair. I registered that with a small, unreasonable jolt of panic before I remembered, piece by piece, what had actually happened: the chanting, my own scream tearing his name into the room, the sudden and total silence after, and then, apparently, nothing at all.
I’d gone down. I didn’t remember going down. I only remembered wanting, more than I had ever wanted anything, for both of them to simply stop. I opened my mouth to ask where he was, and didn’t get a single word out before he was there, a blur of motion that resolved into him sitting on the edge of my bed, both hands finding my face with a franticness I was starting to recognise as simply how he loved. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nana Flo flinch, just slightly, at the speed of it. She was in the visitor’s chair, exactly where she must have been all night, and something in her face went carefully, deliberately blank the moment she caught me watching her watch him.
“What happened?” My voice came out cracked, unused.
“You fainted, honey.” Damian’s thumb moved slow across my cheekbone, careful of the stitches.
“Hard, and for longer than anyone here was comfortable with. The doctors want to keep you one more day, just to be sure, before they’ll let you go anywhere.”
“You tried to do magic.” Nana Flo’s voice cut in before I could respond, sharp with something that wasn’t quite accusation.
“It took more out of you than your body could afford to give. What were you trying to do?” “I don’t know.” That was the honest, humiliating truth of it.
“I was trying to protect him. I don’t know what I was reaching for, I just knew I needed it to work.” I pushed myself up against the pillows, my shoulder protesting the movement, and looked at her properly for the first time since the chanting had stopped.
“Why did you do that to him? You’re a witch too. You, of all people, should understand what it costs to have someone reach into you like that.”
“Because he’s a vampire, Sarah.” She said it like it should have settled the matter entirely.
“Because I have spent thirty years keeping you away from exactly this, and I walk in to find you in a hospital bed with one wrapped around you like he has any right to be there.”
“He has more right than anyone else in this room.” My voice was shaking now, and I let it.
“He’s saved my life more times than I can count on both hands. Where were you for any of that?”
“Watching.” She didn’t flinch from it.
“From further away than I wanted to be, but watching. I have watched you since before you could walk, Sarah. I have moved my entire life around the shape of keeping you alive. I don’t expect you to remember most of it, but I have never once stopped.”
“Watching isn’t the same as being here.” Damian’s voice had gone very quiet, very controlled, the particular stillness he got right before something cost him a great deal to say evenly.
“I have been here. Every single time it mattered, I was the one standing between her and whatever was trying to hurt her.”
“And yet here she is.” Nana Flo’s gaze swept once, deliberately, over the cast, the stitches, the monitor still beeping its steady rhythm.
“Broken in a hospital bed, under your protection. Forgive me if that record doesn’t inspire the confidence you seem to think it should.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Neither is any of this, and yet.”
“Stop it. Both of you.” I hadn’t meant to shout, but it came out that way regardless, loud enough that a nurse’s shape paused briefly in the corridor glass before moving on.
“This is a hospital. There are actual sick people on the other side of that wall, and the two of you are standing here scoring points off each other like children.” I looked between them, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the fainting.
“I love you both. I don’t know how to say that more plainly. But I am not going to lie here and referee a fight about who gets to keep me safest, because the answer, apparently, is neither of you managed it alone, and I am so tired of being the thing everyone’s fighting over instead of the person everyone’s actually talking to.” Neither of them said anything to that.
“I’m going with Damian,” I said, into the silence, and felt my own throat tighten before I’d even finished the sentence.
“He’s my partner. He’s the closest thing to a father Noah has ever had, and I am not walking away from that for anyone, not even you, Nana, not after everything we’ve built.” My eyes were properly wet now, and I didn’t bother hiding it.
“But you owe me the truth. All of it. Thirty years of it. You don’t get to walk back into my life after two decades and expect me to just follow you out that door without a single answer.” Damian’s expression, when I looked at him, had gone soft in a way that undid something in my chest, love so plain on his face it was almost difficult to look at directly. Nana Flo was quiet a long moment, and then, finally, she nodded, once, something in her shoulders giving up a fight she seemed to understand she’d already lost. We moved to the house on the hill that afternoon, Nana Flo installed in the back seat of Damian’s car with the particular rigid dignity of a woman who has decided to tolerate something rather than approve of it, and Damian, for all the fury still simmering behind his eyes, said nothing at all about her coming. He simply drove, and got us settled, made tea neither woman drank, and then stood in the doorway with his car keys already in hand.
“I’ll collect Noah from school,” he said, to me, carefully not looking at Nana Flo at all.
“That gives the two of you a few hours.” His eyes found mine, softer now.
“For whatever she needs to tell you.” He left before either of us could argue, and the house went very quiet around the two of us, just the fire settling in the grate and Nana Flo’s hands folded tightly in her lap.
“Thirty years,” I said.
“Start there.”
“Your mother,” she said, and her voice cracked properly for the first time since she’d walked into that hospital room.
“My daughter. She died giving birth to you.” I felt something in my chest go very still.
“It’s always been this way, in our line.” She wasn’t looking at me now, staring instead into the fire, the words coming slow and careful, like she’d rehearsed them a thousand times across thirty years and still couldn’t make them easy.
“Every other generation carries it properly. Magic, full and awake from birth. Her daughter, the next one down, is born entirely ordinary, no trace of it at all, until that daughter has a daughter of her own, and the whole cycle starts again. I had it. Your mother didn’t. You were always going to. That part was never in question.”
“Then why did she die?”
“Because the birth itself is dangerous, when the power skips a generation and then comes roaring back all at once in the child. Her body wasn’t built to carry what you were, not fully. I felt it happening from two towns away, and I got there in time to save you, only you, there was nothing left to be done for her by then.” Her hands twisted together, white-knuckled.
“I did magic that night I’ve spent thirty years hoping I’d never have to use again, just to keep you breathing until you could breathe on your own. And when it was done, I understood exactly what I was looking at. A child powerful enough that the same people who’d been hunting our line for centuries would find her eventually, the same way they always have.”
“So you hid me.”
“I hid you so thoroughly I became a stranger to my own grandchild, moving from foster home to foster home just to stay near enough to watch, close enough to step in if it ever came to that, far enough that no one following our bloodline would ever think to look at a quiet old caretaker twice.” Her voice broke properly now, and I watched thirty years of careful, terrible restraint finally give out all at once.
“I have hated every single year of it, Sarah. I want you to understand that. I did not choose distance because it was easy. I chose it because it was the only thing standing between you and the exact kind of danger you found anyway, the moment your power finally woke up.”
“I felt so alone.” It came out of me before I could stop it, thick and furious and entirely unguarded.
“My whole life, Nana. No mother, no father, no family, just me and a string of houses that were never mine, and you were there, the one constant thing I had, and then you were just gone, and I never understood why, and I have spent twenty years believing I simply wasn’t worth staying for.”
“You were worth everything.” She reached for my hand, and I let her take it, both of us crying properly now, the fire the only sound in the room besides it.
“You were worth thirty years of a life I never got to have, watching from doorways instead of holding you the way I wanted to every single day. I am sorry, my love. I am sorrier than I know how to say. But I would do every single year of it again, exactly the same way, if it meant you got to stand here in front of me now, alive, and furious, and finally asking me why.”
“And Noah.” I wiped at my face, some new fear arriving all at once.
“The cycle. Does it, will he—”
“No.” She said it with the first real certainty she’d offered all afternoon.
“You broke it, Sarah. However it happened, whatever it means, you had a son instead of a daughter, and the line runs through daughters. Noah is entirely, wonderfully ordinary, and whatever comes hunting for what you are, it has no reason at all to come hunting for him.” I don’t know how long we sat like that, crying quietly in front of a fire neither of us tended, before the front door went and Noah’s voice carried through the hall, bright and completely unaware of everything the last twenty-four hours had contained.
“Mum!” He was across the room and into my good side before I’d finished turning toward the sound, warm and solid and smelling like the school bag he hadn’t bothered to put down, and I held onto him with my one working arm like he was the only steady thing left in the world.
“You’re home! Are you all better? Damian said you fell but you’re okay now, right?”
“I’m okay,” I told him, and meant it more than I had in longer than I could remember.
“Better than okay, actually.” He pulled back to grin at me, and it was only then that he noticed Nana Flo, still seated by the fire, watching the two of us with an expression I didn’t have a name for.
“Who’s that?”
“This,” I said, and found, to my own surprise, that I was smiling through the last of the tears, “is your great-grandmother. Nana Flo. She’s going to be staying with us for a while.” Noah’s whole face changed, curiosity arriving so fast it nearly knocked the surprise clean off his features.
“I have a great-grandma?” He said it like I’d just told him the house had a secret second floor.
“Since when?”
“Since always, actually,” I said.
“You’ve just never met her before.” He considered this with enormous seriousness and turned the full weight of his attention on Nana Flo, who was already easing up out of her chair, watching him with something soft and unguarded she hadn’t shown me even once that afternoon.
“How come I’ve never met you if you’re my great-grandma?” He tilted his head, working through it out loud the way he did with maths problems he hadn’t quite cracked yet.
“Are you from Mum’s side or my dad’s side? Wait, is Mum’s mum your daughter? Where’s she? Do I have a great-grandpa too?”
“One at a time,” Nana Flo said, laughing properly now, the sound younger than her face.
“I’m on your mum’s side. And I’m afraid there’s no great-grandpa to meet, love, he’s long gone.”
“How old are you, then?”
“Noah.” Heat crawled up my neck.
“That’s not really—”
“It’s a perfectly fair question.” Nana Flo waved me off, already moving toward the kitchen, and Noah trailed after her the way he trailed after anyone he’d decided was interesting.
“Old enough to remember when the telly only had one channel, if that means anything to you.”
“That’s so old.” He said it with frank, uncomplicated wonder, climbing up onto a stool at the counter to watch her survey the fridge.
“Do you live near us? Can you come to my school things? Arjun’s grandma comes to everything, even the boring assembly ones.”
“I could be persuaded.” She pulled out a leg of lamb, potatoes, a bag of pumpkin, a bunch of silverbeet still gritty with garden dirt, and set to peeling with the brisk, unhurried efficiency of someone who’d done it ten thousand times before.
“Tell you what. While I cook, you can ask me anything else you like, and I’ll answer as honestly as an old woman’s allowed to. Fair trade?”
“Anything?”
“Within reason.” He took her up on it immediately and at enormous length, working his way through her favourite colour, whether she’d ever broken a bone, if she was scared of spiders, and whether she thought he was old enough for a phone, while the kitchen filled slowly with the smell of rosemary and hot fat and potatoes turning golden in the pan, pumpkin roasting sweet alongside them, a pot of silverbeet going soft with butter on the back burner.
It was, I realised, watching the two of them from the doorway, the first properly home-cooked Sunday roast this kitchen had ever seen, and something about the ordinariness of it, gravy and mint sauce and a boy interrogating his own great-grandmother about spiders, settled something in my chest that thirty years of questions hadn’t managed to. By the time Damian came to find us, drawn by the smell as much as anything, Noah had moved on to asking whether Nana Flo could cook roast every single Sunday from now on, and she was already agreeing before I’d had the chance to answer for either of us.