Nana Flo didn’t say much more that night, beyond the words that had frozen both of us where we lay. She simply closed the book she’d been carrying, set it carefully on the end of our bed like something that might bruise if handled wrong, and told us both, gently but with absolutely no room for argument, that we’d talk properly in the morning, once we’d all had time to understand what we’d actually done. I didn’t sleep. I don’t think Damian did either, though that was less unusual for him. We lay tangled together in the aftermath of it, and I could feel him still, faintly, at the very edges of my own mind, a warmth that hadn’t been there before that night, steady and quiet, like a second heartbeat I hadn’t known I was missing until it arrived.
“Can you feel me too?” I asked, somewhere near three in the morning, testing the shape of the question as much as the bond itself.
“Constantly.” His voice was rough with something that wasn’t quite sleep, since he didn’t need sleep, but felt like it anyway.
“It’s extraordinary, Sarah. And a little frightening, if I’m honest. I’ve had five hundred years of my own head to myself. I’m not sure I know how to be a person who isn’t alone in there anymore.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“No.” He pulled me closer, pressed his mouth to my temple.
“It might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. That doesn’t make it not frightening.” Nana Flo was waiting for us at the kitchen table the next morning, the old book open in front of her, two mugs of tea already poured and going cold, and an expression on her face I hadn’t seen from her yet, something between awe and a very old kind of dread.
“An infinity bond,” she said, without preamble, once we’d both sat down, “doesn’t happen by accident. I want you to understand that before anything else. It isn’t a stronger version of ordinary feeding, and it isn’t simply love expressing itself efficiently. It’s a joining. Soul work, older than most of what’s written in this book, and it only takes root between two people who are already, in some sense, the same thing wearing different shapes.”
“Meaning what?” Damian asked.
“Meaning I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened the same season Sarah’s power woke properly.” She turned a page, careful, deliberate.
“The bond has made you both stronger. It has also made you both far easier to find. Two souls tied together like that give off a kind of signature, to anyone who knows how to look for it. The world you come from, Damian, the ones still hunting for whatever’s left of Antonia’s line. They will feel this. If they haven’t already.” The kitchen went very quiet. “Then we get ready,” I said, before the silence could settle into fear.
“You said there’s a next step. Something that finishes what the geranium started. Tell me what it is.” Nana Flo was quiet a moment, and then she reached into the deep pocket of her cardigan and drew out a small, worn velvet pouch, older than anything else in the room except the book itself, and set it on the table between us with the particular reverence of someone handing over something she’d carried far longer than she’d ever wanted to. Inside was a ring, plain silver gone dark with age, a single stone set into it that looked, in the morning light, like it was holding a very small storm inside itself, colour shifting each time I tilted my head to look properly.
“This has been in our line since before your mother, since before me,” she said, quietly.
“It doesn’t grant power so much as it opens the door power’s already standing behind. I have been waiting thirty years for the day you’d be ready to wear it, and I confess I hoped that day would come further from danger than this one has, but I don’t think either of us gets to choose our timing anymore.” I picked it up. It was warm, absurdly warm for a piece of old silver that had been sitting in a cardigan pocket, and the moment I slid it onto my finger I felt something settle into place inside me that I hadn’t known was unsettled, like a held breath I’d been carrying my whole life finally allowed to let go.
“There she is,” Nana Flo said again, the same words from the geranium, except this time her voice shook properly around them. It was Damian who noticed, two mornings later, standing very still at the kitchen window while the rest of us ate breakfast around him.
“Someone’s been at the treeline,” he said, quiet enough that Noah, three spoonfuls into his cereal, didn’t look up.
“All night. I could smell it from upstairs. Gone now, but they were there for hours.”
“Vampire?” I asked, my stomach dropping.
“No.” He frowned, something puzzled and old moving behind his eyes.
“Human. Or human enough to pass for it. But there’s something underneath the scent I don’t recognise at all. Nothing I’ve ever come across, in five hundred years of learning to tell one kind of danger from another.” He looked at Nana Flo.
“Does that mean anything to you?” Nana Flo had gone very still over her own tea.
“It might,” she said slowly, “and I don’t like what it might mean.” She set her cup down with great care.
“There is a clan, Damian, older than the coven that made you, followers of Cybele herself, who have hunted witches from our family line for longer than I have records of. I don’t know why. I have spent thirty years trying to find the why and never once managed it. I only know what’s left behind, when they finish.” Her hands tightened around the mug.
“The deaths are never simple. Never quick, when they can help it. Always as though they’re trying to take something out of the woman they’ve caught, rather than simply ending her. I have always assumed they’re looking for exactly what you’re now wearing on your hand, Sarah, though I have never once managed to prove it.” She stood, crossed to the window herself, and looked out at the treeline with an expression that made her look, for the first time since I’d met her again, genuinely afraid.
“If they’ve found their way to Glenfrost,” she said, “then whatever’s coming next isn’t going to wait politely for us to be ready. And I don’t believe, my love, that this was ever going to be a single fight we win and then go home from.” Outside, past the glass, past the frost-heavy grass and the dark line of trees, something moved, brief and deliberate, gone again before any of us could properly see it, leaving nothing behind but the faint, cold certainty that we had just been watched, and that whoever had done the watching had wanted, very precisely, to be noticed. Nana Flo turned back to the table, to Damian’s hand already finding mine, to Noah still blessedly, obliviously spooning cereal, and to the ring on my finger catching the morning light like something finally, fully awake.
“Well,” she said, quiet, steady, the fear in her voice giving way to something harder underneath it.
“It seems this was never going to be the end of it. This is only the beginning, all of you. I hope you’re ready, because I don’t think it’s going to give us much more time to get that way.”