I stared at the table where the small package had been neatly wrapped beside the cake she’d made that night—the one that never got cut.
Derrick brought his hand to the table, placed something, and withdrew it, revealing a silver bracelet. It was a solid piece except for the smooth cut made to slip over the wrist. At the center was a bright, deep green stone set tightly within a bezel.
“I made a few adjustments, but this is what she intended to give you,” he said.
I picked up the bracelet and read the engraving on the inside.
For my daughter, the only light I’ll ever need.
“Derrick,” I said quietly. “Why didn’t she want me to go to Nightfall?”
He was as still as stone. “It is complicated. Some part of you must know—your mother was different. As am I.”
His gaze bore through me like he was seeing more than I could imagine.
Once, I’d tried to explain what Derrick was like to Katie and Eiryn, but I couldn’t find the words. It was a feeling I’d never felt around anyone else. He was like a storm. Here one minute, gone the next, but you could feel when he was coming. The intense presence of something eternal that didn’t need explanation—it just was.
But I knew what he was saying. My mom, Derrick, and I—we were different.
If Derrick were the storm, my mom was the sun, always trying to brighten the day, but when the darkness came, she was gone—simply unavailable.
“I know,” I whispered.
The admission left me shaking. Acknowledging this truth wasn’t something I’d ever thought I was allowed to do. She refused to address my curiosity as a child, and I’d learned to keep quiet about it. We weren’t supposed to be different. Even when the wind hummed like the trees were going to be ripped from the ground like toothpicks during a training session, or the skies darkened whenever my mom and I had a fight.
No, I never talked about those things.
But what did it mean?
Why did I feel different from everyone else?
Why were we different?
Derrick shifted, this time, his hand resting on my shoulder. “This will not be an easy journey, Anna. However, I am afraid you no longer have a choice in the matter. You are no longer hidden from our world.”
Derrick’s wordsstayed in my mind long after Eiryn took me home. The confirmation of what I’d always felt was surreal. The confirmation that I didn’t belong here. The rain beat down on the roof, the storm casting me into the deep recesses of my mind.
I wasn’t sure what to do with Derrick’s revelation. It was like I was in limbo, waiting for something to push me in the direction I was supposed to go.
The more I thought about my mom, the more I began to recall distant memories—her nightmares, her surreal hallucinations, and the panic attacks that followed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what’d happened in her past. She had the look of someone who’d seen too much.
Nightmares twisted reality into shadows in my sleep that night.
I awoke in a sweat, the blankets scattered and tangled around my limbs.
True to Derrick’s word, an invitation arrived later that day. There was no return address, only a wax seal featuring a swirling design of a pegasus, a dragon, and a raven, with a capital N at the center.
Katie and I sat on my bed, staring at the letter that lay unopened on the bedspread. After I told her about Derrick, she hadn’t left my side. Katie and Eiryn had been there since before I became the town’s daily headline. They were the ones I could share anything with, even if I didn’t. Making friends now seemedlaughable. It made me value them, but fear followed like a shadow, the fear that they could meet the same end as my mom. That one day, I’d snap and murder them just like I’d killed her.
Katie had never shared my concern for her safety, always far more concerned with mine. I swore she wasn’t breathing anymore as I listened to her near-constant stream of consciousness about what I should do.
Until the letter came anyway.
“Are you going to open it?” she asked.
My body was thrumming with anticipation and increasing nausea. Snatching the letter, I ripped it open and read:
I dropped the letter and looked at Katie.
