While he does, I help mom tidy up the kitchen.
I might be itching to get out of here, but that doesn’t mean I need to be a brat or a freeloader. When we’re finished, dad gives me a hug before heading to their bedroom, and so does mom, lingering for far longer than necessary.
In that hug, all her unspoken worry.
She doesn’t ask where I’m going, or when I’ll be back. She doesn’t press for details she knows I don’t want to give her, and I’m equal parts grateful and ashamed.
“Be careful out there, my love,” mom says in parting as she heads up the back stairs. “Saturn is just about to square your—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I call back, already striding for the door. “I’ll let Saturn know I’m too busy for whatever kind of smack-down he wants to put on my life.”
“You can’t outrun the stars, and you can’t outrun your fate,” she says, delivering that ominous warning in an easy, breezy tone that sends a chill down my spine.
You can’t outrun your fate.
The image of a huge, handsome, surly demon flashes through my mind.
The desperation on his face when I stepped into the emerald light of the Veil.
The panic in his eyes when he realized he wouldn’t be able to follow.
I’m so busy thinking about it that I don’t hear the back door open just as I’m about to let myself out the front. I don’t realize who’s just come into the house until I hear the call of a familiar voice.
“Mom? You here? I have those charts you asked Esme to pull for—”
Soleil steps into the front room, and we both freeze.
It’s been months since I last saw my sister. My other half. My twin.
Poised just at the edge of the Veil, long after twilight had fallen on Joan’s wedding ceremony, I’d looked back—just once—and seen her watching me go.
I’ve tried to forget that moment for months.
The sadness in her eyes. The way her lips parted slightly, like she meant to call after me. The way I turned and stepped into the ether before she had the chance.
And now, just like on that night, we’re both spellbound.
A fracture in time. A cavern cleaved right down the middle of all the years we’ve spent apart and all the years we held on tighter to each other than anyone else in the world.
In the middle of that fracture, the Crescent Coven Hall.
When I left, Soleil stayed.
She was Emse’s darling, just like I was. A pretty gem to be polished, a talent to train up and exploit. She went through just as many years of always looking over her shoulder for the witch in the wings waiting to take her spot, just as many years of whispers and resentment, just as much inter-coven politics and bullshit, the same harsh realization that we were only there to continue that cycle.
And when I begged her—beggedher, even though I’d never done something so damn undignified in my life—to leave the coven with me and make our own way, the two of us together against the world, she stayed.
My sister, the healer. The one who fixes and soothes. A generational talent, pulling the energies of the earth and the stars and everything in between to make others whole.
Only, there was no fixing what happened to us, no soothing my righteous rage over the fact she chose them over me, no force in heaven or on Earth that could make us whole again.
“Seren,” she breathes, and the spell between us breaks.
I don’t answer her, don’t give her a second more of my attention as I turn back toward the front door.
The itch is so much more than an irritant now. It’s a command. A sharp stab somewhere dangerously close to the center of my chest.
I have to get the fuck out of here.
