“That went rather well,” Gabe said, barely able to contain his amusement. 

From my position at the dining table, I could see him holding another one of our mugs in his hands - this one thankfully blank on the side. Lyneth stood next to him, hip pressed to the countertop. 

 “You think this is taking it well?” she asked, gesturing to me.

My hands were steepled in front of my mouth, which was pursed so tightly the insides of my lips were pressed against my teeth. “Is everyone out of the store, Li? I think I need to kill someone.”

“Please don’t kill anyone, I just mopped,” Li responded. They were sitting across from me, Bree next to them. Neither of them had gone out to see Gabe, preferring to stay back and help Mom by closing the shoppe for the day. It surprised some of our regulars, but a quick look out the window showed them who had descended upon our shoppe. By the time I got Gabe’s news, they both looked how I felt. Pole-axed.

A human had never broken through our Barrier, not in the four hundred years since its creation. We finally stopped the millennia of internal fighting and rose up as one Kingdom to protect the Kindred from humankind. After the Barrier officially sealed us off from Rasa, the Daughters - secret assassins, murderous bands of super-powered Kindred - were disbanded and scattered to the winds. 

The line between our worlds would never be breached. Could never be breached. And now it had happened. 

Now the humans could get through. If one could now, it was only a matter of time before more followed. They would disrupt our entire world. Destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to build and maintain, with their recklessness and instability. 

My body coiled into itself, a knot made of wire and fear. It was impossible to escape from the waves of possible horrors eating away at my mind. I’d had this thought pattern for years, ever since I was little - the smallest things could peel me open like an onion. I was reminded of little snails that curl up when you pour salt on them. My brain sizzled, over-seasoned and threatening to whistle with heat.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, careful and sure. “Breathe,” Lyneth said quietly. 

“I’m okay,” I said. 

Lies. Nothing about me said I was okay. The small, bemused noise Lyneth made told me she knew I was full of it, but thankfully she didn’t say anything else. 

I would never tell her how the simple act of a palm on my back, Lyneth’s palm in particular, instantly made me calmer. I didn’t want to know if it was some strange trick, some sort of Vampire magick we hadn’t found out about. All I knew was the warmth that bubbled through me.

Bree rubbed the back of her neck with one hand, totally ignorant of my emotional crisis. “Lyneth, you really think telling her about all of this now was a smart idea? I’m surprised she isn’t going into shock.” 

“Okay, what would be more preferable for your schedule?” Lyneth drawled, moving away from me to occupy the hallway between the kitchen and the living room like a spectre. “When Sorina’s more relaxed, but everyone we know is a corpse? Sounds like a great plan to me, when do we start?”

“We don’t want her to be catatonic before we need her, Lynnie,” Gabe started. 

I shot my head up so fast it made the back of my neck click. “Need me? Need me for what?”

Gabe turned his gaze on me, eyebrows slightly lifted. A question. I heard Li make a noise in the back of their throat. 

I stared back at Gabe, tilting my head. “Is this just a sick game you guys like to play? Because it’s not funny.”

“Does it look like we’re joking?” Gabe asked. “My mother is dead, Sorina.”

“You know what?” I pushed my hands through my hair before scratching my scalp. “Forget it. Just tell me there’s a plan to find this human before more of them get in. Although it wouldn’t surprise me if more of them have gotten in by now.” My mom used to say of bugs or roaches that if you see one, there’s hundreds just lurking in the walls. 

“Yes, and that’s where you, me, and the rest of you come in.” He tapped his backpack. “If you’re amenable to it” - I heard a small hah noise come out of Lyneth, but she quietened when Gabe shot a look at her - “We’re going straight from here to the Court of Silver to find Elsebet Bartos. She’s the new Elder Prime of her people, and a brilliant soldier to boot. They need to be informed, if they haven’t already.”

“Knowing Elsebet, she’s probably already mustering up an army big enough to rip Rasa apart at the root,” Lyneth said.

“From there we’ll have to combine our efforts. That’s why we’re here. We need Witches to fill out our ranks before we go. And that’s where you all come in.”

“But that’s my point, Gabe.

Gabe’s eyes narrowed at the nickname, but I shrugged it off and carried on. “I’m saying, we aren’t related to these crimes. I don’t know Elsebet Bartos. We know you guys, but that’s it.” The room was cool, but a trickle of sweat ran down the back of my neck, hitting my undershirt. The smell of coffee still ran through the kitchen, the dark roast my mother favored. It curdled in my nose. 

Mom came back into the room, carrying the morning’s profits in a drawstring bag. The energy coming from her was different than the type shared by the rest of us - Lyneth focused, Gabe torn between anger and amusement, Li and Bree clearly trying to be calm so I wouldn’t spin off my axis. 

Mom moved with a jerk in her walk, borne of something more than just harried concern. Her hands were tight around the pouch, knuckles nearly white, and her shoulders were pushed up and in, pinching the muscles around her neck. 

“If you aren’t careful you’ll start a fire,” Bree said. Mom stopped, dropping the pouch onto the countertop, putting her hands down on the marble. Her back was hunched. “Don’t make her do this,” she murmured, in a voice choked with an emotion I couldn’t place.

“I’m not making her, or you, do anything.” Lyneth clicked her tongue. She adjusted the sleeves of her cardigan with the same fingers I knew had ripped open the throats of Witch, Wolf, and human alike. Countless dead, all at the whim of the Vampire nestled in my breakfast nook. 

“Okay,” I started, my voice low so I didn’t start screaming, “you all know something I don’t and it’s pissing me off.” I knitted my hands together so I didn’t break the table. Mom didn’t move for several, interminable seconds. When she did, it was with a terrible slowness, like her bones were molasses thick. 

“There is much you shouldn’t know, Sorina, but you have to,” she said. 

Did I? Really? 

Mom held out her arm, and peeled her long sleeve back to expose her wrist. 

“Ioana, don’t,” Li started. Bree grabbed her hand. I looked at them, and then back to Mom. 

“What are you doing?”

“Something I should’ve done a long time ago. Telling you the truth.” Mom’s face was almost colorless, but she wasn’t pale. It was a mix of resignation and something like regret, hanging behind her eyes. I was suddenly reminded of a childhood friend’s puppy the day they adopted her. She looked lost, but also slightly tense.

At first, all I saw was her arm, and the blank, olive cream skin I knew Mom rubbed liniments into every night to keep it supple. The shoppe’s stones and potions were hell on the skin, especially with all the drying, carving, and trimming Mom had to do with all the supplies, and Mom took pride in her appearance. That was a trait I never really got. My beauty routine tended to be ‘all or nothing.’ 

Then, the air around my mother - my sweet, silly, eternally befuddled by high prices at the market mother - began to smell of burning flesh. 

I jerked up and out of my chair, towards Li and Bree. They pressed themselves close together to stop me from getting away. Li’s eyes were filled with a horrible understanding as the scent of acrid death flowed through the room, threatening to choke me where I stood. 

“Look.” The voice sounded like Mom’s, but there was a silver-sharp edge that spoke of something darker. Like viscera and knives, pink mist and death in the fog. The iron tang of blood settled in my mouth. The flapping of anticipation, like the wings on the back of a killer. 

“When the Daughters came to a village, the air reeked of blood.” 

Lady Philippa’s voice was unique in that it both made you want to sleep but was at such a uniquely squawking pitch that I could never manage to drift off during one of her History of Theara lectures. But today was the lecture on The Daughters, the Thearan band of mercenaries charged with hunting and killing humans. Today I was wide awake. Hell, I had my head propped on my hands like a little child, wondering what I’d get for Midwinter presents. 

Lady Philippa waved her hand. The words on the board rearranged themselves into several lists of dates. Important events in Thearan lore for us to memorize and regurgitate on the tests.

The lecture series on the Daughters of Theara was the main thing I wanted to get to in this class on the Great Wars between the humans and Kindred. I had done my reading, of course; known that the Daughters brought with them the smell of death, hanging on the mist like a pink fog. Hell, even at the age of twelve my mom was enrolling me into combat courses Not because I wanted to be a Daughter - the Daughters had long been scattered to the winds, a relic of a bygone, bloodier era - but because I wanted to be ready if the humans ever came back. Mom wanted me to be ready the right way, without worry of a backyard scrap putting me in too much danger. There had been rumors of a return, for many, many years.

“The Daughters tended to leave nothing behind but the smell of blood and flesh when they were done with a mission,” Lady Philippa continued. “Their bodyguards, known as Shields, stood watch at the perimeters while the Daughters, in their aerial positions, unfolded their mighty wings and razed every building to the ground. They were led by the Daughter Prime from each Court, who acted as a commander. The Primes were the most powerful of the Daughters, and their Shield Primes followed suit. It was said that their powers came from a fusion of their own blood with the blood of Mirta Herself.”

“Holy shit,” I heard Joshua Gaeie next to me whisper. I bit the inside of my lip to keep from laughing.

“Daughters came from all three races of Kindred, each with their own special skills.” Lady Phillippa pointed at the board again, where the words rearranged themselves. “Wolves obviously can shapeshift. The Vampires can manipulate living or dead blood into weapons. We as Witches rely on the earth and sky and sea to provide our tools. Daughters have those abilities at an exponentially heightened degree. But the one thing that truly bound all three kinds of Daughter together was their ability to end human life at a truly frightening rate.”

I could feel my chest get tight. Bree, sitting next to me, let out a deep exhale. 

Lady Philippa shot her a look, then settled her spindly body swathed in colorful scarves on a stool. “Once accepted and initiated into the fold, all Daughters were branded with a mark on their wrist. After a time, the mark would fill in with what looked like a small black gemstone, but no light could be reflected on it. It simply swallowed up all light, mirroring the darkness each Daughter had sworn themselves to. To bear the Mark of a Daughter, the brand of Mirtas herself, meant you were cursed to live your life in death. It followed you like a ghost. To say nothing of the wings Daughters received as a final initiation gift. All Daughters were gifted with the power of flight.”

“What about the Shields, Lady Philippa?” Aeronwy Konner asked from the back of the room. “Did they have the mark, or the wings?”

“Did you do the reading for today?” I mumbled under my breath. Under the table, Bree kicked me, and I snickered.

“Not exactly,” Lady Philippa said dryly, clearly not paying attention to our little rebellion. “Shields were charged with protecting the Daughters from harm. They had their own unique skills, chief amongst them empathy and protection charms of all stripes. It took a certain constitution to be named a Shield, as well as a natural gift for empathy. Although, to be a Shield also required extensive training. You had quickly acclimate yourself with the culture of blood that surrounded the Daughters, of course, and you had to swear fealty to the Daughter you were chosen to protect. And although only female-identified beings were Daughters, one did not have to ascribe to a gender to be named a Shield.”

“And it was a big deal to get picked for either role, right?” I finally managed to ask. 

Lady Philippa nodded. “Correct, Miss Hasdeu. It was a tremendous honor to be born a Daughter, or to be chosen as a Shield. But now, they are rightfully positioned as the killers and accomplices they are.” 

I couldn’t help myself, and leaned my elbows on my desk.“Are any of them still alive?” 

Lady Philippa smiled with tight lips. “If they are, they don’t make their presence known. Otherwise, they would be brought before the council and tried with war crimes, and their wings would be removed and displayed in the Theara Historical Vault as a symbol of their savagery.”

I had seen those wings. Shriveled and rotting with age, behind glass cases we weren’t allowed to touch for fear the wings would sense a threat and shake off the years that kept them shackled, wreaking chaos and havoc in their wake. Daring each other to touch the glass was a common tradition amongst young children in each Court, but usually kids were too scared to do anything. 

“But if they were just trying to protect Theara, wouldn’t that make them heroes?” I blurted out. Lady Philippa’s smile vanished. 

“Violence and bloodshed will never be the way to peace, Miss Hasdeu. No more questions!”

I sighed, and looked over at Bree, who made a face. The lecture continued.

Over the years I grew into these teachings, and began to accept them. The Daughters of Theara and their ways of hunting (more like ways of killings) were bad for the Kingdom and they were rightfully disbanded. Their Primes, and the Shields, had all faded into nothingness, knowing that if they were to make themselves known again, they would be swiftly eradicated. If a conflict arose in the Three Courts, we didn’t sic lunatic assassins on them. We settled it like adults, with zero bodies hitting the floor. We were civil. We were peaceful.

*

The skin along my mother’s wrist began to cave in on itself, as if a disease were eating away at the very marrow in her bones. My stomach dropped to the bottom of my shoes, but Mom didn’t blink, didn’t even make a sound, as the flesh turned a mottled grey and then black around the edges of the sinkhole of skin, peeling off to reveal what I had begun to dread - a black , reflectionless gemstone emerging from underneath the tendon and ligature of Mom’s wrist. The separation of stone and tissue made a noise I had not heard since I was a small child and my mother removed an infected tooth from a customer’s mouth. A wet, scraping sound, tearing off from the bone. Raw, exposed meat.

The very structure of Mom’s face, too, seemed to change. Her eyes took on the dull void of the gemstone, the black irises swallowing up any trace of white. Then, I could see small flecks of pure gold, shining with undisclosed malice.

I suddenly had a sick remembrance of a time when Mom caught three local boys stealing some of our wolfsbane. Her eyes had changed to that black-gold hole, just briefly, and they’d dropped their loot and ran away. I’d thought my eyes were fucking with me. 

But here it was again. My mother was metamorphosing in front of me, into a being more powerful than I’d ever imagined. 

“Look at me,” she said, in a voice that rang off every surface in the kitchen with the dread of a funeral drum.

“Look at her, Sorina,” Lyneth said, her own voice matching the tones of my mother. “You gaze upon Ioana Hasdeu. Daughter Prime of the Court of Magick.”

It was terrible, and yet somehow beautiful to behold.

Or at least, what I saw of it was terrible and beautiful, before I fainted.

*

It’s a mistake to think that fainting happens the way you read about in books or see in a dramatic play. They position fainting as either a comical stiff-backed thud against the floor, or a slow exaggerated swoon with a hand clutching one’s breast or pressed to the brow. Then, they wake up with nary a hair out of place, probably covered in blankets on an expensive couch, with a romantic interest hovering concernedly over them with hearts pouring out of their eyeballs. 

Bullshit, all of it. I’ve only fainted twice in my life, and you don’t go down gracefully. In this particular instance, if it hadn’t been for Li shooting arms out and catching me, I would have slammed head first into the kitchen counter. My body collapsed, then righted itself with disorienting speed. I pushed Li’s grip off my arm despite the room still tilting away from me. Mom had covered up the Mark and now looked a little bit more like herself. Like nothing had been irrevocably altered.

“Ri,” she started, her voice a cracked whisper. I turned on my heel and ran out the front door, nearly barreling into Lyneth as I went. I may have shoved her aside in the push to get out, but I’d apologize later. Or I wouldn’t.

I didn’t think she’d blame me if I didn’t.

*

I ran.

I didn’t know where I was going, or even what I was running away from. Mom? A Daughter? Two Daughters, since Lyneth was there. Running from the threat, from Rasa, or even from Theara itself?

Was I running away from me?

My brain was still mushy from passing out, but it was as if my legs weren’t connected to my body or my mind. They just wanted to run as fast as they possibly could, past the fields of vegetables and the corn maze and even through the toxic plants. Running, running, running, until I could slam into the barrier, through Rasa, into the Eastern Ocean. 

The sun was already starting to go down by the time my legs ultimately gave out next to our ceramic pots of chrysanthemums. My head was spinning so fast I thought it was going to cave in. I sat a moment, hands on my knees, taking in giant, gulping breaths as if they were going to soothe me. Not so much - they just made me feel more lightheaded, and as my body filled with oxygen I had the sudden, clawing urge to break through my own skin.

“Calm down,” I hissed to myself.

Never tell an anxious person to “calm down,” okay? It’s the worst possible thing you can say. It just makes them even more freaked out. Which is exactly what happened to me. 

I tried to ground myself as much as I could, and grabbed a handful of the yellow-orange flowers and crushed them in my shaking fists before scattering them on the pitch walkway. “Tell me they’re fucking with me,” I whispered, although the rotten feeling in my throat as I spoke didn’t promise anything good. 

Scattering chrysanthemums was a failsafe spell to determine honesty. I’d always loved petal spells - not only because it made the ground a plush spray of flowers but also it was one of the oldest forms of Magick. When our ancestors first were formed from the earth, they began to look back at the earth to find answers to common issues. Dirt, plants, food, their own blood when the Vampires and Witches were allies and the Vampires taught us how to deliver promises from our veins. Everything was usable.

The spell wove its way amongst the flowers, spinning gold and red and ochre into pure truth. I stared at the ripped open blossoms strewn across the path. 

When the spell settled, the blooms looked like bloody fingernails against the black sidewalk. They confirmed what my gut was already telling me. 

My mother was a murderer. Not only a murderer, but as a Daughter Prime, she was one of, if not the most legendary murderers of them all. If the Daughters were spoken of in whispers, the Primes weren’t spoken of at all. Their names weren’t even common knowledge, and those who knew them either were their Shields or were gone to memory and time.

It was said Daughter Primes rarely spoke, and let their violence form what they couldn’t put into words. When they did utter words, it was made of nightmares. My teacher had compared it to nails digging across a blackboard, but that never bothered me too much. The tone in my mothers’ voice when she shifted, though? Now I knew what Lady Phillippa meant. 

The wreckage the Daughters and their Primes inflicted on Rasa passed over legend and into nightmares. All of the stories I had heard in school about power given directly from the Mothers themselves was taken as literal truth, when it came to the Primes. Their wings, and their power, were directly granted from Mirtas herself. And although we had no love towards the humans, it always struck me as both awful and perversely fascinating to hear about the carnage the Daughters had created for them. It wasn’t that I felt bad, but there was a twinge in my gut that perhaps lived close to sympathy. Sympathy adjacent, perhaps. All of that bloodshed simply for existing. At least that’s what we were told nowadays. And my Mom was at the apex of that bloody legacy.

Mom was everything I had been told was evil and rotten about Theara’s history. Everything about my Mother, from the day she was born to this exact afternoon, was now, to my mind, littered with corpses. 

Or, I thought as I stared at the bloody spray of petals on the ground, was Mom a savior? Someone called from birth to protect us and our ways from the humans and their desires to destroy our way of life, our homes, our Magick?

That was what schooling had also taught me. For all of their many, many faults, the Daughters were respected and feared in equal measure for a reason. They, despite their monstrous nature, had saved Theara time and time again. My Mother was part of that legacy.

Savior and killer, in the body of the woman that birthed me, who held me through my triumphs and heartbreaks, and still liked to take my hand when we did everyday mundane things - a move I found funny as I approached adulthood. Now, I would give anything to have her slender fingers wrapped around mine, to have the soft smell of her vanilla and amber soap envelop me as she hugged me close in the shadow of the kinglight tree.

I think too much, I berated myself as tears started to fall down my cheeks.

I sank down, crushing some of the flower petals under my kneecaps, the sea wave crushing me again.

The world felt very small and grotesquely large at the same time. And there I was in the middle, caught between two realities, stretching myself to the breaking point.

It just didn’t make any sense. 

My mother, making me pancakes in the summertime. Brushing out the tangles in my hair when I was smaller and didn’t want to brush it before finally giving up and letting me go to school with a rat’s nest of hair.

Singing. So much singing. Not a day went by in our house that wasn’t laced with song, weaving through our lives in a constant profusion of melody. 

“You all right?”

Lyneth stood in front of me. Gabe hovered behind her.

“Please stop asking if I’m all right, guys,” I muttered, with a voice like broken glass.

“You haven’t changed much in the years I’ve known you, but your tendency to run away when things go wrong is a constant thread.” Lyneth sat down. She picked up some of the flower petals and spun them in between her fingers. “You’ve been this afraid of confrontation since you were twelve.”

“It’s a bad quality in a Shield,” Gabe said wryly.

What. 

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I moaned. “Please tell me you didn’t just say what I think you said.”

“Why the hell do you think we’re here, Sorina?” Lyneth leaned toward me. I jerked away, but she remained unfazed, fingers curling over one of the ranunculus flowers. It was a perfect shade of oxblood. “We kind of figured you didn’t know about your mother’s lineage since she keeps it so close to the vest,” she said, snapping the flower off the stem, “but you had to have known that we were sniffing around here for a deeper reason than shopping for stones and herbs.” She tucked it behind my ear. My heart twisted.

“Forgive me for thinking you might have been my friends.” I pressed the heel of my hand into my cheek, massaging the sudden knot of tension that stretched from below my eye to the edge of my jaw. 

“Well, that came later. We stuck around because we thought you were interesting.” Lyneth said. She didn’t move her hand from my cheek.

I rolled my eyes, but quickly sobered in the light of my next question. “So. If Mom is one of the Daughters of Theara, that makes me her Shield, huh?” 

“Yep. Shield Prime, to be specific,” Lyneth said, with all the casual air of picking what flavor ice cream to eat. “Unless you want to be a Daughter yourself, but we’d have to run tests.” 

“Oh holy hells, no,” I said, sucking my teeth. “I would rather eat dirt.”

“I thought Witches already did. Don’t give me that look, I’m kidding.” Lyneth raked a hand through her hair and got to her feet again. “You’ve got the constitution for a Shield, though. The empathy, the ability to heal, the urge to protect everyone around you. Textbook Shield skills.”

I remained quiet for a minute or so. When I managed to speak again, it was a question I already knew the answer to. “You’re a Daughter too.”

“Well, yeah,” Lyneth said incredulously. “Why else would I be here?”

Something caught in my chest at that. “Gabe?”

“Gabe’s mother was, too. He was her Shield, and now he is mine.” 

“It’s what Mama would have wanted,” Gabe said, his voice slightly bashful at the mention of Fiona. “Lyneth is the Daughter Prime of our Court now, as Ioana was for yours. Mama always said that if she wasn’t around anymore, I’d be lucky to serve her.” 

“I’m the lucky one, G,” Lyneth said, and Gabe fell silent.

“I just can’t reconcile all of this with my Mom,” I said, rather pathetically.

Lyneth sighed and moved to kneel down in front of me rather than next to me. Her presence, terrifying as it was, also comforted me in a weird way. I felt the air settle down around me when she was close. “If there is one thing I’ve learned from my years on this earth, it’s that no one is exactly as they seem,” she said, sounding reassuring and simultaneously deeply uneasy about the concept of reassuring anybody.” But everyone does what they do because they think, in that moment, that it is the right thing to do. Ioana had a gift. A tremendous one. She trained hard. To become a Daughter Prime, you must give up something of yourself to serve a cause that’s so much greater than you could possibly imagine. For her, that was the right thing to do.”

Lyneth stood up. “Now you need to figure out what is the right thing for you.”

“Of course we’ll give you time.” Gabe also rose. “We’ll be staying at an inn in Crae for the next three days, then we’re moving to the Court of Silver. If you aren’t there, you aren’t there.”

They walked off silently, leaving me alone with my many, many thoughts. 

The sky turned the color of ripened peaches in the west. 

I remained still, staring at the spray of chrysanthemum petals in the dirt.

I was a Shield to one of the last surviving Daughters of Theara. 

I was a Shield Prime, highest rank of the order, to the Daughter Prime of the Court of Magick.

Who just happened to be my mother. 

Awesome. 

Or whatever the opposite of awesome was.