Page 2 of Dark Night Golden Dawn
Harlow sighed. She’d felt that way about someone when she was much younger, and it ended so disastrously it had kicked off a domino effect of terrible decisions that were still ricocheting through her personal life, leaving a leaky mess everywhere she turned. She’d rathernotfeel that way again, if she was honest with herself.
“So, the human. Your sisters say something about news on the Section Seven app and the socials? Something about Mark and a vampire?”
Harlow groaned internally. Hearing her elegant, erudite mother discuss her humiliation on the gossips and socials made everything worse somehow. But she smoothed her face as well as she could. Of all the things she was bad at, pretending she was fine while her personal life burned around her was not one of them. She was an expert atthat.
“Stop pretending you’re not angry, Harlow. What good does it do to act this way?”
“I’mnotmad. I don’t care. You all just think I should because you would.”
Aurelia lost her patience. “Harlow Andromeda Krane, I told you to drop the pretense.”
Harlow cringed at the sound of the hunt in her mother’s voice. The lupine snarl of a pack in pursuit of its quarry, the sound of the moon’s song, and the goddess Akatei’s power rang true in Aurelia’s glamour. She glanced up at her mother, who appeared nearly ten feet tall and imposing as a divine being.
“Oh, stop that,” she gasped, squeezing her eyes shut.
“Well, you wouldn’t be honest.” Aurelia returned to her usual self, serene as she smoothed her pants. “Be honest and I won’t have to.”
Harlow laughed. The dry humor in Aurelia’s voice got her every time. She was the parent who hated throwing her magical weight around. Selene wouldn’t have hesitated, but Aureliahadtried to pry it out of her another way. She’d been trying for months to talk to her about Mark, despite how much she’d disapproved of their relationship.
Harlow took her mother’s hand and Aurelia squeezed hard, reassuring her girl it was all right to let her guard down. “It’s been six months, bun-bun. Surely you knew he would move on.”
Harlow glared at her mother. “Of course I knew he would. It’swhohe moved on with that stings. Not because I care who he’s with, but because it invites comparisons.”
Aurelia nodded. “It is unfortunate he aligned himself with the Order of Night.”
“Our whole affair was unfortunate. You and Mama were right about humans.”
“We had very little problem with Mark’s humanity, you know that, don’t you?” Aurelia said softly.
This was an old wound, and Harlow suppressed the wince she felt coming on, but didn’t quite succeed. Aurelia’s hand covered her own. “It wasn’t a good relationship, my darling.”
Harlow rolled her eyes. “But you didn’t like that Mark was human, did you?”
Aurelia sighed. “As we’ve discussed many times, what your mother and I worried about was his interest in sorcière secrets, in the Order at large... And his treatment of you. The way he tracked your every move… we worried aboutthatmost of all.”
Aurelia said the last part quietly, tentatively. Harlow knew both her mothers had been concerned about Mark’s incessant jealousy, his increasing demands on her time. By the time they’d broken up, she’d never gone anywhere alone. Even if she tried, he showed up with a kind of relentlessness that had worn her out so much she’d simply stopped going anywhere. The maters had been distressed by this, arguing that he was isolating her—dangerously so.
She stared into her teacup, feeling the sting of shame she always felt when she thought about how foolish she’d been about Mark. “It’s over. We don’t have to talk about it anymore.”
A small sigh hissed from between Aurelia’s lips. “We can talk about it for as long as you need to.”
Harlow’s gaze snapped to her mother’s bright blue eyes. There was love and concern there, and real fear. She knew more about how things were with Mark than she’d expressed. Harlow didn’t put it past her mothers to have used magic to find out what really happened between them, and that thought made everything worse.
Harlow couldn’t escape the feeling that her legacy would be a trail of mistakes and apologies. This one though… this one was particularly bad because it didn’t just hurt her, it had hurt her family, her Order, and now Mark’s actions were an embarrassing reflection on all of them.
Aurelia gestured at her, waving her elegant hands imperiously. “You’d better look at the photos and have it done with.”
Harlow nodded, pulling her phone out. When she unlocked it, the Section Seven app was already open. She scrolled past several posts about humans protesting procreation screenings in Nea Sterlis in breaking news. There it was, the first featured item in the lower Orders’ gossip feed: Mark and a beautiful vampire princess, Olivia Sanvier, kissing and smiling for the cameras. One caption read, “Mark Easton, son of prominent tech mogul Alain Easton, and the new Lead Media Strategist for the Limen Publishing Group, levels up from a frumpy sorcière to a princess of the Order of Night!”
“Levels up?” The implication that she’d been a launch-point for Mark’s social career stung. The frumpy comment stung as well, but it wasn’t altogether inaccurate. She looked down at her ill-fitting trousers and the almost purposefully ugly blouse she was wearing. She’d stopped caring as much about what she looked like late in university, and at first it’d been freeing, confidence-building. Now it had turned into something else and she knew it. Frumpy indeed.
Aurelia read over her shoulder as she poured them both another cup of tea. “You aren’t frumpy. What are they talking about?”
But then Aurelia glanced at her ensemble and her forehead wrinkled. It was as though she was seeing her child for the first time in a long time—through the world’s eyes, rather than her own. It hurt Harlow’s heart to feel her mother’s scrutiny. She could practically hear Aurelia thinking, “What else have I missed?”
They liked Mark at first. Everyone had. He was handsome, funny, and smart. It wasn’t until they’d been together for almost six months that the fighting started. The feeling that she was always doing something wrong, that every person she talked to threatened their relationship. Her life got smaller and smaller, until it was just her and Mark, against the world—or so she’d thought.
When he broke up with her and kicked her out of their apartment, Harlow was shocked. Six months later, she was still processing, and now there wasthis. Harlow scrolled down to a photo someone had snapped of her leaving the grocery store in a nearly identical outfit to the one she was wearing now, her hair in the kind of messy bun that looked terrible, instead of artfully mussed, the way she’d thought it looked when she threw her hair up.
