Page 72 of Embers of Midnight
“What about watchers?” I ask. “It feels like we’re being watched at intervals meant to make me doubt I saw the first one.”
“We’ll rotate discrete eyes,” he answers. “Not a parade. A pattern that looks like coincidence to anyone not paying attention.”
“Tomorrow is grill night,” Ash reminds us, too cheerful on purpose. “I promised meat, smoke, and the opportunity to commit sauce crimes.”
“Invite Taya and Laz,” Darian says, not looking up from his glass. Then he does look up, and the line of his brows softens. “You invite them.”
“I will,” I answer. I mean it. They already carry part of the mess. They deserve the parts that don’t hurt.
Caelum taps the table, two quick, one long. “Keep the breath pattern. Boring works,” he says. “If frost tries again, it will hit empty air.”
Darian’s hand finds my knee under the table and rests there. Not a squeeze. A weight. “Breathe,” he reminds me. “Two short, one long.”
The house breathes around us: water running in a sink, the soft creak of someone upstairs, wind pushing against a window in a way I refuse to call moody because I promised myself to stop giving weather personality. Ronan clears plates. I reach for the stack and he lets me take half without turning it into a power struggle. We work without commentary until everything looks like we didn’t cook at all, which is always the mark of a good meal.
When I go up later, the hall is quiet in the way that means people are still awake but being considerate. My doorframe is not. There’s an envelope pinned just above the handle. The seal carries a line of cold along its edge that could pass for condensation if we were playing pretend.
I fetch the tongs in my top drawer and take the thing down without touching the wax. Inside sits a formal copy of the Performance Verification notice, the same indifferent serif letters, the same information about date and time and the honor of being tested like a blade on someone else’s stone.
Below the printed lines, in patient handwriting that believes itself elegant, someone added two words.
Stay small.
It’s not clever. It still makes something down inside me flex its claws. I bag the envelope and the note separately. Date. Time. Location. I line them up in the folder with the rotated tile photo and the first door note and the chain of frost that Caelum caught and caged. The folder’s spine thickens under my hand. It feels like muscle.
I stand there with my shoulder against the frame and breathe the pattern until the urge to burn everything that isn’t my people dissolves like sugar in hot tea. Two short. One long. My ribs obey. The heat under my skin cools from a blade to a blanket. Neither is more me than the other. Both are mine.
Tomorrow we grill. I will invite Taya and Laz and serve them meat and jokes and the kind of evening that stitches holes shut. We will look like a group that survives on purpose. We will not shrink.
I slide the folder back into the drawer and close it. The bracelet warms against the thread at my wrist. The room feels ordinary. My body feels like it could do sleep without bargaining. The last thought before the dark arrives is not poetry. It’s a plan in one line:
Ready over lucky.
Friends at the Gate
Seraphina
At the last bell, my back is tight and my patience thin. The hallway is shoes and breath and people pretending they’re not sprinting for the weekend.
Taya hooks an arm through mine. “Grill night?”
“Grill night,” I confirm.
“Good. I’m bringing a salad that could legally be classified as a forest.”
“Sexy,” I deadpan. “Bring Laz. He can yell at the mayonnaise.”
She grins like a threat. “We’ll be there after we drop a frog off at the greenhouse. He keeps escaping and judging me.”
Laz drifts up like a theatrical fog bank. “I don’t judge. I editorialize. Also yes, we’re coming, and I’m wearing my ‘Don’t feed the banshee’ apron.”
I kiss my fingers and press them to his forehead. “Bless you and your melodrama.”
We split at the arch. The walk home has that late-afternoon calm where the air holds warmth low. I enjoy exactly twenty seconds of it before the back of my neck prickles. The feeling is too familiar to be interesting. Someone watching. Not close. Not clumsy. Just… around.
I don’t turn. I keep my pace. The thread at my wrist sits where it always sits, pulse under it like a metronome. Breathe. Two short. One long. The exhale shoves the prickle out of my shoulders and into the path, and I let it stay there.
The house is already awake. Music low in the kitchen. Voices negotiating vegetables. The smell of garlic behaving.
