Page 77 of Embers of Midnight
“You’re ridiculous.”
“You’re into it.”
“Shut up.”
“Love you too.”
I don’t freeze. I don’t even flinch. He doesn’t mean the word like a cliff. He means it like an ecosystem. It lands exactly where it should and does not explode. I rinse a plate and hand it to him and feel weirdly steady.
Ronan passes behind us with a stack of bowls and drops a kiss on the top of my head without breaking stride. It’s a small contact that still changes air pressure. Darian switches the outdoor lights lower and the house sighs into night mode. Caelum dries glasses with a focus that could cure disease.
Taya and Laz host a side conversation with Ilya about hair products that survive fire and stage lights. Nyra interrogates Thorn about the correct way to dice an onion. Kieran installs a neat, barely-there ward along the fence with a small device that sings once, then shuts up. He catches me watching, tips two fingers to his brow. All good.
Vex reappears with a potato chip bag around his head like a helmet. He walks into a chair leg, offended by physics. Ash rescues him with one thumb and holds him up like a prize. “Our son,” he declares.
“Return him,” Ronan says, “before he eats the silica packet.”
Vex squawks, deeply insulted, then steals a grape and forgives us.
When the last guest leaves—Nyra after hugging me like we’re already blood, Kieran with a finger laid along the ward as if to tell it a secret, Thorn carrying the trash out like a saint, Rex promising to bring his grandmother’s spice next time, Ilya air-kissing the entire room—the yard drops into a softer silence. The grill ticks as it cools. The string lights buzz faintly. My skin holds the day like heat after a bath.
I breathe. Two short. One long. The exhale lets my shoulders climb down from whatever cliff they were pretending to cling to.
Darian leans a hip against the doorframe and studies me the way he studies maps. “Good night?”
“Good night,” I confirm. “Thank you for making it look easy.”
He nods. “We’ll do it again,” he says. “Invite Taya and Laz often. People who help you clean are the right people.”
“Consider them abducted,” I say.
“Invite Umbra again, too,” Ronan adds, already coiling the hose exactly the right way because of course he does. “They’re useful.”
“They’re friends,” I correct, because my mouth wants the word and my body doesn’t fight it anymore.
Ash slings an arm around my shoulders and steers me into the kitchen for one last round of glasses. He bumps my hip like punctuation. “Tomorrow,” he says, pleased with himself, “we nap and then do nothing loudly.”
“Training,” Darian counters. “Then nothing.”
“Fine,” Ash concedes. “We train boringly well, then we do nothing loudly.”
“Compromise,” I say. “We’re a functioning unit.”
We close the back door. The latch clicks. The house shifts to its night setting. Footsteps upstairs. Water running in a bathroom. Someone humming three bars of a song and then stopping. Normal.
I take the trash out because I’m not above symbolism, and because the bin is at the far edge of the yard near the fence. The night is cooler now, a clean bite. The ward along the fence hums under my fingers when I pass, a low affirmative. Kieran’s trip-line holds, a neat brush of pressure on my wrist when I cross and recross, telling me all quiet.
At the bin, I pause. The grass near the hedge is flattened in a way my eyes don’t like. Not fresh. Not old. A place someone stood for too long pretending to be part of the scenery. I crouch. The dirt isn’t disturbed enough for a shoe print worth framing. But the metal edge of the recycling bin—there, along the lip—a faint crust of white where condensation shouldn’t have frozen.
I don’t touch it. I don’t pretend it’s coincidence. I breathe and let the information join the file in my head where measurables live. Frost residue, outer yard, post-party. Kieran’s ward didn’t trip, which means our watcher didn’t linger enough to be rude. Orthey’re better than I want them to be at stepping on the seams of our protections. Either way, it’s another paper cut.
Inside again, I bag a swab because Laz has ruined me for casual living. I label it with a time and a little heart because pettiness is a vitamin. I slide the bag into the drawer where we’ve been building this careful stack of boring proof and feel something inside me click into a more comfortable gear.
I stand in the kitchen with my hand on the cool counter and listen to the house breathing. Caelum’s violin case latches. Ash tells Vex a bedtime story about a noble raccoon. Ronan and Darian argue low about nothing important, voices like stone and river comforting themselves.
The week tried to teach me I’m a problem. Tonight taught me I’m a person with a table and people on either side of it. Tomorrow there will be training and errands and probably another note somewhere pretending it matters. I’ll keep the breath and the file and the bracelet on my wrist. I’ll keep the jokes and the meat on sticks and the violin lines that feel like a spine.
I flick the kitchen light to its lowest setting and head upstairs with the kind of tired that doesn’t make me flinch. The bracelet warms against the thread. My room smells like soap and smoke and a lemon I cut at noon. I undress, shower fast, stick my head out the door to tell Ash he’s insufferable and perfect. He bows. I shut the door.
