Chapter 3: The Child They Fear
1259 Words
Aurora ran.
She was not a runner by nature. She went to the gym twice a week and walked whenever the weather allowed and considered that sufficient. But fear was a different kind of fuel, and she moved through the wet streets of Cresthaven with a speed she had not known she possessed, splashing through puddles, cutting across an empty intersection without looking, her dress soaked through and clinging to her legs.
Leo was five years old and had been asleep when she left the apartment at eight. He slept deeply, always had, the kind of exhausted full-body sleep that children fell into after days spent running and shouting and treating the world as an obstacle course. She had left the television on low in the living room, the way she always did when she went out, so that if he woke he would not feel the particular loneliness of a silent apartment.
She had told herself it was fine. She had left him alone for two hours before without incident. Lydia lived three floors below in the same building and Aurora had texted her the unit number and asked her to keep an ear out.
She had not expected creatures with red eyes to be hunting anyone connected to her son.
The heir must die.
She shoved the words down as she ran, refusing to let them expand into the full shape of what they might mean. Later. She would think about it later, after she had her hands on Leo and confirmed that he was safe and breathing and completely unharmed.
She reached her building and hit the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. Third floor, end of the hall. Her key was already out by the time she reached the door.
"Leo."
The apartment was quiet. The television was on, some animated show she did not recognize, casting colored light across the living room. The couch where Leo sometimes migrated in the night was empty.
"Leo!"
Running footsteps from the bedroom. Small and fast and completely familiar.
He appeared in the doorway wearing his dinosaur pajamas, hair flattened on one side, eyes bright despite being clearly half-asleep. He looked at her drenched state with the frank assessment of a five-year-old.
"Mommy, you're all wet."
She crossed the room and dropped to her knees and pulled him against her chest so tightly that he made a small noise of protest.
"I know," she managed. "I know. Are you okay? Did anyone come here tonight?"
He pulled back enough to look at her face. His brow was furrowed, matching some internal calculation.
"A man knocked," he said.
Aurora's relief curdled immediately. "What man?"
"I didn't open the door. You told me not to open the door for strangers." He said this with the pride of someone who had successfully executed a mission. "But he kept knocking. He said he had something important."
"Did you see him?"
"Through the little hole." The peephole. "He was big. His eyes were weird."
"What happened to him?"
Leo thought about it. "Another man came. The first man went away."
"What did the second man look like?"
"Tall. His eyes were a funny color." Leo tilted his head. "Silver. Like coins."
Aurora sat back on her heels. The relief and the complication arrived simultaneously, tangled together so tightly she could not separate them.
Damon had been here. He had gotten here before her, or sent someone, and whatever that meant she did not have the mental resources to sort through it yet.
A knock at the door.
Not urgent. Not frantic. Three measured knocks, evenly spaced.
She already knew.
She stood, put her hand on Leo's shoulder. "Go to your room, baby. Just for a few minutes."
"Who is it?"
"Someone I need to talk to."
He looked at her with the particular solemnity of a child who understands more than they are being told, then turned and padded back down the hallway. His bedroom door clicked shut.
Aurora opened the front door.
Damon Blackwood stood in the hallway. His suit was ruined completely, torn and blood-stained from the fight. He had somehow gotten here faster than her despite starting from the same point on that street, which told her something significant about what that transformation made him capable of. His silver eyes moved past her into the apartment, taking a brief inventory of the space.
"He's fine," she said.
"I know. I made sure of that before I came to find you." He paused. "May I come in?"
It was the courtesy that undid her slightly. She stepped aside.
He entered the apartment, and the dimensions of it seemed to shift around him. He was not a small man in any setting, but in the narrow living room with its secondhand furniture and the cheerful chaos of Leo's toys scattered across the rug, he looked like something from an entirely different world.
Which, she supposed, was accurate.
"The man at the door," she said. "Who was he?"
"A scout from the Ashclaw Pack. They sent him to confirm your location." His jaw tightened. "They found it regardless."
"Damon." She crossed her arms. "Who is Leo to them? Why would they send three of those things after a five-year-old?"
He looked at her for a long moment. Then his silver gaze moved past her toward the hallway, and something in his expression shifted, the controlled exterior developing a hairline c***k.
"I need to ask you something," he said quietly. "And I need you to answer it honestly."
"Okay."
"How old is Leo?"
The room became very quiet.
Aurora studied his face. She had been the only person in the world who knew the full truth of Leo's origins. She had kept it locked away for five years with a discipline that had cost her enormously, in lost sleep and constant watchfulness and the particular loneliness of carrying a secret that could not be shared.
She had known, from the moment she saw Damon Blackwood standing in her doorway tonight, that the lock was about to give.
"He's five," she said. "He turned five in March."
She watched the mathematics of it move across Damon's face. She watched him count backward. She watched his expression do something complex and painful and controlled all at once.
"Aurora."
"I know."
"He's mine."
It was not a question. It did not need to be.
From the hallway, Leo's bedroom door opened a c***k. A small silver eye peered out.
The birthmark on his neck caught the light from the living room lamp, a small mark shaped like a crescent moon, silver against the brown of his skin. Damon saw it. Aurora watched him see it, watched something move through him like a current.
He had an identical mark in the same place. She had noticed it the night Leo was conceived and had thought nothing of it, a birthmark, coincidental.
Nothing about it was coincidental.
"Damon," Aurora said carefully, "whatever you're feeling right now, we need to deal with the immediate problem first."
He pulled his gaze away from the c***k in Leo's door with visible effort.
"You're right," he said. "Pack your son's things. Both of you are coming with me tonight. They know where you live now, and they will come back with more than three."
Aurora opened her mouth to argue and then thought about red eyes in the dark and the words the heir must die, and closed it again.
"How much time do we have?"
"Not much," he said. "Move quickly."
- Writer
