Between Shadow and Skin

CHAPTER 10: CRACKS IN THE NORMAL WORLD

SERAPHINE

The box arrived on a Friday, three weeks into whatever this was with Kael.

It came via a solicitor's office — a firm she'd never heard of, in a letter that was stiff and formal and explained that a Ms. Carol Voss, her former foster carer from age three to age five, had passed away six months prior and had left specific instructions that this item be delivered to Seraphine on her twenty-fourth birthday.

Sera had turned twenty-four in November. It was now March.

She sat with the box on her kitchen table for a full ten minutes before she opened it.

Inside, wrapped in old cloth: a pendant on a silver chain, small and heavy, shaped like nothing she could immediately name — an intricate form that her eyes kept sliding off of, like it resisted being looked at directly. A sealed letter, the paper yellowed and thick, the wax seal on the back pressed with the same symbol she'd been drawing her whole life. And a photograph, faded and slightly water-damaged, of a woman she had never seen and immediately recognized.

Same cheekbones. Same amber eyes. Same particular angle of jaw that Sera had spent twenty-four years looking at in mirrors.

She turned the photograph over. On the back, in handwriting she didn't recognize: Seraphis. London, 1999.

Sera sat very still.

Seraphis. She had always been told her name was unusual, a foster-system clerical oddity, a shortened form of something Italian that no one could quite remember. She had told herself this story her whole life because the alternative — that her name was intentional, that someone had given it to her with deliberate meaning — opened doors she had found it safer to keep closed.

She picked up the pendant. The moment it touched her palm, the symbols on her walls pulsed once — every single one of them, simultaneously, silver-white — and she felt something move through her blood that was warm and immense and grief-shaped, like a wave that had been traveling a very long distance and had finally arrived.

She put the pendant down. Breathed.

Then she picked up her phone and called Kael.

He answered on the first ring. "Sera."

"I need you to come over," she said. Her voice was very steady. She was proud of that. "And I need you to bring the truth with you. All of it. Not some of it. All of it."

A pause. Brief. She heard something in it — a settling, like a man putting something down he'd been carrying for a long time and hadn't yet found a place to set.

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes," he said.

"Good."

She hung up. She looked at the photograph of the woman with her eyes. She looked at the sealed letter she hadn't yet opened. She looked at her walls, all of them pulsing gently now, warm and silver, like something that had been waiting to be activated and had finally received the signal.

She thought about everything Kael hadn't told her. The gaps she'd been cataloguing, the things he knew and held back, the guilt she'd seen in his face the night he'd stood at her walls and told her the symbols were a language.

She thought: whoever this woman is — this Seraphis with my face — she sent me something to hold until I was ready. She planned for me to still be alive at twenty-four. She believed I'd make it.

She thought: I did make it.

She put the pendant around her neck. It settled against her sternum like it had always been there — warm, heavier than its size, humming with something she couldn't name but recognized the way you recognized a song you'd heard only once, very young, in a place you could no longer return to.

She was not going to cry before Kael got here. She was going to be furious, and precise, and she was going to get every answer he'd been rationing out to her in careful spoonfuls, and she was going to do it without falling apart.

She made that decision firmly.

She was crying by the time the buzzer rang.

He came through the door and saw it immediately — the box on the table, the photograph, the pendant at her throat. His eyes went to the pendant and stayed there for a moment that told her everything she needed to know about how significant it was.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Don't," she said, before he could speak. "Don't say anything soft. Just tell me."

He crossed the room. He didn't sit — he crouched in front of her chair, which put him below her eye level, which was such an obvious deliberate choice that she loved him and hated him for it simultaneously.

"That pendant belonged to a queen," he said. "The last queen of the Elaryn bloodline."

Sera held his gaze. "Tell me her name."

He held hers back. Gold eyes, steady, carrying the full weight of what he was about to say.

"Seraphis," he said. "Her name was Seraphis. And she was your mother."

The room was very quiet.

Sera looked at him for a long time. She thought about the symbols on her walls. The dreams of the silver hall. The pull toward things she couldn't name. The woman in the photograph with her face.

She thought about a queen using her last breath to send her child somewhere safe.

She thought about twenty-four years of not knowing.

"Tell me everything," she said. Her voice was very quiet. Very controlled. The particular quiet of something enormous trying to find the shape of itself. "From the beginning. Leave nothing out."

He took both her hands in his.

"From the beginning," he said. "I promise."

And he told