Chapter 172 It's Done
ADRIANA
“Does it hurt him?” I was a bit hesitant to know. The thought of my baby having to deal with something so dark and evil worried me so much.
“He won’t feel anything. He’s too young.”
My relief only lasted a second. “Does it hurt me?”
She considered it. “It won’t cause any physical harm. You’ll be tired for a few days. Your powers will be slightly muted while your body recovers. Nothing beyond that.”
I looked at the cup in my hands.
“When?” I said.
“When you’re ready. There’s no urgency. The dormancy is stable.”
Elijah appeared in the doorway. He had heard the sisters arrive and had given me the room to speak with them and then had apparently decided that whatever was being happening was something he wanted to be present for. He looked at me with the question in his eyes.
I told him everything they’d told me.
He sat on the arm of the sofa and listened, and when I finished he was quiet for a moment.
“The blood binding,” he said to the sisters. “Is it safe for her?”
“Safer than leaving the fragment unaddressed,” the sister said. “Yes.”
He nodded once. Then he looked at me.
“It’s your decision,” he said. “Completely yours.”
I already knew what I was going to say.
“I want to do it,” I said. “Soon. Before he gets any older and becomes more conscious of his body.”
The sisters looked at each other and then back at me.
“We’ll prepare,” she said.
After they left, Elijah and I sat in the sitting room together. My tea was cold. He picked it up and took it to the kitchen and came back with a fresh one and sat beside me, and we were quiet for a while.
“The gathering,” he said finally. “What you did there.”
“What about it?”
“I’ve seen you do a lot of things,” he said. “That was, I want you to understand what it looked like from across the grounds. You were standing there with the whole pack around you and something was moving through you that I could see even from that distance, and you held it. And then you turned around and went to talk to Marta about her daughter’s first week of school.”
“Marta was worried about the school,” I said. “Her daughter is shy.”
“I know.” He paused. “That’s what I mean.”
I leaned against him.
“Yara came back,” I said. “Sunday night.”
He put his arm around me.
“I know,” he said. “I could feel the difference in you.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Isn’t it?”
I thought about it.
“No,” I said. “I suppose it might be.”
We sat there until the house went fully quiet around us, until the only sounds were the distant ordinary sounds of the pack settling for the night and somewhere above us the soft regular breathing of children asleep.
“I want to hold them,” I said. “In the morning. Both of them. Without being afraid.”
“You will,” Elijah said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you held the gathering. I know Yara came back. I know you’ve been building toward this for three weeks with no sleep and insufficient food and more stress than any person should carry simultaneously.” He looked at me. “Yes, I do know that.”
“After the binding, when he’s safe, I want to think about the vow renewal. I want to do it properly. When the dust is settled.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Yes,” he said simply.
I turned to the window, the night was clear. I could see the edge of the moon, almost full, the blue-white light of it falling across the garden in the way it had on the night we first came here and I had stood in the doorway of this house and not known yet what any of it would become.
I knew now.
Everything I had wanted and not known I was waiting for. Everything my mother had wished for me in a pack far away, in a life that had felt like the only life available and had turned out to be only the beginning of it.
I finished my tea and we went upstairs.
The sisters had prepared the space in the garden for the binding, the one that faced east, the same bench where Leo had found me and said the things he had said. I did not know if that was deliberate on their part or coincidence, and I had decided it didn’t matter.
Elijah stood beside me. He had asked if he could be present and I had said yes immediately because there was no version of this I wanted to do without him standing there.
The elder sister spoke about the preparation and then looked at me.
“Ready?”
“Yes,” I said.
The blade was small and the cut was precise and the blood that came was, as the sister had said. I held in my mind the image of my son, his face, his laugh which was beginning to be distinct from his brother’s. I held the intention of protecting him as clearly and completely as I could.
The sister worked for perhaps ten minutes.
Then it was done.
No drama. No surge. No visible sign that anything had happened at all, except that when I looked at Liam through the nursery window later that morning. What I had felt in him since the beginning was simply gone. Not reduced. Gone. Replaced by the ordinary warmth of a healthy child who was currently attempting to eat his own fist.
I pressed my hand against the glass for a moment, tears filled my gaze.
“He’s alright?” Elijah asked beside me.
“He’s alright,” I echoed with conviction and relief all wrapped in one.