Chapter 64 THE RESCUE
Ava's POV
Nobody spoke for a full ten seconds after Sera said it and the silence was the loudest thing in the room.
My mother had walked out of that hospital fully healed and nobody had an explanation and she knew where I was and I sat there with Dominic's knee pressed against mine under the table and tried to hold all of that at once and couldn't quite manage it.
"How is she healed," I said finally, looking at Sera, "you said the suppression was killing her, that's been happening for fifteen years, how does that just stop."
Sera looked at the mark on my shoulder and back at my face and said, "we think the bond advancing on your end started reversing the suppression on hers, they're connected through the bloodline, what activates in you echoes back through her."
"So me and Dominic," I said slowly.
"Every step forward you take with the bond," Sera said, "heals something in her, yes."
I sat with that and felt it move through me in a complicated way because on one hand my mother was healed and on the other hand I had not chosen this, none of it, and the bond had been advancing with or without my consent and dragging my mother's recovery along with it like I had no say in any of it.
Dominic's hand found mine under the table and held it and I held back.
"Where is she now," he asked Sera, his voice even.
"She was in London two days ago," Sera said, "she's been moving, trying to find you, she doesn't have a phone and she won't contact anyone she doesn't trust and she doesn't trust many people right now."
"She's alone in London," I said and my voice came out flat because that was the only way I could say it without it breaking, my mother who had been in a hospital bed for most of my life was alone in London trying to find me and I was sitting in a cottage in the countryside eating tinned food and having bathroom encounters with my supernatural boyfriend.
"We need to go back," I said, looking at Dominic.
"The hunters are still in London," my father said from the other end of the table and I looked at him and he said it carefully, not trying to stop me, just stating it.
"I know," I said, "we still need to go back."
Dominic looked at Elias and something passed between them and Elias nodded slightly and Dominic looked back at me and said, "tomorrow morning, we plan tonight and we go tomorrow," and his voice was the voice that ended conversations so I nodded and let it be tomorrow.
That night I couldn't sleep and I lay next to Dominic in the dark and listened to the cottage settle around us and thought about my mother walking out of a hospital on her own two feet after fifteen years and felt something enormous and fragile sitting in the middle of my chest.
At some point I got up and went downstairs for water and my father was at the kitchen table in the dark with a cup of something and we looked at each other and I sat down across from him because I was too tired to walk away.
"She's strong," he said quietly, meaning my mother, "she always was."
"I know," I said, "she had to be, she didn't have anyone else."
He took that and didn't deflect it which I gave him some credit for.
"When this is over," he said, "I know there's nothing I can say that fixes it, I'm not trying to fix it, I just want you to know that I'm going to finish this and then I'll go, I won't insert myself into anything you don't want me in."
I looked at him across the table and thought about the eight year old version of me and then I thought about my mother walking through London alone looking for her daughter and I said, "let's just get through tomorrow first," and he nodded and we sat in the quiet kitchen and didn't say anything else and it was almost okay.
We left at first light, three cars again, different routes into the city, and Sera had contacts who had tracked Elena to an area near Paddington and we had a rough location and a two hour window before the hunters' next scheduled sweep of that area according to my father's intelligence.
I was in the back with Dominic and he had his hand in mine the whole drive and said almost nothing and I was grateful for both things.
We parked two streets from the location Sera had given us and went on foot, Dominic and Adrian ahead, me and Elias behind, my father taking a parallel street to cover the other exit, and the London morning was grey and cold and busy with ordinary people going about ordinary lives and I moved through them feeling like I was from a different world entirely which I supposed was increasingly true.
The building was a small guesthouse on a quiet street and we went in through the side entrance and Sera's contact had already spoken to the owner and we went up to the second floor and Dominic stopped outside a door and looked at me.
"You go first," he said quietly.
I knocked.
Silence, and then movement inside, and then the door opened and my mother stood in the doorway and she looked completely different from the last time I'd seen her, upright and solid and present in a way she hadn't been in years, her eyes clear and sharp and when she saw me they filled immediately.
"Ava," she said and her voice broke on it.
I went into her arms and she held me and I held her back and she was real and warm and strong in a way I had forgotten she could be and I pressed my face into her shoulder and let myself cry properly for the first time since all of this started.
She held me for a long time and then she looked over my shoulder and her eyes found Dominic standing in the hallway and something moved across her face, recognition and something older than that, something that looked like understanding.
"You're him," she said to Dominic quietly, not accusingly, just knowing.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him for a long moment and then she looked at me and took my face in both hands and studied it the way she used to when I was small, like she was reading something in me.
"The mark," she said softly, touching my shoulder lightly, "it's almost complete."
"I know," I said.
She nodded slowly and then her eyes went past me down the hallway and she went completely still and I turned and my father was standing at the end of the corridor and they looked at each other across the distance and the air between them was fifteen years of everything that had happened and neither of them moved.
Then my mother said, very quietly, in a voice I had never heard from her before, calm and certain and with no fear in it at all, "I know what you are now James, I know everything, and if you take one step toward my daughter I will burn this entire world down before I let you touch her.”