Born Of Two Moons

The kitchen floor had four hundred tiles. I knew because I had counted them on my knees, one scrub at a time, on more Saturdays than I could remember. Today I was counting them again on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, and nobody in the house had said a word about it.

From the living room I could hear Brielle's friends laughing, the clink of the good glasses Mom only brought out for company, the thump of music someone kept turning up. Mom's voice floated over all of it, warm and bright in a way it never was with me.

"Is everyone comfortable? Brielle, sweetheart, do you want more lemonade?"

Sweetheart. I had lived in this house for eighteen years, and I could not remember her using that word on me even once.

I pushed the brush harder and watched the grey water swirl around the tiles. Mara Ellis, the girl who lived in the house but never quite in the family. I had stopped asking why around the age of ten. There were only so many answers a child could invent before she ran out, and none of mine had ever been kind.

It wasn't only that Brielle was their real daughter, with Mom's smile and Dad's laugh and a place at every table. It was that I had never matched any of them. I was pale in a way no summer could fix, with eyes the color of dark honey that Brielle's friends called creepy when they thought I couldn't hear.

I could always hear. That was another thing nobody liked about me.

On my sixteenth birthday, Dad had remembered a day late and slid a twenty-dollar bill across the counter in an envelope. "Get yourself something," he'd said, already looking at his phone. I had kept the envelope. It was the only birthday card I had ever owned.

I wrung out the rag and leaned back on my heels to wipe the sweat from my forehead. The chain around my neck slid forward and rested against my collarbone.

It was the one thing I owned that felt like mine. A thin silver chain with a small, plain locket no bigger than my thumbnail, which had hung around my neck for as long as I could remember. When I was little, Dad had told me it was "some cheap trinket we found in your blanket," and he never mentioned it again. I had tried to open it a hundred times with a pin, a knife, even my teeth once. It was sealed shut as if it had never been meant to open at all.

I bent over the bucket, and the chain snapped.

It made no sound. I only felt a sudden lightness at my throat, as if a hand I'd never noticed had let go. Then the locket hit the tile with a crack that was far too loud, skidded across the wet floor, and stopped against the foot of the fridge.

For a second I couldn't move.

Then I was crawling after it, soap and grey water soaking through my jeans, my heart pounding as if I'd dropped something alive. I closed my fingers around it.

It was warm.

Not warm from my skin. Warm like a held breath. I turned it over in my palm, and a thin seam I had never been able to find slid open on its own with a soft click, like a lock that had been waiting for exactly this moment.

I should have called out. I should have run into the living room and shown someone.

But nobody was coming, and some quiet part of me already knew it.

Inside the locket, folded so small it looked like a speck of lint, was a piece of paper. I pinched it between two fingers, and it unfolded as if it wanted to be read. The ink was dark, the handwriting slanted and hurried, the lines pressed so hard they had almost torn through the page.

My darling Aurelia,

I read the name three times. Aurelia. It meant nothing to me, and yet something in my chest turned over, slow and heavy, like a door opening somewhere deep inside me.

If you are reading this, the seal has broken, and you are old enough to bear the truth. I am sorry I could not give it to you sooner. I am sorry I could not give you anything at all.

You are not ordinary. You never were. Your father was a wolf, and I am a creature of the night, and the love between us was forbidden by both our peoples. That is why you are alone. That is why I could not stay.

I laughed. It came out as a short, cracked sound in the empty kitchen. A wolf. A creature of the night. It sounded like one of those stories Brielle's friends read online, the kind with glowing eyes and brooding boys and far too many kisses.

But my hands wouldn't stop shaking.

I held the letter closer and noticed the paper smelled of something I had no name for, like rain on old stone and a night that hadn't ended yet. My eyes burned. I didn't know whether it was the smell or the words.

There is a place where your father and I met. Duskmere Academy. Go there. Find out who you are. Find out what they did to us. It is the only place where the truth is kept.

In the next room, Brielle's friends burst into laughter, and I flinched. They sounded too close, as if there were no wall between us. I could pick out each voice, even the whispered one at the back of the room, saying, "Where's your sister? Is she still cleaning?"

"She's always cleaning," Brielle said. "It's kind of her thing."

The words used to hurt. Today they slid past me, because everything inside me had gone strangely quiet and sharp, like a blade drawn slowly from its sheath.

I looked down at the empty locket in my other hand. The inside was smooth silver, except for one thin line along the edge of the back plate, where it didn't sit quite flush. As if something else had been tucked in behind it. As if there was more.

I turned back to the letter. There was only one line left.

And whatever they tell you, Aurelia, don't trust the ones who say they

The ink dragged across the page in a long, desperate stroke, as if the pen had been torn from her hand.

Nothing came after it. There was only a single dark smear, and a faint tear in the corner where the paper had been gripped too hard, by someone who had been running out of time.

Don't trust the ones who say they...

They what? Love you? Know you? Are on your side?

I read the broken line again and again, until the words blurred and my own breathing seemed to echo in the empty kitchen. Somewhere in the back of my mind a small voice whispered that this was a prank, a mistake, a cruel joke. But the locket was still warm in my fist, and my hands had never felt so certain of anything.

Behind me, the kitchen door creaked.

"Mara?" Mom's voice, sharp and impatient. "What was that noise?"

I closed my fist around the letter and the locket. For the first time in eighteen years, I did not answer her.