individual members of their bound bloodline. The night of the massacre, the loss of those marks had warned the winikin that the attack was a disaster, the Nightkeepers dying. That warning had preceded the attack on Skywatch by mere seconds. Now, most of the surviving winikin had only the single bloodline glyph of his or her lone charge.
Shandi continued: “When I saw that, I knew Denny was gone too. He would’ve been right near the harvesters in the ranks with the other unbound winikin. I looked for Samxel, but I couldn’t see him anymore. The children were screaming, crying. Some of the older boys were trying to get through the doors to fight, and there were boluntiku everywhere. I couldn’t see him. . . .” Her face shone now with tears. “I tried to get down there, but my legs wouldn’t work. My arm was burning. I only had one bloodline mark left, but it was flaring, throbbing, not letting me go get my baby. It was the magic, you see. It wouldn’t let me go to Samxel because you were my charge, my first and only priority. It made me go get you first.” There was bitterness now in her voice and her eyes. “So I went. You were in the nursery zone, surrounded by a sound barrier that kept the music from disturbing the youngest ones. I grabbed you and started running for the dance floor, screaming Samxel’s name. Then the next thing I knew, I was outside, headed for the garage. It was the magic again. It made me get you out rather than go back for him.” She stopped and pulled her hands from Jade’s, not in an angry gesture, but so she could mop her face with her sleeves. Her words were muffled behind the cloth as she said, “I would’ve tried to go back in, but I knew. Somehow I knew he was gone.” She lifted a shoulder. “A mother’s instincts, I guess. Or maybe I needed to believe he was dead so I could do my duty by you.”
And that was what she had always been to her winikin , Jade realized. Duty, pure and simple. More than even she’d realized, raising her had been Shandi’s job. The knowledge bit with sharp, greedy teeth, but she said only, “I’m sorry, Shandi. I’m so sorry.”
“We might have gotten away,” the winikin said softly. “Only the chosen were marked with the aj-
winikin; the unchosen weren’t marked at all. If I hadn’t been chosen, the boluntiku wouldn’t have been able to track us through the magic. Maybe Denny and I would’ve even taken Samxel and slipped away before the attack; who knows?”
“Did other unchosen do that?” Were there others out there, unmarked and anonymous?
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure I even care at this point—they’re gone, just like everyone else.”
Shandi shook her head, blinking tear- drenched eyes. In their depths, though, Jade saw the winikin’s habitual hardness coming back into focus. The starch—bitterness? resentment?—was back in her voice when she said, “That’s why I’m not like the other winikin, why I couldn’t ever love you the way you wanted me to. Loving you would’ve been giving in to the magic that bound me to you and forced me to save you rather than Denny and Samxel. So there you have it, the truth. Are you happy now?”
It was one thing, Jade found, to think that the woman who raised her had never loved her. It was another to have it confirmed flat-out. Breathing shallowly past the hurt, she said, “It explains some things. But does it make me happy? Hell, no. There’s nothing good about that, nothing fair.”
Shandi sniffed. “Life’s not fair.”
Jade found the ghost of a smile. “That was the first thing the Vennie nahwal said to me. ‘Life’s not fair, child,’ she said.” And then everything had started to change for her. Or had things been shifting around her for weeks before that? Months even? Where did the old Jade end and the new one begin?
Or, hell, was she even changing at all? What had happened to the whole “people don’t change” thing?
What if she was just deluding herself into thinking she’d begun to evolve? Gods. This was at once too much for her to bear, and not enough for her to believe in.
Wrenching her mind back to the conversation, she said, “If life were fair, you wouldn’t have been tagged with the aj-winikin glyph, and both our lives would’ve been different.” This time, hers was the voice carrying a slash of bitterness. Who would she have been, she wondered, if she’d grown up with a loving, supportive winikin like Jox or Izzy?
Shandi made a sour face. “Don’t be so sure about that. I deliberately tanked the psych profile.”
“You . . .” Jade trailed off, gaping. “During the winikin testing? But why? What about the three
‘D’s?” Being chosen had been the ultimate honor in winikin society. She couldn’t picture Shandi turning that down. She just couldn’t.
The winikin smiled with faint wistfulness, and her voice was soft with memory when she said, “I’d only known Denny for a couple of months when I went for testing, but I already knew he was the one.
I tanked my chance to become a winikin because I wanted to be with him instead. In the end, though, the gods and destiny got their way.” She sniffed again, and blotted at her now-dry face with jerky motions. “That was far more than I meant to tell you, but maybe it’s good that you know why I’ve pushed you to be the best harvester you can be. That’s . . . It’s the only way I can justify what happened, the only way I can see to make their deaths mean something on a personal level. For you to be what you were meant to be, what you were born to be.”
Jade sank back against the conference table, staring at the walls of books. Her thoughts coiled around another of those truisms she’d learned over the years: Love could make a woman defy her own nature. More, the loss of love was a terrible thing. But she said, “You can’t put that on me.”
“I already did. I’ve been putting it on you your entire life.”
“Okay, then let me rephrase: I won’t let you put that on me, not anymore. I want to be a good harvester, but I also want to be the best mage I can be, the mage the Nightkeepers need me to be right now. If that means going beyond the restrictions of a harvester, then so be it.”
“But you are a harvester.”
Thinking of the Vennie nahwal, Jade lifted her chin. “I’m half star.”
“That’s not the way it works.”
“Maybe not before. But what if it’s time to change the rules?” Strike had said something similar to her the night of the new moon, she remembered. He’d said that the modern magi sometimes had to make their own choices, their own rules.
So then why did it suddenly seem like a revelation?
Shandi pushed away from the table, her face setting once again in the fallback expression of peaceful calm that hid so much. “The rules are the rules. If you try to defy or avoid them, you’ll pay for it one way or the other, just like I did.” She headed for the door stiff-shouldered, turning back at the threshold to pin Jade with a look. “I lost my entire world because I tried to have a love outside my gods-determined destiny. Your mother lost her life doing the same thing, and your father died thinking she’d abandoned him. Who are you to think you can do better?”
“I don’t know who I am,” Jade snapped. “All I know is that the person you want me to be isn’t all there is.”
Shandi bared her teeth. “That sounds like something she would have said.”
“I—” Shit. Jade’s stomach roiled. Pressing her lips together, she shook her head. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“But you don’t want to follow my advice either.”
“Which is what, exactly? What would it take to make you happy?”
The winikin took a long, hard look at her. Then she just shook her head and walked away, pushing through the door without another word. The message was clear, though: Nothing you could do would make me love you, because you’ll always be second- best.
