I turned to page 117.

It was a chapter I had read before and read badly — Coastal Bond-Cults of the North Atlantic, 14th–18th Century — the way you skim a chapter you've decided in advance is not about you. I'd been seventeen and looking for the one on selkies. Page 117 had not been about selkies, so I had skipped it.

I read it now.

It began the way my mother always began — with a sentence that didn't warn you that you were stepping through a door. "Of the bond-cults in the historical record, the rarest and least studied are those in which a single human female is identified, by mechanisms not yet understood, as the carrier of a blood capable of briefly amplifying the abilities of a non-human partner."

I went very still.

Three pages of careful academic prose, her neat citations stacked at the foot of each, in which my mother described — without once using the word — exactly what I now understood myself to be. On 118, a diagram in her pencil: a circle in thirds, Awakener, Vampire, Werewolf, and where the thirds met, a single point. In the margin, four lines of notation I had never found in any of the twelve copies on my father's shelves:

April 1996. Confirmed: the line skips generations. Mother negative. Daughter unknown. June 1996. Carrier mechanism active only post-puberty. Confirmation possible only then. October 1996. The cults of Aeloria never documented the central point. I believe it is the Awakener herself. — A.M.

I checked the spine. First printing, 1996. The marginalia were from the year the book was set in type — eleven years before I was born. I sat with that arithmetic until it stopped being arithmetic and became a fact about my mother: she had been writing about daughter unknown a full decade before she had a daughter, in a chapter she had buried where no casual reader would dig. She had not, as I'd been told for thirteen years, been a generalist folklorist who liked the coast. She had been the specialist. She had been the one specialist, on the one thing I was, and she had spent the years around my birth hiding the whole body of that work inside a book about herring and selkies.

I read on. The mechanisms of the bond. The historical price of refusing it. The handful who had survived and the handful who had not. The chamber beneath the academy — bonding chamber, her word. The Bonding Moon, spelled with her two capitals, like a proper noun she was being introduced to in the right company.

On page 124, in pencil, in ink older and softer than the dated notes around it — added later, I understood, after there was a daughter to address — four words:

Lydia, do not panic.

I checked the facing page. The chapter ended there, with a single line of typeset: Note: Subsequent research, undertaken privately by the author, has identified one further consideration unsuitable for publication in this volume. Interested parties are encouraged to correspond.

I'd read that sentence at seventeen and thought interested parties meant academics, and correspond meant a letter to a journal. I had not understood that my mother had opened a private channel, in a published book, to anyone in the world who could read this chapter and recognise themselves in it.

I closed the book and didn't move for a long time. The candle Mira had lit at some point in the dark burned down by an inch. I let myself grieve — not the death thirteen years gone, which I had grieved in pieces all my life, but the woman she had been in the years before it, the one I had never met, who had spent my childhood preparing me in code for an island I would not reach for thirteen more years.

I had so few real memories of her. Flour on her wrists. The way she'd say a word in another language and then refuse to translate it, later, child, when it can't scare you. I had always thought that was a quirk. Reading her own hand telling a daughter she did not yet have do not panic, I understood it had been a method. She had been raising me to survive a room she could not describe to me without breaking me, and she had run out of years before she could finish the lesson, and she had known she might, and so she had hidden the rest of it in a book where it would wait. The patience of that. The terrible, loving patience. I cried for half a minute, the kind of crying that is mostly admiration with the grief threaded through it, and then I shut it down, because she had also taught me that.

Then I read the part I had not yet let myself reach: the acknowledgements at the very back, where she had thanked five people by their initials and nothing more.

F.A. — I knew F.A. now: a small white-bearded man who had handed me a dead woman's memoir and told me the first lesson is always refusal.

D.V. — I knew D.V.: a younger brother who had left this very book on my bed.

S.H. I didn't know. V.K. I didn't know.

C.V.

I stared at the two letters until they stopped being letters.

A few pages earlier, in chapter ten, I had passed a marginal note without weighing it: "D.V., 1995, refused access to the archive. Polite. Younger than expected." 1995 — the year before the book. The year, I would later learn, that my mother first set foot on this coast. She had come here. She had been turned away from the archive by a polite young vampire. And the year after, she had published a book that thanked, by initials, the brother who'd turned her away — and his Lord.

I got up and crossed to the window and watched the fog work at the glass, and I did the thing I am good at and hate myself for: I laid the pieces in a row and refused to look away from the shape they made.

A pin, threaded through my collar in the first nine minutes by a woman whose dead brother had wanted me to have it. A flower pressed in a memoir, on the page a man left open on his armchair the night he told me he would like to know me. A file his people had built of my whole life — three photographs, no platforms, the first Awakener in fifty years whose life fits in one folder. I had thought that meant I had managed to stay invisible. Sitting at the cold window, I understood it could just as easily mean someone had kept me invisible — kept me off every list, every feed, every place a stranger might have found me first.

A book left on my bed at the precise hour I needed it. A chocolate-maker in Camden who wouldn't sell to anyone who couldn't name her seabird, and somehow my mother had always known the bird. A school chosen, a town chosen, a small grey life arranged so carefully around me that I had never once, in nineteen years, been surprised by anything that mattered until the ferry hit the dock.

And under all of it, the thing I least wanted to set in the row, because of where it had lodged in me: the night before, in a cold room, a man with his hair down had stopped his hand a half-inch from my throat and told me he would like to know me, and I had felt it in my pulse like a struck bell. If the rest of the row was true — if he had pressed the flower, built the file, chosen the town, kept me off every list a stranger might have searched — then the half-inch he had not crossed was not restraint. It was technique. A man does not need to reach for a thing he has been quietly holding for nineteen years.

I made myself sit with that, and it was colder than the window.

He had claimed me sight-unseen, in a chamber, under his own name, on my first hour here.

But he had not found me on my first hour here. C.V. had been in the back of my mother's book since 1996. My mother — the woman who, two years before she had me, had written in darker ink at the bottom of a page, do not give them your hands; hands are how they hold you — had been thanking Cassian Venantius by his initials since before I was born.

I set my palm flat against the cold glass and made myself ask it plainly, the way she'd taught me to ask the questions that frighten you most, because the unasked ones grow in the dark.

The question was not whether Cassian Venantius had known my mother. He had. She had thanked him on a page meant for no one but the dead and the very careful.

The question was whether he had been arranging the whole small shape of my life since before I could spell my own name — the town, the school, the silence, the very invisibility I had mistaken for luck — and whether my mother, who told me to keep my hands to myself on this island, had been holding his the entire time.

And the worst of it — the part I made myself say last, alone, to the cold glass — was that knowing it changed nothing in my pulse. I could lay out every reason he was the most dangerous person on an island full of them, and the laying-out did not undo the half-inch, did not quiet the struck bell, did not make me want less to walk up to the third floor and watch him fail again to look away from me. My mother had told me not to give them my hands. She had not told me what to do when the wanting to was already there, ahead of the warning, waiting in the body she had built and left behind for me to live in.

The candle guttered. I did not light another.

Far below, in the stone, the clock began to strike, and I caught myself listening for thirteen.

It struck six. Just six. And for some reason that frightened me more than thirteen had — because thirteen was the island showing me it was wrong, and six was the island telling me, very calmly, that the rules I'd been counting on did not always apply.

Downstairs, Dorian Venantius would be at the second table from the windows, where he always sat, because in two hundred years he had never once eaten breakfast without daylight. He had given me the book. He owed me the rest of the sentences.

I put on the green wool. I pinned the silver moon at my jaw and slid the bronze one into my pocket where Mira wouldn't see it yet. I had questions now, and for the first time since the dock, I knew the people who held the answers were sleeping — or not sleeping; they didn't, some of them — under the same roof.

I went down to ask him how long his brother had been keeping me.