It took a while to explain everything that happened to me in detail, but while I talked, I made scans of Calen's grimoire. We needed to burn that thing as soon as possible, and then I'd cleanse the ashes and wash them away in the nearest stream. It wasn't the neatest or cleanest process, but it was the only way to be certain we destroyed any trace of it.

By the time I finished explaining everything and answering questions, it was late. Mom and Ray offered to handle burning the book, and I was glad to let them. They knew what they were doing, probably more than I did. I trusted them to do it right.

Their relationship was... interesting. They weren't at each other's throats, but there was obviously a little tension. You could tell they knew each other well, though, and that they still loved each other. After the initial shock of finding out Ray was back in town, it was like Mom couldn't stand to be away from him for more than a few minutes at a time. I'd even seen them holding hands at one point, though their backs were turned to me, so they didn't know I was even looking.

Mom also jumped right back into sharing a bedroom with Ray. Knowing exactly how painful it felt to ignore the pull of a soul mate bond, I couldn't blame her, even if they still had things to work out. And hey, at least one of them wasn't a murderer.

... Why did I have to get that problem?

Grandma had her own room, electing to take the south bedroom for herself. It was one with two twin beds, and she seemed more than happy as long as she had her own space.

The last bedroom had three sets of bunk beds, apparently meant to hold as many people as possible. I wasn't crazy about the idea of staying in a summer camp style room all by myself, so I went back to the room I'd shared with Dante on the first night.

Dante looked a little worse for the wear after the long day, and I wanted to check on his wound before we slept. At least, that's what I told myself.

"Hey," I said quietly, still standing in the doorway.

"Hey." Dante turned towards me from where he was already checking his own wound in the mirror over the dresser. So much for that excuse.

"How's it looking?" I asked, shoving my hands into my pockets.

"Better. Sylvans heal quickly, especially vampires with a blood supply," he said, pulling down his shirt. "I should be fully healed in about a week."

"And the wing?" I squinted at his blue and black wings, but I couldn't see anything from this distance.

"Come see for yourself," he said, beckoning me over, a smile playing on his lips.

My heart pounded as I walked into the room, though I tried my best to ignore it. As I stepped closer, I could see a slightly raised place along Dante's wing where I'd stitched it back together. The only strange thing was that I'd used black thread when I'd stitched it, and now... now it looked almost crystalline? The tissue underneath was healed, though there was a very, very thin line where you could tell it had been cut apart.

"Do you want me to take out the stitching?" I asked, bending down to touch it without thinking.

"No!" Dante said quickly, though he tried to cover up his urgency with a cough. "I mean, no, it's... it's fine where it is. The stitching took on some of the magic in the wings, so it'll stay put nicely, and I... I like it how it is."

"Okay," I whispered as I stood up straight once more.

And then his face was inches from mine, and I forgot how words worked.

I wanted to kiss him. I didn't just want to kiss him, though— I wanted to hold him and hug him close, to hear him talking late into the night, to spend hours upon hours in the library with him. I wanted to talk about the stars and magic and all the history I never had the chance to learn.

I wanted him to put his arms around me so that I could listen to his heartbeat until I fell asleep beside him.

But... Dante wasn't my soul mate. He wasn't guaranteed. I could wind up hurt, or worse, I could hurt him in the process. Even our life spans were very different—

And yet something in the back of my mind whispered that I was half Sylvan, and they might not be quite so different after all. I also probably had enough Sylvan in me to be turned vampire, if I wanted. The idea of vampires turning humans is a myth, but for those with enough Sylvan blood, it is a real option to extend their life spans.

"Sunday," Dante began, stepping a little closer. "Do you want to sleep here tonight?"

"Yeah," I said, nodding.

"Come on, then." Dante took me by the hand and led me over to the bed. On the one hand, I felt like I was going to explode. On the other hand, it felt like lying down next to Dante was the safest, warmest place that I could be, and that came with a feeling of extreme serenity.

Dante lay on his side to accommodate his wings, facing the center of the mattress. I crawled in after him, not even bothering to change out of my jean shorts and T-shirt. He pulled me in close to his chest, so near that I could hear his heartbeat. Hesitantly, I wrapped my arm around his waist, letting my eyes drift closed as he pulled the blankets up.

I fell asleep almost instantly, but then I began to dream.

In my dream, I stared at the charred remains of what was once a grand country house.

I didn't know who I was in this life, but she must have been from a wealthy family to have a house like this. Even the blackened remains of the structure gave some hint of how beautiful it must have been in its prime.

I was crying as I looked at where the house had once been. My chest hurt, my eyes hurt, everything hurt. Somewhere in my mind, I understood that Calen was back now, that there were things we could do, but it would be a difficult path moving forward from this.

Everything had been lost in the fire. Every piece of furniture, every heirloom, every memory, every cent of paper money locked away in the house.

"What happened?" Calen asked.

"While you were gone, the cook left without banking the fire properly. The best we can guess is that there was a strong wind from the open window, and one of the embers managed to blow away and catch on a tablecloth."

"When?" he pressed.

"Tuesday afternoon," I said, brow furrowing. "Does the day matter?"

I finally turned away from the burned mess to look at Calen. He was dressed in a black suit that looked decently modern— maybe early twentieth century? It was recent enough that I recognized the style, at least.

"Let me show you a trick," Calen said, smiling. "Take my hand."

I slowly and carefully put my hand in his, and he grabbed on tightly. Very soon, I was forced to hold on tightly, too, because it felt like the world was spinning around us.

Our surroundings blurred, though Calen remained strangely clear. We stood in a whirl of colors as a shimmering fog surrounded us, entirely obscuring the surroundings. I stepped closer to Calen from sheer fear, but he only laughed.

It was only a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity before the spinning stopped, and we were... standing... in the house?

In the complete, unburned house. It looked exactly as it did before the fire, with everything in place. Even the clock on the mantle ran three minutes slow, just as some part of me knew it always had. Everything was exactly as before.

"How... how did you do this?" I asked, reaching out to touch one of the robin's-egg-blue walls. "Is this a dream?"

"This isn't a dream at all, darling," Calen said, moving to wrap his arms around me from behind. "This is Tuesday. On top of that, I believe the cook should be leaving right about now. Let's go make sure that fire is properly banked this time, yes?"

And then I woke up.

I didn't wake up screaming or crying this time, but I was certainly gasping for breath. I pushed myself up into a sitting position, trying to process what exactly had happened.

The shifting woke up Dante. He rolled over beside me as I started to shake, staring into the pitch black darkness of the safe house. I couldn't think. I couldn't breathe.

"Sunday?" he mumbled. "What's wrong? Did you have another vision."

"I did," I rasped.

He must have heard something concerning in my voice, because he sat up and grabbed my hand. I couldn't see anything in the dark, but he probably could due to his vampire heritage.

"Calen—" I gasped, my voice shaking.

"He's not here. You're safe," Dante said gently, putting his arm around my shoulder.

"Calen is the hourglass," I said breathlessly. "It's him. It's been him the whole time. The time magic kept him alive for— for thousands of years."

Every scene I'd witnessed in my dreams, every face that looked too much like his, every single figure that I thought was just a substitute from my mind...

It wasn't a substitute. It was him.

He'd lived all this time.

Calen was the Hourglass.

And I was an idiot.

I should have seen it before. It was right there in front of me the whole time, just staring me in the face if I'd had the good sense to put the pieces together. The Weaver magic was tied to my soul, and the Hourglass was its balance. Calen was my soul mate, like it or not. It only made sense that he would possess the magic that balanced the Weaver's abilities.

That had to explain why the Threads didn't work on Callie's tattoo. He probably understood the intricacies of the Weaver's magic better than I did, and because of that, he was able to design something that would fight back against my magic. Callie would be free of it someday, thanks to my meddling, but immediate magic using the Threads wouldn't work on the sigil the same way it would on a locked door.

I didn't understand what he wanted, though. Why keep killing those past incarnations? Why be responsible for that, why go so far for love only to brutally murder his partners?

Had it been all of them? Was he responsible for every one of my past deaths?

And... and the tattoos.

Oh, shit, the tattoos made much more sense now. A century to turn someone into a living puppet was like a blink for him. Calen wasn't just gathering followers and trying to brainwash them into an insane loyalty to him. He was building an army of witches.

Witch lifespans were longer than humans. A century-old witch could still be perfectly strong and healthy, and some witches lived as long as three hundred years. It wasn't forever, but by the time anyone caught on, it would be too late. There were already hundreds of names in that binder, and there was no telling how many more there would be within the next year alone.

I didn't even realize there were tears running down my cheeks until I tasted salt. Dante flicked on the light on the bedside table, then cursed under his breath when he saw my face, reaching out to wipe away my tears.

"I am... so stupid," I mumbled.

"You're not," Dante insisted. "Fuck, I didn't see it, either. It makes so much sense, and I thought he was suspicious, but I never imagined..."

"That's how he's stayed one step ahead of us this whole time," I said, shaking my head. "Taking the grimoire doesn't even matter. He probably wanted us to have it. Otherwise, he could just rewind time and get it back."

"Well, he hasn't done it yet," Dante said. "He might have a backup plan and he might be onto us, or we might have pulled something he didn't expect. How often do witches check their grimoires?"

"We..." I paused. "Not often, actually."

Daily use spells were things we had memorized. Anything more than that was up in the air. It depended on the complexity, of course, but... No. I hadn't pulled out my grimoire to reference a spell in months. My regular herbal recipes that didn't require magic were in an entirely different book, and I had most of them memorized, anyhow.

"Living Ink is probably the thing he'd need most often, and it has to be brewed on a full moon, according to the directions in the book," Dante said. "The full moon just passed a few days ago."

"I hope you're right." I reached out for his hand, wanting something solid to hold. It was terrifying to think that every plan we'd made could simply be undone with a snap of Calen's corrupt fingers.

We sat like that for a long moment, just breathing and trying to calm ourselves in the dim lamp light. I rested my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes, and he gently rocked back and forth. It was soothing.

The thought occurred to me that maybe this is what I should have been looking for all along. Maybe I should have told Dante before that I had a massive crush on him, should have asked him out. Maybe that would have stopped this whole thing from happening in the first place. Really, I shouldn't have assumed he was gay from the start. It was just an excuse to make me feel better about waiting on my soul mate.

But... I really didn't think I wanted my soul mate anymore.

And I still... I still wanted Dante.

Calen, on the other hand, was a mystery.

"I still don't know what he wants," I said helplessly. "I can't figure it out. I don't think he really cares about the mundane world outside of witches, and I can't figure out what he's trying to amass all this power to do."

"He wants you, first of all," Dante spat.

"He's not getting me." It would be a cold day in hell before I went willingly with that man. "But I... I think he wants something to do with the Sylvans, too. I don't know. I'm just... I'm just guessing."

"Why? What did you see?"

"He said Sylvans hunted humans in one of my dreams— uh, visions," I explained. "He wanted to do something to punish them way back when I was Ataraxia, but it wasn't clear what. And then, just now, he talked about taking power before..."

Before he killed my incarnation. Again.

It was a pattern at this point. Every time one of my incarnations realized that he was up to no good and refused to work with him, he killed her. They'd all underestimated his capability for violence, and that had probably resulted in almost every single one of those early deaths recorded in the Sylvan Library.

Not this time, though. At least in that regard, I was a little ahead of my past incarnations. And, though I didn't want to be, I could be violent, too. At the very least, he wouldn't catch me by surprise with a knife in my chest.

"You... you were Ataraxia?" Dante breathed.

"I think I was," I said, but that wasn't quite right. "I know I was."

"What was she like? Was she like you?" he asked, a smile creeping across his face. "I always wantd to meet her as a child."

"Really?" I asked, a soft laugh bubbling to the surface. "Why?"

"She just seemed... The books always made her seem like such an amazing person," he said, sighing.

That was adorable. He was adorable. Everything about him seemed to glow when he was excited, even though he could be grumpy and sullen, too. Watching Dante let his walls down was incredibly beautiful, and I had to consciously stop myself from staring.

I cleared my throat and looked away, fiddling with the pinkish ends of my hair.

"I guess what I remember most is that she... said something about the Veil. She said 'the Veil will work,'" I muttered. "I thought the Veil was always there, though."

"It wasn't," Dante said. "It's a common misconception, considering it's been around so long. I'm not sure there are any Sylvans still alive from that far back."

"Then who... who put it up?"

"The Moon Goddess, or so the legend says. Apparently, the Veil showed up around the time that witches were born. Another story says that a group of witches put it up themselves because they were trying to push the Sylvans out of the human world entirely." Dante ran his hand through his hair as he spoke, eyes unfocused, staring off at the stars.

That would make sense with the timeline that Calen gave. In fact, Calen might be the only person left from the time before the Veil existed, might be one of the few that remembered its creation. If my visions were true, and if Ataraxia and the Moon Goddess worked together to put up the Veil, that would... that would make him thousands of years old.

"Does she have a name?" I asked, blinking. "The Moon Goddess. I've never heard her called anything else."

"If she does, it's news to me." He shrugged.

And then I did something very stupid: I leaned forward and kissed him.

It was a soft kiss, just a peck on the lips, and it only lasted a moment. It was like instinct, as natural as breathing, and my hand came up to cover my mouth afterwards as I tried to scramble away, eyes wide.

"Don't," Dante whispered, reaching out to pull my hands away from my face. "Please don't go."

"Was that... I mean, I'm sorry—" I stuttered, but he cut me off.

Dante carefully leaned forward and kissed me.

It was gentle and soft, slow and careful. There wasn't any of the scary desire I'd become accustomed to feeling near Calen, just... warmth. Warmth, safety, and affection. I wanted to cry from relief and joy, from feeling safe and sheltered.

I wasn't ready to think about the depth of what I felt for Dante just then, but I was happy to hold him and kiss him, and to express it that way. I was happy to sleep next to him all night.

It was a kind of happiness that I hope sunk into my very bones.