Selene sat in their living room, a cup of untouched tea before her.
She looked old. Not in the way vampires aged—she'd been turned in her seventies, her face lined with a lifetime before immortality. Her eyes were tired.
"I joined the Silent Ones fifty years ago," she said. "I believed what they told me. That the division between our kinds was necessary. That unity would wake something terrible." She paused. "I was wrong."
"The bridge beneath the third bond," Lyra said. "It's healing. Not destroying."
"I know. I felt it. When you restored the third bond, something shifted in me. In all of us who had been touched by the Silent Ones. Some resisted. Some... didn't." She looked at Kael. "Your friend Marcus Valerius. He was one of the ones who broke free. I was another."
"Why are you here?"
"Because not all of the Silent Ones are gone. The leadership fell, but there are remnants. True believers. They've gone underground." She leaned forward. "They know about the child. They've been watching you since the pregnancy began. And they believe that if the child is born, it will complete what the three bonds started. It will break the last seal."
"What last seal?"
Selene's voice dropped. "The one that keeps the bridge bound to this world. If the child is born, the bridge becomes permanent. Unbreakable. The old hatred can never return. And the Silent Ones—what's left of them—will lose everything."
Kael looked at Lyra. Her face was pale, her hand resting on her stomach.
"How do we stop them?" he asked.
"You can't. Not completely. They're scattered, hidden. But you can protect the child. You can ensure it's born safely." Selene reached into her coat and withdrew a small pouch. "Inside are names. Locations. The remnants I know about. It's not all of them, but it's a start."
Lyra took the pouch. "Why help us? You were one of them."
"I was. And I did terrible things in the name of a cause I didn't fully understand. I spent fifty years serving hatred." Selene met her eyes. "I want to spend whatever time I have left serving something else."
She left before dawn. Kael and Lyra stood on the widow's walk, watching her disappear into the trees.
"A key," Lyra said. "Our child is a key."
"Then we make sure it opens the right door."
The sun rose over the Pacific. Somewhere in the distance, a storm was gathering.
But they had faced storms before.