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But Anya seemed to sense her intentions.

She looked up, the half-wraith’s arm hauled around her neck, her good eye piercing Thea’s gaze. There was something about that eye, something that made the hair on Thea’s nap stand on edge —

Another flaming arrow shot towards her, but this one was swallowed by a cloud of darkness gathering around the two half-wraiths. As the power thrummed around their bodies, Anya still held Thea’s stare.

‘Don’t you remember me?’ she asked, reaching for something Thea hadn’t noticed hanging around her neck.

A flower necklace.

Her hand brushed the petals there, before intricate bolts of lightning danced at her fingertips.

Thea loosed a breath, not realising that she had taken a step towards that familiar power that called to her.

‘I thought you would recognise your own blood,sister,’ Anya said.

Sister. The ground seemed to quake beneath her, the word somehow cleaving through the walls she had built around herself, shattering all notions of the past and ringing with an undeniable note of truth.

‘Sister?’ Thea choked. An icy shiver raked down her spine, her magic winking out around her, the storm circling above ebbing away into the distance.

Thea’s gaze shifted from Anya to Wren, the three of them staring hard at one another, like bolts of lightning meeting to strike the same point.

Shadows deepened and swirled, caught in the current of a windstorm.

‘Beware the fury of a patient Delmirian…’ the Daughter of Darkness murmured, before taking her general and vanishing into darkness.

A soft cry wrenched Thea from her trance and she threw herself towards Wren, who was kneeling in the mud. Thea skidded to a stop beside her, Cal there instantly as well.

Thea’s skin crawled at the sight of her sister, pale and shaking, soaked to the bone. Wren reached for her. There were no signs of blackened veins or leaking shadow. The half-wraiths hadn’t got their talons in her. Wren was herself, but clearly in shock. Thea realised that she probably was, too.

She wrapped her arm around her sister’s shoulder, needing to reassure herself that Wren was truly there, truly whole.

Teeth chattering, Wren started to babble. ‘I… Farissa and I… We had nearly fixed the tear, but there was a swarm of wraiths on the other side trying to force their magic through. Farissa got knocked overboard, and without her help, I… I couldn’t hold them off.’ She sniffed.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Thea told her.

Cal looked on, horrified.

‘But it is, Thee… I couldn’t hold them off, couldn’t fix the rest of the tear. And when they burst through, I used my magic. I didn’t mean to. I remember Hawthorne saying it attracts them, but —’

‘It was your only option, Wren. You were defending yourself.’

‘That doesn’t make it alright. I should have let them have me, rather than let them through.’

‘No. That was never an option, do you hear me?’ Thea spoke fiercely, fury pulsing alongside her uncontained magic now. ‘They can’t have you. They never will.’

Cal stepped back, fear etched on his face.

But Wren looked at Thea, the horrific truth dawning there. ‘Thea… What she said… What she called you…’

The term echoed in Thea’s mind, but she wouldn’t – couldn’t – say it aloud. Instead, she tasted another phrase on her tongue.

‘Beware the fury of a patient Delmirian…’ Bile burned the back of her throat. ‘It was never me,’ she rasped. ‘It was her.’

Flower necklaces in small hands.

The whisper of a storm in the wind.

‘You can feel it in your bones, can’t you?’ Wren said quietly, her voice quaking. ‘That what she said was true.’