Page 81 of Lustling

“My friend,” she supplies, steady. “He’s been helping me.”

“Helping you how?” her mother presses, and I feel the taut little rise in Lillien's skin as the old nerves wake.

She hesitates, and so I do something small and human: I let the barest thread of my power slip out, a calming press, nothinginvasive—just enough to ease the air. It smooths the tightness in the room. The parents' shoulders loosen as their muscles uncoil. It is a courtesy, a small mercy; sometimes the world needs a soft touch more than a sword.

“Come in, then,” her mother says after a moment, and the relief that blooms on her face is plain and painful to watch. We move through the house and it smells like someone’s ordinary life—coffee, old fabric, the particular dust that settles in family homes. Photos line the walls, frozen holidays and birthdays and small mercies. A life stitched together in increments of ordinary days. I have never had this. Nothing in me knows quite what to do with it.

We sit. Lillien beside me on the couch, our knees brushing, her fingers worrying at the hem of her skirt. The questions come, soft and relentless. “Where have you been?” her mother asks.

Lillien answers in a voice that is steady but measured. “I needed some time away.”

Her father presses, more concerned than accusatory. “Away from what? You just… vanished.”

“I know,” she says. “I didn’t mean to worry you.” There is a truth there that she doesn’t say: that some things she fled were not meant to be understood by human minds. She keeps the dangerous parts folded tight.

Her mother almost cries then. “We were going to call the police. We thought something terrible happened.” Their fear is blunt and clean and it makes whatever I am feel heavier on my chest. Something terrible did happen—but not to them, not in the way they would understand.

“I’m okay,” Lillien says softer, promising. “I promise.” Her father studies her, searching her face as if it might read him the map of what had occurred. His gaze narrows a second later. “You… look different.”

She stills. “Different how?” she asks.

The mother fumbles for an explanation. “You seem more… mature. And your eyes…” She trails off with the helplessness of someone who cannot place a shadow. “Maybe it’s just the lighting.”

Lillien glances at me quickly and I understand the thing she is measuring: the small, impossible distance between the daughter they raised and the creature she has been waking into. Her transformation leaks in little ways—posture, the tilt of her head, the particular focus in her gaze. Even their human eyes catch it.

But she redirects the conversation, softer, practical. “Was I ever sick as a kid?” she asks.

“Sick?” her mother repeats.

“Not really,” her father says after a beat. “You were healthy.” He searches memory and comes up empty for anything that would mark her as other.

Her question is a probe into identity, into the map of a life she thought she knew. She is testing the seams, looking to see if anything about her past sticks out enough to tell the truth she carries inside.

She asks the deeper one then, the knife of it. “…Am I really your daughter?”

The room freezes. For one terrible, beautifully honest second the house is smaller than the question.

“What kind of question is that?” her mother says, desperately trying to keep an ordinary script intact.

Her father’s confusion is real. “Of course you are. Your mother gave birth to you. We raised you. You are our daughter.” He looks baffled, the answer a sturdy stump he clings to.

Lillien’s pulse is visible at her throat. “But I don’t look like you,” she says.

Her mother pats a stray hair from her own face, smooths for comfort. “Genetics are strange,” she offers.

“You must take after some distant relative.” Her father agrees, citing a grandmother like it will sew the seam closed. They want to believe. They do believe.

They do not know what they carried home from the hospital. They don't know their infant was replaced in a bargain they never saw. The knowledge sits between us like a blade I do not plan to pull free here. Lillien hears them, measures their certainty, and grief and resolve passes across her face.

She forces a small smile and makes the softest excuse. “Okay. I was just wondering.”

They exhale; comfort returns in small, human waves. But I have watched her checking the edges of an entire life, the way a thief slides a hand along a wall to see if anything rattles loose. I know what she is doing. She is deciding whether to let this be her home or something else entirely.

She stands. “I need a minute,” she says, and the room thinks it is only a minute of composure she requires. They nod, tender and unaware.

I rise too, because she moves like smoke and I will not let her walk alone. She turns and I follow, not because I was asked but because it is the only thing that feels right.

FORTY-EIGHT