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They don’t look related in any normal sense, but the way they move around Kael—like different currents circling the same tide—makes the word brother make sense.
Meeting Jules is the thing that knocks me sideways.
She’s like me.
Not the perfect haired, impossibly sculpted type I half expected, but curvy and warm and very, veryhuman.
Hearing her say, “Another Jersey girl?” is like hearing someone call my name in a foreign tongue.
Her dark hair is piled in an artful twist that somehow looks effortless, and her clothes are familiar—a soft blouse, practicalpants—only mine seem shinier, touched with what Amber told me was sea-silk.
The way she smiles at Alaric makes the rest of the world dissolve.
How he looks at her is the kind of obsessed passion tempered by true affection I didn’t know I wanted.
It almost hurts to watch.
That little stab of jealousy makes me feel like a child, and I hate myself for it because Jules is kind.
She is radiant and real, and yes, obviously loved.
She hugs me every time we see each other, which over the past twenty-four hours is almost constant.
But it’s like she’s been saving that exact gesture for me—sunlight and lavender, the sort of hug that settles you.
I breathe her in, and the smell alone quiets the frantic part of me.
For the first time since the whirlpool, I feel less like an exhibit and more like a person.
I’m eager to talk to another woman from Earth, to ask the small, stupid things.
Did you keep your phone?
Are there bagels where you come from?
Is pregnancy as weird as TV makes it?
But the festival swallows talk like that, and the men around us dim the space with their hushed conversation.
We move to a circle of giant cushions around a bonfire that smells of kelp and cedar.
The men cluster like gears, talking sentries and wards and lines of defense in words I mostly only half-follow.
Maps and strategy and a kind of language that feels designed to keep ordinary people safe but somehow also keep them small.
Jules catches my eye, and the laugh lines at the corners of her mouth make something inside me unclench.
“It’s a lot, isn’t it?” she says, voice soft, eyes crinkling with understanding.
“When I first came here, I thought I’d drown under the weight of it all. I mean, a new world where dreams and nightmares are made? The threat of it all unwinding at the hands of monsters called SoulTakers? Not to mention a Demon Lord who basically makes the wearing of underwear completely optional,” she adds the last with a conspiratorial wink.
“Well, it is a lot, but you make it look easy,” I hear myself say, before the part of me that catalogues risk can file the confession away.
The words come out steadier than I feel, and when she smiles like she already knows that’s not true—well, it feels like the first small mercy of Nightfall.
She laughs, a tiny, secretive sound.
“It’s not easy. Phoebe. None of it is. But it’s worth it.”
