A week passed in a taut, grey string of days. The rain relented, leaving a sky the colour of unpolished lead and a damp that seeped into the bones of the house. The tension did not ease; it changed form, becoming a routine of silent vigilance.
The training shifted. Alistair, with a centaur's pragmatism, abandoned esoteric meditation for something more tangible. "You can't defend a feeling," he'd grunted, leading them into the dense beech woods of the Chilterns, a few miles from their home. "But you can defend a position."
The woods were an ancient place, the air thick with the smell of leaf rot and damp stone. The old magic there, Alistair explained, was neutral and deep—a good place to mask their own. His glamour flickered more freely among the trees; the twins caught glimpses of the powerful, dappled flank, the shift of muscle under tawny hide, the solidity of him that was more than human.
The exercise was simple in theory: Erik would hide. Kaitlyn would find him, not by sight, but by following the 'signal' of their bond. Then they'd swap.
It was a disaster.
Erik, the natural hider, would quiet his mind, slow his breath, and try to minimise his presence in the bond. To Kaitlyn, it was like trying to track a radio station by listening for its silence. She'd stomp through the bracken, frustrated, the bond yielding nothing but a vague, directionless sense of Erik-ness.
"Stop trying to turn it off!" she'd finally yelled, her voice echoing in the damp wood. "Just be! Be loud!"
From his hiding place in a hollow oak, Erik flinched. He wasn't trying to be silent; he was trying to be precise. But at her shout, his focus broke. Annoyance, bright and sharp, flared in him.
And Kaitlyn snapped her head around, zeroing in on the oak like a compass finding north. "There!" She marched over and thumped the tree trunk. "See? Easy."
"You found my irritation, not me," Erik said, crawling out, moss in his hair.
"Same thing, isn't it?" she shrugged, a triumphant glint in her eye.
Alistair observed, tail switching. "The bond transmits state. Emotion. Sensation. Not GPS coordinates. You," he pointed a blunt finger at Erik, "must learn to broadcast a steady signal, not a dead wire. And you," he turned to Kaitlyn, "must learn to read the signal's quality, not just hunt its loudest spike."
It was during their third attempt that the woods offered its own lesson. Kaitlyn was hiding. Erik stood still, closing his eyes, letting his other senses expand. He pushed aside the chatter of the woods—the rustle of a fox, the drip of water—and sought the unique, warm-cinnamon-and-sparks signature that was Kaitlyn.
He felt a pulse. Not from the bond, but from the land itself. A slow, deep, subterranean thrum of power. It was immense, old, and utterly indifferent. For a moment, his mind, so used to analysing, was overwhelmed. He staggered.
In that moment of vulnerability, the bond did something. It didn't lead him to Kaitlyn. Instead, it pulled from her. A bolt of pure, grounding instinct—a sense of Here! Now!—shot down the link and anchored him. His senses snapped back, refined. He didn't 'see' her, but he knew the exact texture of her impatience bleeding into the mossy air behind a fallen ash tree thirty yards to his left.
"Behind the ash," he said aloud, his voice steady.
Kaitlyn emerged, looking surprised, then grudgingly impressed.
"Good," Alistair said, a rare note of approval in his voice. "You used the land's interference to refine your focus. And you," he looked at Kaitlyn, "you provided an anchor, not a beacon. You're learning. The bond is a two-way road. You can pull as well as push."
---
Back home, the siege was bureaucratic. A letter arrived from the local council, querying the "unauthorised substantial hedging work." Jonas spent an afternoon on the phone, his voice a study in polite, strained reason, citing privacy concerns and vague plans for a wildlife garden.
Maria's battlefield was the supermarket. In the chilled aisle, Sarah from two doors down caught her arm. "Everything alright, love? Saw that police car again. And your Jon out there all hours with that… that large friend of yours. Everything… sorted?" The question was layered with suburban concern and sharp curiosity.
"Oh, sorted, yes," Maria smiled, her grip tight on the trolley handle. "Jon's friend Alistair is helping with the garden design. You know, a proper project. And the police were just finalising their report. All a bit of a fuss over nothing, really." She offered a recipe for shepherd's pie as a distraction, and it worked.
But the cost was a constant, low-grade exhaustion. The house was no longer a home; it was a command centre where every external interaction was an intelligence operation.
The true cost, however, was revealed in the dark.
Jonas woke to the sound of a stifled cry from Erik's room. He was there in seconds, Maria a shadow behind him.
Erik was sitting bolt upright in bed, drenched in a cold sweat, his eyes wide and unseeing. He was trembling violently.
"The blood… it was so warm," he gasped, his voice not his own. It was flat, haunted. "And then it was cold on my hands. I can still feel it. The crunch. The stop."
The vampire. The one he'd killed. It wasn't a memory visiting him in a dream. It was a ghost, clawing its way up from the place where he'd buried the act.
Maria gathered him into her arms, rocking him. "Shhh, love. It's over. It's done."
But Jonas watched, his blood turning to ice. This wasn't normal survivor's guilt. The description was too visceral, too sensory. Erik was reliving the physics of the murder.
Downstairs, the wards on the back door chimed softly—a single, clean note. No attack. Just a touch.
Alistair was already in the kitchen, a shawl over his shoulders, his eyes like chips of flint in the gloom. "A fetch," he said, before Jonas could speak. "A different sort. A dream-fetch. It doesn't scratch the walls. It scratches the mind. It finds a crack—guilt, fear, memory—and worms inside, to fester and isolate."
"Morwen," Jonas breathed, the name a curse.
"She's mapping the interior now," Alistair said, his voice grim. "The strength of the walls mattered little if she can poison the well within. She is trying to isolate Erik. To make his mind a prison, to make the bond a chain that hurts him. A divided dyad is a weak dyad."
As if on cue, a floorboard creaked above them. Kaitlyn stood at the top of the stairs, her face pale in the night-light. She hadn't heard the cry. She'd felt it—the sudden, cold horror bleeding through the bond, yanking her from sleep. She looked from her father to Alistair, her young face old with understanding. "He's hurting."
She didn't ask to help. She went into Erik's room, displacing her mother. She didn't hug him. She sat on the edge of his bed, her shoulder pressing against his. She didn't speak of vampires or guilt. She simply opened herself up, not as a psychic therapist, but as a presence. She let the solid, stubborn, fiery warmth of her own spirit flow across the bond—a counter to the cold, invading horror.
It wasn't a cure. The nightmare didn't vanish. But Erik's trembling slowly eased. The horrific sensory loop was interrupted, diluted by the undeniable, normal, annoying reality of his sister's proximity. He leaned into her, his breath evening out.
Jonas watched from the doorway, Maria's hand clutched in his. He saw it then, with terrifying clarity. Alistair was right. Morwen wasn't just attacking their home. She was attacking the dyad itself. She was trying to prove that their greatest strength—their bond—could be turned into a conduit for agony.
And in the quiet dark, he saw the corollary: their only defence was to make that bond even stronger. Not just a link for power, but a lifeline against the dark. Kaitlyn, instinctively, was already doing it.
The war was no longer just outside. It was inside their walls, inside their minds. And the twins, barely teenagers, were the main battleground.