Magnolia Glass's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Magnolia Glass pressed her palm against the cottage doorframe and waited for the world to pick a side. The stone under her hand belonged to the human world. The moss creeping across it belonged to the fae. She stood in the seam, and the seam was cutting her again. Pain lit up her spine like a struck match. She hissed through her teeth and stepped fully inside. The curse had done this to her since she was a child. Half in, half out. Never allowed to settle. She had spent years collecting scraps about it — a name in a burned ledger, a rhyme from a drunk hedge-witch, a warning scratched into a barn door. Not enough. She refused to try to break a curse she only half understood. Half-known meant she might unravel herself instead of the spell. Tonight she meant to change that. She locked the door and set three things on the kitchen table: a bowl of salt water, a black candle, and the milk-white teardrop pendant her mother had left her. The pendant was the only thing she owned from before the curse. If any object she had carried a clue to the source, it was this one. She lit the candle and lowered the pendant into the salt water. The stone had always looked empty. Now, under the flame, something moved inside it — a slow curl of shadow, like ink dropped in milk. A thin whine came from under the table. The silver pup crawled out, wings folded tight, ears back. He had been her companion since she found him bleeding in a hedge two winters ago. He never whined. He was whining now. "Stay," Magnolia said. He did not stay. He put his front paws on her knee and stared at the pendant. The shadow inside the stone sharpened into a shape. A woman's face. Not her mother. Someone older, harder, with Magnolia's own jaw. The face opened its mouth and spoke a name Magnolia had never heard, and the sound went straight through her ribs. She knew, the way you know a burn is a burn, that the name belonged to whoever had laid the curse. She also knew, from the shape of the jaw, that it belonged to her blood. The candle guttered. The pendant went cold in the water. The face was gone. Magnolia sat back. Her hands shook once, then stopped. She had a name now. Not a rumor. Not a scrap. A name, and a family she had never been told about. The pup pushed his nose into her palm. She scratched his ear without looking down. "We're not hunting a curse anymore," she said. "We're hunting a person." She blew out the candle and reached for her coat. The crossing would hurt. She was going anyway.