The sirens were a blade of sound slicing the neighborhood's quiet open. Blue and red light painted the wreckage in pulsing, surreal strokes.
Jonas moved on autopilot, a script written by a primal part of his brain: Protect the children. Control the narrative.
He gently but firmly pried Maria off Kaitlyn. "Take her inside. Both of them. Now. Bathroom. Check for injuries. Real injuries." His voice was low, a commander's tone that brooked no argument. Maria, her face slick with tears, nodded numbly and herded the twins toward the house. Kaitlyn cast one last, wide-eyed look at the truck, her fingers brushing the fading scratch on her arm as if to confirm it was real.
Jonas turned to the scene. The truck driver was stirring, moaning. A small crowd was gathering at the edges of lawns, phones held aloft. Evidence, his mind screamed. Witnesses.
He approached the cab. The man reeked of bourbon and sweat. Jonas didn't bother with the door. He placed a hand on the warped window frame. A focused, intense heat, invisible but potent, emanated from his palm. The metal didn't glow; it softened, just enough. With a sharp tug, he peeled the door frame back like the lid of a tin can.
The action was hidden by the crumpled geometry of the vehicle. To the gathering neighbors, it would look like he'd simply found the door jammed and wrenched it open with superhuman—but believably fatherly—strength.
"Hey," Jonas said, his voice dangerously calm. He leaned into the cab, the smell of alcohol and deployed airbag chemicals assaulting him. He grabbed the man's collar. "Look at me."
The driver, a man in his forties with bloodshot, unfocused eyes, blinked at him. "Wha… the kid…"
"There was no kid," Jonas said, the words leaving his lips as ice. He let a fraction of his elemental nature surface, not as flame, but as a dry, oppressive heat that sucked the moisture from the air in the cab. The man's eyes widened with a terror deeper than the crash. "You lost control. You hit a tree. You are drunk and you are lucky you didn't kill anyone. You will tell the police exactly that. Do you understand?"
The man gagged, nodding frantically, his survival instinct overriding the haze of alcohol and the impossible image of a young girl standing in the road.
"Good."
By the time the first police cruiser skidded to a halt, Jonas was standing a few feet from the truck, hands raised in a gesture of helpless shock. He had already texted the Mage, a single word: BREACH.
---
Inside, the house felt like a bunker. Maria had the twins on the couch under a blanket, though neither was cold. Erik was statue-still, his gaze fixed on the middle distance, processing. Kaitlyn was vibrating, a tuning fork struck by a colossal force. She kept opening and closing her hands.
"Does anything hurt, baby? Really hurt?" Maria asked, her hands fluttering over Kaitlyn like nervous birds.
"No. Just… fizzy. Everywhere." Kaitlyn's voice was small.
"Adrenaline and residual kinetic energy," Erik said, not looking at them. "It will metabolize. Her cellular repair is accelerated. The scratch is already epithelialized." He sounded like he was reading from a medical textbook written in his mind.
Maria stared at him, then at Kaitlyn. Her children. Her beautiful, impossible children. One a calm river hiding unknowable depths, the other a volcano that had just announced itself to the world. Jonas's paranoid question echoed in her skull: Don't you want to know which one?
Looking at them now, the question felt obscene. It was like asking which lung she wanted to protect.
The front door opened and shut. Jonas entered, followed by the cool, damp-forest scent of the Mage, whose real name was Alistair. He was a tall, gaunt man with hair the color of ash and eyes that held the patience of deep roots and old stone. He carried a worn leather satchel.
"The constables are… creatively interpreting the scene," Jonas said, his voice hollow. "The driver is singing the song I gave him. A tree. He hit a tree. They're looking for the tree."
Alistair's gaze swept over the twins on the couch. It was not a look of comfort, but of acute assessment. He didn't ask if they were okay. He knelt before them, his movements fluid.
"Kaitlyn. Look at me." His voice was soft but left no room for refusal. She met his eyes. He didn't touch her. He simply looked, and the air between them seemed to thicken. "You channeled a significant amount of force. You grounded it through your own somatic structure. A crude but effective technique. Where did you learn it?"
"I… I didn't," she whispered. "I just… did it."
Alistair's gaze shifted to Erik. "And you. You perceived the threat."
"Before I saw it," Erik confirmed, his focus finally snapping to the Mage. "I felt the… wrongness. The mass and velocity. It was a taste. Metallic. Sour."
"A synesthetic clairsentience. Not standard for your father's lineage." Alistair stood, turning to Jonas and Maria. His expression was grave. "The fiction will hold for the local authorities. It will not hold for anyone else. A surge of power that blatant is a thunderclap in the quiet places of the world. It leaves an echo."
"The witch," Maria breathed, her arms tightening around the twins.
"Or her agents. Or other interested parties. The hunters' networks will have felt it too." Alistair walked to the window, peering through the blinds at the flashing lights. "The time for secrecy-by-obscurity is over. They are no longer hidden. They are identified."
Jonas sank into an armchair, the weight of it all bowing his shoulders. "I was trying to figure out which one to shield," he said, the confession torn from him. "I thought if I knew who the heir was, I could… I could focus."
Alistair didn't turn. "You were attempting to diagnose a Siamese twin by studying only one head. A pointless and dangerous endeavor." He finally looked back, his eyes landing on the twins. "The spell I cast to save Emily and George's child was not a transfer. It was a translocation and a grafting, performed under duress. It did not preserve a discrete entity. It took a soul under siege and gave it a fortress. That fortress," he said, pointing a long finger at Kaitlyn, then at Erik, "was her native vitality, and the ambient elemental magic of this household. You are not two children with shared traits. You are a single magical biosphere. A dyad."
The word hung in the room, new and absolute.
"A dyad," Erik repeated, testing the shape of it.
"Which means?" Maria asked, her voice tight.
"It means the heir is not a 'who.' The heir is a 'what.' The heir is them," Jonas said, the final piece clicking into a dreadful, awe-inspiring whole. "The power, the legacy… it's distributed. It's in the link."
Alistair nodded. "Precisely. Their strengths are specializations within a shared reservoir. Erik: perception, precision, analysis. Kaitlyn: projection, raw force, instinct. They are two expressions of one reality." He fixed Jonas with a piercing stare. "Your testing, your suspicions—they are not just irrelevant. They are a threat. To question the bond is to weaken the fortress."
The shame that washed over Jonas was a cold tide. He had been poking at the foundation of their strength, looking for cracks that defined individuality, when their power was the unity.
"What do we do?" Maria asked, the practical mother cutting through the mystical verdict.
"You train," Alistair said simply. "But not as individuals. You train the dyad. You teach them to fortify the link, to share power consciously, to defend it. Because our enemy will not try to kill one. She will try to sever the connection. To capture one to control the other. To turn their amplified power inwards until it consumes them."
A heavy silence fell, broken only by the fading sirens outside.
Kaitlyn shifted under the blanket. "So… we're stuck with each other?" she asked, a flicker of her old sarcasm returning.
Erik finally showed a hint of a smile, glancing at her. "Looks like it."
"Good," she said, and meant it. The fizz in her veins was calming, replaced by a new, solid feeling. It wasn't just her own strength she felt. It was his steady presence beside her, a silent hum on the edge of her awareness. An anchor. A beacon.
Jonas watched them, the old, hungry questions finally dying. In their place was a new resolve, colder and harder than fire. He had spent years looking for a label to put on his children to understand how to love them.
Now, he understood. The love wasn't the problem. It was the key.
The protection wouldn't come from hiding one or training one. It would come from making the bond between them unbreakable.
Alistair's phone buzzed. He glanced at it, his face hardening. "The echo has been heard. A signature I haven't felt in thirteen years just brushed against the edge of my wards, two towns over. Faint. Probing." He looked at the family, his message clear.
The grace period was over.
The witch knew where her inheritance was.
And she was coming to collect.