The glow faded from Kimona's hands, leaving behind a faint warmth that seeped into Willow's skin like sunlight through cracked blinds. He lay there on the living room floor, staring at the ceiling where shadows played tricks in the dimming light from outside. The pain in his shoulder dulled to a persistent throb, no longer a screaming void but a shallow echo, knitting itself together under the spirits' grace. Blood cooled on his clothes, sticky and metallic, mingling with the scent of splintered wood and overturned earth from Kimona's herbal pouch, spilled in the chaos.

  Kimona stirred beside him, her breathing steadying into something almost normal. She pushed herself up first, wincing as she tested her weight on her arms, the gashes across her chest and abdomen pulling taut beneath her torn jacket. Willow followed suit, slower, his body protesting with every shift. The room swam into focus around them, a battlefield disguised as a suburban home. Shattered glass from the lamp glittered like fallen stars on the carpet, the coffee table lay in splintered halves, and blood smeared the walls in abstract strokes, dark against the faded wallpaper his mother had chosen years ago for its quiet cheer.

  Willow took a deep breath, the air tasting of iron and dust. He turned to Kimona, pointing vaguely at the wreckage. "This looks like a murder scene." His voice came out flat, laced with that dry edge he used to keep the world at arm's length. He raised a hand to his shoulder, fingers probing the wound. Where a hole had gaped through flesh and muscle, now only a shallow depression remained, raw but closing.

  He dropped onto the armrest of the sofa, the fabric giving a soft, defeated sigh under him. Rubbing his forehead, he tried to piece together the fragments of the evening, but they scattered like pigeons startled from a ledge. Hopeless, all of it. He glanced at Kimona again, her braids disheveled but her eyes steady, and motioned toward her with a tired flick of his wrist. "Where did you learn to do all that?"

  She paused, leaning against the wall for support, her grin faint but real. Dad taught me to fight. Mom taught me magic." She straightened a bit, ignoring the pull of her injuries. Willow had met both. Her father was built like a bearded mountain, and her mother spoke enough wisdom to make him feel dumb by the second sentence. "My family are Veil Guardians. Small group, but we defend people from things like what we just fought."

  Willow blinked once, the words hanging in the air like smoke from a distant fire. "Right, Veil Guardians." He said it as if repeating a line from a dream, one he had already decided not to question further. Sense had fled the building hours ago, leaving only this absurd reality in its wake.

  His gaze drifted to the kitchen doorway, where the crushed apple still lay in its puddle, innocent and disregarded. Compared to the bloody sprawl stretching across both rooms, it seemed almost quaint, a minor offense in a day of greater sins. Slowly, he turned back to the window, half expecting that peculiar pigeon to perch there again, its eyes holding secrets older than the city. But the sill remained empty, the afternoon beyond quiet, save for the occasional hum of a passing car.

  Willow pressed his hands together, eyes dropping to the blood on the floor, congealing into dark pools that mirrored the chaos inside him. How to explain this? He murmured, almost to himself, "Mom’s going to freak out when she gets home."

  Kimona pushed off the wall, her chuckle soft despite the exhaustion etching lines around her eyes. "You’re taking this in stride, at least. Most would be screaming by now."

  There was a pause as he looked at her, really looked, seeing the friend he thought he knew layered with this new, fierce depth. Then he replied, deadpan, "I'm saving the breakdown for after we've cleaned up."

  Her smirk bloomed, cutting through the heaviness like a knife through fog. Though wounded, bloodied, and bone-tired, they set to work. Willow fetched mops and buckets from the cupboard under the stairs, the familiar clatter a small anchor in the storm. They scrubbed the blood from the floors, the red swirling into pink suds that drained away like bad memories. Broken furniture got piled into old cardboard boxes from the attic, splintered legs jutting out like accusations. The sofa, though, they stared at long and hard, the stains set deep into the fabric, stubborn as old regrets.

  Willow turned to Kimona, exhaling a long breath. "Do the spirits know how to get blood out of fabric?"

  She tilted her head, considering it for a moment, her gold beads catching the light. Then she shook her head, a rueful smile tugging at her lips. "Nah, calling upon the protective spirits of my ancestors for a cleaning job’s not the most respectful thing. They’ve got bigger duties."

  Time slipped by in quiet increments, the clock on the wall ticking like a heartbeat too steady for the day they had endured. Kimona offered to stay over, her voice firm, no room for argument. Willow nodded, grateful in his silence, and she crashed on the pull-out bed in the spare room, her presence a ward against the lingering shadows. The house settled into an uneasy hush, the wounds on their bodies mending slower than the mess they had tidied.

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  Friday dawned gray and ordinary, the city outside oblivious to the veil's tear.

  Willow attempted to manifest his powers more than once, sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor, eyes closed, willing chains or spears into being. Results varied, a flicker of blue here, a fleeting link there, but nothing solid, nothing controlled.

  Schoolwork blurred into nonsense, equations and essays mocking his divided mind, but sharing the days with Kimona made it bearable. She sat beside him in class, her notes neat while his scribbles wandered, her quiet encouragement a thread holding him together during the classes they shared

  Saturday came and went in a haze of recovery, walks in the park where the air smelled of rain-soaked grass and distant fry-ups, conversations dipping into the mundane to avoid the abyss. Then Sunday arrived, the weekend folding away like a letter unread. Willow lay in bed, sleep an elusive companion these past few days, chasing him in fits and starts. Dreams tangled with memories, azure lights piercing shadows that whispered his name.

  Footsteps echoed through the house, hurried, frantic, pulling him from the edge of slumber. A voice accompanied them, his mother's, sharp with worry. "Willow? Willow!" Right, the house. Though cleaned, it bore scars, dried blood on the sofa defying their scrubs, walls cracked like veins in marble where impacts had landed.

  He pushed open his bedroom door, groggy, hair wilder than usual. Dana's eyes widened, fear flashing before she pulled him into an embrace, her arms tight, exhaling a long, relieved breath against his shoulder. She smelled of airport coffee and ancient dust, her travel bag still slung over one arm. Then she pulled back, scanning him and the house beyond. "What on earth happened? Why does everything look like.., this? Are you okay? Why is there blood on the couch?"

  "Hello," he said first, soft, reassuring her with a nod that he was fine, or close enough. Willow stared at her for a moment, the question bubbling up unbidden. "What is Dad?" Not where, not when, but what, the word heavy with the weight of revelations.

  Dana paused, silence draping over them like a shroud. Her eyes, sharp and inquisitive as ever, softened with something old and unspoken. "It was your birthday." The words hung there, simple, yet laced with regret. That one statement had solidified what happened, or rather, why. The look in her eyes confessed to that. She knew that his eighteenth birthday would thrust him into an entirely different reality. Something she utterly failed to prepare him for.

  Dana drowned in work, her life a whirl of digs and lectures, artifacts speaking louder than dates on a calendar. Though she loved her son, it would have been a stretch to consider her a present mother.

  Willow had not reminded her he turned eighteen. He had not wanted to impose. Silence stretched again, before she wrapped her arms around him once more, holding tight. "I'm so sorry, Willow. I should have been here."

  He let her hold him, the closeness a balm, if somewhat unfamiliar coming from her. Then she pulled back, her voice steadying. "Willow, your father wasn't an ordinary man." The confession should have come long ago. It didn’t.

  He raised a brow, tilting his head with that dry sarcasm he wore like armor. "Yeah, kind of figured that." He motioned past her toward the rest of the house, the cracks and stains telling tales he could not yet voice.

  Dana took a breath, deep and measured, and looked into her son's eyes. Bright and blue, brighter than last she saw, glowing with a subtle fire that echoed distant sands. "Come," she said, guiding him to the kitchen table, where morning light filtered through the window like reluctant confessions. "Let me tell you the story of how I met him."

  They sat, the table between them scattered with the remnants of his solitary weekend, a half-eaten toast crust he hadn’t hungered for, a mug ringed with cold tea. Dana folded her hands, her archaeologist's fingers callused from unearthing secrets long buried. "It was during a dig in Lebanon, years ago. The site was ancient, ruins from before Abrahamic religions. I was young, ambitious, sifting through layers of time for clues to trade routes that spanned empires."

  Willow listened, his mind drifting to the rollercoaster he had experienced, its chaos an echo of something vast. Dana continued, her voice weaving the tale like threads in a tapestry. "One night, under a sky thick with stars, I wandered from the camp. That's when he appeared, Azhar, stepping from the shadows as if born from them. Tall, lithe, with eyes like yours, blue as the deepest wells, and a smile that held the warmth of desert suns."

  She paused, a faint smile touching her lips, melancholy threading through it. She had always been quite the theatrical woman. Her choice of words odd to others but a norm to Willow. "He spoke with an accent thick as honey, words laced with Arabic that rolled like music. 'Ya helwa,' he called me, beautiful one, and we talked through the night. He knew things, Willow, histories I had only read in fragments, myths that felt alive in his telling. A Djinn, ancient as the sands he roamed."

  The word hung there, Djinn, fitting the puzzle pieces Willow had glimpsed. He leaned forward, the wound on his shoulder a dull reminder. "Djinn. Like genies in lamps? Big blue from Aladdin?" Suddenly, his own color scheme felt like whiplash.

  Dana shook her head, her expression turning grave. "Not the fairy tales, no. Real, unbound, with powers that twist wishes into tragedies. He warned me of that, the monkey's paw curse in his blood. But love blinds, and we shared what time we could. When I learned I was pregnant, he vanished, saying the world was too dangerous for him to stay, that his enemies would hunt you for what you might become."

  Willow absorbed it, the story settling over him like dust from an opened tomb. The carefree life he clung to felt thinner now, stretched over hidden depths. Outside, the city hummed on, oblivious, but in this kitchen, myths stirred awake, brushing against the ordinary with fingers of smoke and wonder. He met his mother's gaze, the silence between them full of unspoken futures, and wondered if he could hold onto the boy he had been, or if the flames within would consume it all.