Scathach smiled. It gave her extraordinary pleasure to know that Joan had fallen asleep confident that she would be safe. Scatty guessed that this must be like the absolute trust a child had in a parent. Then her smile faded: she’d never had that trust in her own parents. The two figures had been almost strangers, aloof and distant, and although she had called them Mother and Father, these were empty titles; there had been no emotion behind the words. She’d been close to her grandmother and her uncle, but she’d always been closest to her sister.

Aoife of the Shadows: now, there was a name she’d avoided thinking about for years.

Something moved in the grass and she tossed another rock, sending the unseen creature crashing into the undergrowth.

Scathach rarely thought about her parents now. They were both alive-she would have been told if they were not-in a distant Shadowrealm that was supposedly patterned after the lost world of Danu Talis. She’d not been there in centuries. Not for the first time, it struck her that, unlikely as it seemed, Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel had become the parents she’d never really had.

She frowned, trying to remember the first time she had encountered the Flamels. She was almost sure it was Paris in the middle of the fourteenth century, shortly after they had bought the Book of Abraham the Mage. She knew for certain that she had met up with them in Spain when they were trying to translate the Codex, and she had definitely been in Paris for Perenelle’s funeral in 1402. Over the centuries she had crossed paths with them again and again. She had saved their lives-and they had saved hers on more than one occasion-and almost accidentally they had become her family. When she needed advice, she went to Perenelle, and when she needed money, she asked Nicholas.

Across the decades, there had been some others too who had become part of her new family-Joan was like a sister to her-but the problem with having humani friends was that they aged and died, and in the last few centuries she’d been careful not to cultivate them. The last time she’d had a circle of close friends was when she’d been in a Goth-punk band in Germany with three of her vampire clan. They’d had some wild times. Sleeping during the day, singing and partying all night, then hunting the savage water sprites Nix and Nixe in the twilight hours before dawn. Now that she taught martial arts in San Francisco, she had plenty of students, and on the last Friday of every month she met up with some of them for karaoke night in the local sushi bar, but that was just to keep up a normal appearance, and they were more acquaintances than actual friends.

And she wasn’t lonely. Not really…