Selene

The woman who walked through the door didn't look like a monster. In fact, she looked ethereal, almost magical.

It was just a woman that looked like something out of a fairy tale. Her skin was so fair, she was almost translucent. Her hair dark and wavy moved like the waves of the ocean behind even though she was standing very still. She wore clothes that covered most of her skin but from her visible neck area, I could see scales on her neck. When she stepped forward, she moved like every step had already been decided three steps in advance, like the room had already surrendered and simply hadn't been informed yet.

"Selene." Orion said the name like a curse.

I guess there is no cause for alarm if they knew each other, I thought to myself.

"Orion." She inclined her head, mild, almost polite, and her eyes moved past him, past Cillian, landing on me with an attention that felt like being weighed on a scale I couldn’t see. "So this is her. I expected more fire. Literally." She tilted her head and looked at me like she just wasted her time coming.

"You can leave the way you came," Cillian said, "or you can leave in worse shape. Those are the only two options on the menu tonight." Cillian said with a bone chilling voice but it didn’t seem to move this Selene of a person, if she was even a person,

"How dramatic." She didn’t draw a weapon. She turned her head slowly towards Cillian and smiled condescendingly. "I do like that about you, Ashthorne. You like to challenge me, I like your consistency."

"You know each other," I said, uselessly, because my brain was apparently determined to point out the obvious in moments that called for anything else.

"Everyone who matters in Elaria knows everyone else who matters," Selene said, though her eyes never left Cillian. "It’s a smaller world than the size of it suggests.” She brought her perfectly manicured nails to her lips and blew imaginary air off them.

 “Shall we skip the part where you all pretend this might end peacefully? I find it a waste of time neither of us has."

Before anyone could register what she was saying, she had moved. She moved faster than the scout had. Faster than anything I'd seen move all night. Faster than Cillian, who was already fast enough to have half-shifted before her first strike landed, catching the edge of a blade I hadn't even seen her draw against a forearm that was now gold and dense with fur.

"Careful," Selene said, almost conversational, like they were discussing the weather instead of trading blows fast enough to blur. "I’d hate to damage anything Calum still wants intact for the committee to look at."

"Comforting," Cillian snarled, and drove her backward two full steps, and I watched something in her calm crack just slightly at the strength behind it, a flicker of genuine reassessment.

"You’ve gotten faster," she said, almost approving, resetting her stance. "The last report I read on you was two years out of date. I should have accounted for that."

"Feel free to file an updated one. If you make it out in one person". Cillian struck at her again.

Orion's fire met her from the other side, and she rolled through it like it was weather, twisting under his arm and coming up with the blade angled for his ribs, and it was only Cillian's shoulder catching her mid-turn that saved him, the two of them crashing into a bookshelf that had survived one attack already that night and did not survive a second.

"Aurora, the box”, Orion’s voice reached me amidst the whole commotion and I picked it up without thinking. “Throw it, now!" he shouted, his voice ragged, and I threw it without understanding why. I  watched it catch mid-air in a net of his blue fire and detonate into something bright enough that Selene had to turn her face away for exactly one second.

One second was apparently all Cillian needed. He drove her back through the previously  broken window frame, out into the yard, and I heard Orion swear in a language I didn't recognize and go after them, shouting something over his shoulder that might have been my name or might have been an instruction I was too frightened to understand.

I was alone in the wrecked front room for exactly as long as it took me to decide that standing still was no longer an option I could live with.

I went after them. I don't know what I thought I was going to do. I just followed my instincts.

Selene had Cillian pinned wrong-footed against the porch rail, blade an inch from a throat that wouldn't heal from that particular wound, Orion still ten feet back and closing too slowly, and something in me opened.

 I didn't decide to move. My hands were already burning before I'd finished crossing the yard, and the sound that came out of me wasn't anything human. Unluckily for her, Selene's head turned toward it a half-second too late.

Fire shot through my hand and caught the blade an inch from Cillian's skin and she let go of it. Before she could react, Cillian caught her arms and twisted them backwards, putting her between me and him in one fluid motion, and for the first time all night I watched something that might have been surprise cross her perfectly composed face.

"There it is," she said quietly, almost impressed. "There’s the fire I was promised."

"Leave us alone." My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded like something older, something that had been waiting a long time to be angry on someone else’s behalf.

She looked at me for a long moment, not afraid, not fazed, she was kind of amused. Behind her, Cillian was still, his chest heaving from the brawl that just happened. One hand pressed to the shallow line the blade had already managed against his collarbone before I'd arrived, the other holding her in place.

"You could kill me right now," Selene said, almost thoughtfully, like she was working through a proof rather than facing down a girl on fire. "I can see it in how that flame is sitting on your skin. It wants to. You’re the one holding it back."

"Give me a reason not to." I quipped back, feeling the fire around me grow.

From the corner of my eyes, I saw Orion moving towards me slowly, his eyes carefully scanning what is going on. Me on fire, Selene disarmed and being held, Cillian bleeding against the porch rail while holding the root of all the commotion hostage.

"Aurora." His voice was careful, the same voice he’d used to teach me to find the warmth behind my sternum not twenty minutes earlier. "Whatever happens next, I need you to still be you when it’s over. Can you hear me?"

I heard him. I felt the fire listen too, some part of it recognizing his voice as something worth quieting for, and slowly, unwillingly, the flame along my hands began to wane.

          Orion must have communicated with Cillian with his eyes because he let her go and gently moved away from her.