Serena's body was doing something weird.
She had hugged Gavriel. A normal hug. A relief hug. The kind of hug you give a friend who had been dying in a bed the last time you saw him and was now standing upright and breathing and alive, and the alive was so good and so unexpected that her arms had moved before her brain could file the proper permissions.
Then her body had done the thing. The stiffening, the locking, the full-system shutdown that started in her shoulders and spread outward like ice across a pond. She blamed the necklace. She blamed it immediately, comprehensively, with the conviction of a woman who had been wearing dark magic jewelry for hours and whose body was entitled to a few malfunctions.
