Nowhere was safer than the quiet part of Pennsylvania we lived in. Minivans parked on curbs, kids parked their bikes in driveways, towering chestnut oaks watched over us like grandparents, and streetlamps always came on at sundown.
Though they were eerily dimmer tonight.
I checked my phone, and my stomach dropped. I was already three minutes past my curfew. I contemplated turning around, but since I was already halfway to the school, I blew out a short breath and kept going.
A twig snapped behind me.
“Ember Blackburn?” a vicious-sounding male voice called out.
My heart rate spiked, and a sudden tightness caught me in the throat. Dad was always telling me to watch out for Witch Hunters, a special division of the police, authorized to keep magic out of the human realm by any means. I should have sprinted like my life depended on it, but then I registered what he’d called me . . . and I slowed.
No one had ever called me Ember Blackburn. No oneknewabout Ember Blackburn because I’d always gone by Ember Rose.
Rose was my dad’s name — from my human side — and it was the last name I’d been given, in accordance with human tradition. Only, because I’d once found the witch realm of Everden interesting enough to study it, I knew their tradition was different. Witches were matriarchal. And though I rarely thought about it, I knew where the name Blackburn had come from. It was the name I should’ve gotten from my mother.
Helen Blackburn, Echelon to the School of Mental Magic, the foremost Mentalist in Everden. A low-level, human Witch Hunter wouldn’t know about her, though.
Like sentient smoke, a rope of shadows I recognized asa Shadowcurrent dove between my legs. As dexterous as a human hand, the Shadowcurrent tied my shoelaces together and tightened them.
On my next stride, I fell, my hands shooting out to catch me.
My left wrist took most of the impact, my right hand recoiling just in time to stop my phone from smashing into the sidewalk. I coughed out a white puff of breath, pulled my legs around in front of me, then swiped my hand down my arm to wipe off the bit of blood from where the skin had been torn from my palm.
A brief glance behind me confirmed I was still being followed. The shadows that curled around him, obscuring my view, parted just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of his pale white skin and dark features. He was around Dad’s age, muscular, and tall. And he was a Dark Witch, judging by the Shadowcurrent he’d just cast to trip me with.
At the realization that he was a witch, not a Witch Hunter, I set my phone in my lap and hurried to finish untying the knot between my shoes.
Witches were almost always forbidden from visiting the human realm. Humans had only permitted Ash and I to live here because we were half witches, and even then, they only allowed us to live here until we turned eighteen.
We could have grown up in Everden, exceptthatworld wanted us even less than our own mother, who abandoned us to be an Echelon not long after I was born. The one time Helen visited was on Ash’s eighteenth birthday, but I was sleeping when she came to take Ash away.
I blinked to clear my head, and stood. “Who . . .” My tongue caught in my throat as the shadows hovering around him wafted away from his form. His overgrown nails speared out from his fingertips like sharpened surgical instruments. “Who are you?”
“Don’t speak,” he said.
I tried to protest, but I couldn’t move my tongue.
“We wouldn’t want to wake the humans, would we?” He turned, crooking his finger as he did, motioning for me to follow him. “Come. Follow me this way.”
At the new command, my tongue released from whatever hold he’d had on it, and I blurted, “What?No.” I wasnot—
I stepped toward him, not of my own volition. I tried twisting to run the other way, but something beyond my control prevented me from doing anything other than keep pace with his footsteps.
He steered us back toward my house, striding right over the tire marks streaking the center of the road.
“I imagine your mother never told you about the portal? That it was in your yard? No matter. I’ll show you the way now.” Shadows rose from the ground and swirled around his black-clad figure.
“The portal?” I asked. “The portal toEverden?” I gazed in the direction of my house, but it was still too far away to see. “You’re not . . .”
It might have been obvious, given the date, but after eighteen years of witches ignoring my existence, I never thought they wanted me in Everden. And Everden was the last placeIwanted to be.
I missed Ash, but she’d also stopped writing to me — and Helen . . . Helen never started. I didn’t care about spellcasting. I cared about leaving Dad behind in the human realm. I knew what it was like to have no real friends, and if I was gone, who would he talk to? Who would take care of him?
I summoned the courage to ask, “You’re not taking me there, are you?”
“Didn’t I tell you not to speak?”
“Yes, but — ”
