Choice, free will, and humanity were gifts. Sometimes we got it right; many times we didn’t. The news was full of power-hungry people who thought nothing of trampling on others if it got them their desired outcome. But if you lookedcloser, deeper, beneath the greed, there was hope. Threads of wonder and small acts of kindness. The trick for the future was to nurture those moments, to hold them up to the generations that come long after us as a way of guaranteeing our future survival. Eloise stood for everything that was wrong in this world and had successfully created a ripe cesspit of fear, terror, and uncertainty.
Nobody could deny the presence of the supernatural now. It was clear that it was too late to put the monsters back in the box. Governments have always known we existed, and it’s been a long, uneasy truce that we would stay in the dark to protect our peace and theirs. Eloise turned all of that on its head. I had no idea what lay ahead, but I couldn’t allow what she had planned to come to pass.
I stared at the women in a loose circle around me, who had shaped my life and my values, given me strength, and gifted me acceptance. This is what my grandmother had turned her back on. For me, losing them would wrench something so fundamental in my core being, I would be untethered in an unstable world. I didn’t understand, but then again, I didn’t have designs on ruling the world.
“Are we absolutely sure?” Stella asked. “Once we do this, it cannot be undone.”
I stared at Liz, since the weight of this impacted us both. For me, less so given my mother had long since passed, but it would affect my own children. However, if we didn’t intervene, there wouldn’t be a world left for them to come to anyway.
“I’m sure,” I declared.
Liz swallowed and nodded. “Yes.”
We stood in my garden, the lawn still stained with Roberts’ blood. We didn’t want to hide what we were doing—we wanted it felt, answered, and understood.
“Then let’s do this,” Sophia said with a rub of her hands like she was warming up her magic.
“Wait,” I whispered. I closed my eyes and tugged on the borrowed magic linking me to a god.
“Now?”he asked in my mind.
“Yes.”
“I won’t interfere,”he warned.
“Understood.”
“Is that the god of death? Because, damn,” Dayna said.
My eyes fluttered open, finding Donn stalking toward us from the tree line, his silver eyes flashing in the moonlight. He had shed his regular clothes, opting instead for the billowing black fabric, which twisted with his shadows as he moved. He was lethal, precise, and utterly terrifying.
“Now, we are ready,” I told them.
Liz stepped into the circle, and we tightened our unit, not quite touching but enough that our magic could connect. It didn’t fight us, and that was the first sign we were doing something right.
We didn’t gather candles or chant words stolen from dead languages. We stood barefoot on the ground that had witnessed the severing of the blood bond and was fed by the dead I had protected.
Liz lowered to her knees, spine straight, hands resting on her knees. She looked calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that came from having already accepted the worst possible outcome and deciding to proceed anyway.
This could go so badly, with the consequences being death. But inaction would be so much worse.
“Repeat it,” Liz said. This was part of the declaration. The universe had to be sure of our intention here, and restating it would avoid any confusion and unwanted results.
I met her trusting gaze. “This doesn’t undo what’s passed. You drained your father, and that remains true.”
Her jaw flexed. “And my mother?”
“She no longer has a claim over you, but the bond remains. You can’t sever motherhood; you can only redirect it,” Dayna said, voice steady as she wove the magic tight.
Sophia’s hair lifted with the power settling around us. It was the quiet call of ancestors to witness our call. “You’ll be given a choice,” she said. “Not obligation. Not inheritance. Choice.”
Liz exhaled slowly. “And that choice points upward.”
“To Eloise,” I confirmed.
Stella’s head tipped back, eyes unfocused, gaze flicking through timelines only she could see. She remained silent, a scribe for the future and a caution from the past. She was our anchor, a warning if we took a wrong turn.
Liz rolled her shoulders once and nodded. “Do it.”
