Ena smiled at him as tears filled her eyes. Looking up, she saw similar looks of relief on Cris and Mel’s faces.
“We did it,” she said to them, her voice exhausted and relieved. “I can’t believe we did it.”
Ty stood up, turning to look at Turner, who still knelt next to Greya on the ground at the edge of the grove. The man was clutching his heart, with his head bowed, and Greya was looking at him worriedly, her face tearstained.
“Turner, are you alright?” Ty asked, moving towards his cousin.
Turner looked up as he approached, reaching up to take the hand Ty offered him. “Yeah, I—I think so,” he said, his voice sounding overwhelmed and confused. “I think…” He gripped Ty’s shirt in his hand, as if to steady himself with the feeling. “I feel her too.”
“What does it feel like to you?” Ty asked, his brow furrowed.
“It’s like this…understanding that wasn’t there before. This sense of rightness and balance to everything, where before, it just seemed…chaotic. I mean, the chaos is still there, too, but there’s something new now. It’s like—”
“Seeing through different eyes,” Ty finished for him.
“Exactly,” Turner said, looking at his friend with that wide smile of his. “To be honest, though, I don’t know if I like it.”
Ty laughed—that infectious way he did when he was carefree and happy. “We’ll have to get used to it, I guess.”
The two men embraced each other, hugging like their lives depended on it, and it warmed Ena’s heart to see.
When they broke apart, Turner looked to Ena, where she still stood next to Cris and Mel.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice sincere and emotional. “To all of you. This is…”
“How it was always meant to be,” Ena finished for him. “I Know that, and…something else too,” she said, her brow furrowing in concentration. Was that right? Could she…
Reaching out with her Knowing towards Turner and Ty in that way that usually was met with nothing, she feltthem. She could read their signs—the way they stood, the way they moved, the way they breathed, all of it told her of their intentions and their emotions, just like if they were a witch or a mortal. “I can feel you, with my Knowing,” she said. “Can you too?” she asked Cris and Mel.
“I can,” Cris answered, and Mel nodded in affirmation, too, the witch’s small face relieved and peaceful, as if things were working out exactly as they’d seen.
“I guess now that the bond is broken, our magic works on one another again,” Ty said. “That’s…going to have some consequences.”
He was right. What would this mean for relations between the Covens and the Underworld? Would it escalate tensions or ease them? Ena had no idea. Suddenly, she felt so overwhelmed by everything, the repercussions of all this, what had happened to Heran—whose body still lay on the ground at Greya’s feet, now covered with a blanket from one of their packs.
Her body felt exhausted, and for the first time, she noticed how badly the cold air had gotten to her extremities. She moved to sit by the fire, but realized she still wore the amulet, which had dripped Ty’s blood onto her clothing.
Pulling it over her head, the blood-soaked amethyst brushed her mouth slightly as it passed her lips, transferring a drop of half-dried blood onto her. She could smell it there—metallic and rich. She didn’t know what came over her, but like somehalf-forgotten instinct, her tongue darted out and she licked it, pulling the drop from her lip into her mouth. Gaia, it tasted…
“So are we gonna talk about what happened?” Cris asked the group.
Ena jolted—suddenly pulled away from the ambrosial taste of the blood in her mouth as she redirected her focus to Cris.
Quickly placing the amulet back in the box, she looked at Turner as he responded. “What do you mean what happened? The spell worked, didn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, clearly, but how did it work? What the hell was that that we summoned?” Cris asked.
“I thought you summoned Iblis,” Ty asked, his dark brow furrowed.
“I thought so too,” Cris said. “Or at least, that we were supposed to, but that didn’t feel like Iblis to me. It felt like—”
“Gaia,” Ena said. “You’re right. I thought so too when it happened. It reminded me of my Summoning.” How could that be possible, though? The spellwords they’d used definitely derived from the runic word for chaos. “What did you feel, Ty? When the entity entered you?”
“It felt like Iblis to me, or at least what I remember from my Trial,” he said.
She turned to Mel, who had been suspiciously silent throughout all this. “Mel,” Ena began. “What did it feel like to you?”
“It was like you said, it felt like Gaia, or what I remember of Gaia from my Summoning,” they replied, but they averted their eyes from the group, fiddling with their hands in front of them.
