“They’re your sisters?” I ask, my voice rising again. “How big is your damn family?”
“Figuratively speaking,” she says. “All women are my sisters, really, joined by the great goddess—the mother of all life. Women create life, and all life comes from Her.”
“This is blowing my mind,” I say. “What else do you know about this thing—Sakesh?”
“Not a lot,” she answers. “My sisters know a lot more, which is why I need to speak to them right now. If Sakesh wants to feed on those soldiers, we have to clear the area.”
“Text Rex,” I say urgently. “He needs to know—”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “There’s too much to tell. It would only confuse him at this point, and none of this information will help. We can reveal it if the others say it’s imperative for the soldiers to retreat. If it comes to that, we’ll have to tell him something.”
“Damn straight,” I agree.
Dots suddenly connect in my mind, all the times I thought Grace was hiding something from me, and how I felt it was connected to her long walks.
“I thought you might have a secret,” I say. “I don’t know, I could just sense it. That’s what it is, all this stuff about witches and the snake?”
“Yeah,” she chuckles. “It’s been hard for me. I’ve kept this secret my whole life, and things have heated up a lot in the past few years. But all of it is important to stop Sakesh.”
“What is he?” I ask. “Like, actually.”
“I don’t really know,” she replies. “An elemental force that gained sentience. It has an evil soul, I know that much. He wants to create a land of fire on earth and have all living things under his command.”
“Sounds painful.”
“Unbelievably,” she mutters.
“Okay,” I say, getting my thoughts under control. “What now?”
“Just hold on,” she says.
Grace leans back into the seat and closes her eyes. The air in the car seems to get thicker, as if there’s a fog I can’t see. Small sparks strike off the edges of the door, and I can feel all the hairs in my arms standing up. Even though I’m curious and a bit freaked out, I just focus on driving while the weirdness is going on.
“Okay,” she says, relaxing and taking a deep breath. “Kyra says things have changed, and we might need warriors, depending on how this goes. She told me everything has fallen into place to ensure his destruction, but having firepower on hand could be useful. If they try to go head-on with him, though, they’ll die. We need to tell them when to attack.”
“So how do we do this?” I ask. “Should I tell Rex?”
Grace shakes her head. “We can’t reveal the coven just yet. If we do, we could jeopardize the entire thing. Just tell them not to go into the circle or try to fight Sakesh head-on. Surely, they know by now that all this does is get people killed.”
“They’ll have a plan,” I say. “Sloan, the military. They wouldn’t show up without one.”
“What do you mean?” Grace asks, alarmed. “Like blowing up the rock?”
“Maybe, yeah,” I answer. “I’ll need to check in to find out, but the military always has a plan.”
“If they blow the rock, we would lose the seal!” she says. “That’s always an option—locking him up inside it again. Don’t let them destroy it!”
“I can try,” I say, yanking the car around the turn that leads to Eccles. “Alisha and Sara are there now, but they don’t know any of this, do they?”
“No,” she admits, her voice very soft.
“This sounds like a terrible way to run an operation,” I mutter.
“The snake is telepathic, Dan. It’s in Alisha’s dreams, and Sara’s. It got into Scarlett’s head. If they know about the coven, so does he, and currently, Sakesh thinks he destroyed them a hundred years ago.”
“What about you?” I ask. “You know about the coven, and the snake’s been all up in you, too.”
Grace shakes her head. “It took all my strength to close my mind against him. The coven taught me the technique early on. I can shield my thoughts from almost anything now. I knew he’d come for me. I was prepared.”
