Present Day
Sylvia Page was fifty-one, and she was surrounded by monsters.
The slap of her shoes against the tile cracked like a whip, drowning out every other sound in the mall’s crowded hallway as she ran. She needed to get away, needed to find somewhere she could process what had just happened, but instead of salvation, every step brought her face-to-face with a new horror.
Halloween costumes, she reminded herself. Not real threats. Just kids, cups of alcohol in their hands and happy shouts on their lips. Except it was hard to remember that when they were staring at her witheyes obscured by masks, reaching for her with hands made alien by gloves and claws and prosthetics.
She felt like she had a target on her back. Like all signs pointed to the spectacle of her, to the desperation of her flight and the relentless pounding of her shoes.
Her flats were stained with red.
Her whole body was stained with red.
It was under her nails. In her hair. Crusting on her cheek. Lily’s blood had to be in her eyes too, because the world was tinged with it, a thick haze painting the walls of Hollywood and Highland cherry.
What had she done?
More red overtook her vision as she bolted around a corner, a sudden solid wall of it. She balked at the sight of horns, heart pounding as Hell crystallized in front of her.
Just a devil costume, she knew, except all her mind could focus on was the sudden thought of fire. The woman flipped a strand of blond hair behind her ear, and the flames in Sylvia’s head coalesced around that image, matching it with another strand of blond, a scream in the air and Lily’s body on the floor.
The woman said something, but the words didn’t process. Nothing could get past the blood pulsing through Sylvia’s skull, through the river of heat screaming at her to get out now, to put as much distance as possible between herself and what happened.
Sylvia ran. She kept running, forcing herself forward, pushing past the groups of people to get down the stairs. She felt like she must be leaving a trail of ash in her wake, her body burning the floor beneath her. Sweat exploded out of every pore, rewetting the blood that had dried on her, until she was covered in rivers of iron.
If she could just get outside, she could cool down. Let the fresh air clear her head, so she could finally think around the heat in her bones long enough to figure out what to do. But there were too many people blocking her way to the exit, people who smelled like latex and vodka and perfume, people who seemed to be intentionally standing in her way, people who were trying to block her in here, when she just needed to find a way to get out, out,out…
The fire inside her decided to handle the problem itself.
It started with a crack in the tile, just one fine line stemming from her stained flats, running along the floor until it split, deepened, branched off again and again and again so the room spun on its axis. Except no, that was her, falling, collapsing to the ground with the strength of this thing bursting from her chest.
Distantly, she realized that this was what a snap felt like. This had never happened to her before.
Things had been different, the last time she had unsettled magic.
Less distantly, she felt herself cracking apart, splitting just like the floor beneath her. She had to get up. She had to run. Everyone else was running. Screaming, crying as the building crumbled around them.
Bones snapped. Bodies fell.
Sylvia stumbled to her feet, blinked the red out of her vision, and bolted, leaving the aftermath of all that had happened to shatter in her wake.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Silas Khatri had been in LA for three hours, and he was already tired of it.
He paced around the downtown hotel room his parents had booked for him, wearing a suit his parents’ money had bought for him, talking to his best friend who—as much as he hated to admit it—his parents had picked out for him. They’d chosen Anika because her parents had clamored harder than all the other parents in Noctis, because they had sold her as the smartest, sweetest, most supportive kid there. It was true at the time, but she’d been two.
Sweetwas not a word anyone would use to describe her at thirty.
“Oh my god, pace around that room one more time and I will get on a plane, fly to LA, and duct-tape you to a chair myself.”
Silas forced himself to stop and look at Anika, who was currently magically projecting herself from her New York City office onto the armchair in his hotel. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t taken the one comfortable seat—that you can’t even feel—I wouldn’t be pacing.”
Anika chuckled, her curtain of dark hair swaying as she laughed. “No, you’d still be pacing. It’s a foundational element of your reluctant-prince vibe.”
Silas resisted the urge to move his feet again, instead leaning back against the room’s large desk. “You know, we could just FaceTime like normal people.”
“Yeah, but we’re not normal people. We’re witches.”
