Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Joey is not prepared for this. Elena dead, watching her murdered and not being able to stop it. The sick asshole running away with the book, with the magic. His illusion spell that has suddenly changed the entire crime scene. And now the police, Marissa Berg, outside the glass house looking in, thinking she’s seeing evidence of a horrific crime. But she does not see the truth.
“Joey, what do we do?” Sophie’s words wrench Joey out of her thoughts. Marissa is right outside, waving at the vehicle behind her, which spits blinding blue and red lights everywhere, and someone else gets out of the car. Another police officer. Marissa says something to him and then takes her gun out of its holster and points it directly at Sophie through the window. The other officer is running, and Joey knows he’s heading for the door.
There is no talking their way out of this. Sophie has a murder weapon in her hand, covered in what looks like Elena’s blood. Joey has only one thought. “Run,” she whispers.
Sophie doesn’t hesitate. She drops the sculpture, still dripping withblood, and races down the hallway where they saw Cal run just minutes ago. Joey follows her. They move fast, checking doors, looking for a way out. A solid door at the end of the hall looks like it might lead somewhere outside, and when they get to it, it’s heavy, but it creaks open with a shove. They hear the front door of the house crash open and a man’s voice yelling. Joey can’t hear what he’s saying, but she knows they have to be quick.
They’re in a garage now. There are three dirt bikes lined up against the wall, and Joey can’t believe their luck. Sophie sees them at the same time, and they both make a run for it. Joey grabs the helmet from one of the seats and pushes it onto her head. She climbs on, feeling the bike rock beneath her. She turns the throttle slightly and kicks down the starter. It whirs to life beneath her. Behind her, she spots a garage door opener on the wall. Kicking the kickstand down, she leaps off the bike, smashes her palm against the button on the wall, and then darts back to the bike. The garage door hums and cracks. Darkness and rain swell inside. Lightning and thunder warn them.
“How do I start this thing?” Sophie is twisting her hand forward and backward, looking all around her bike for an answer.
“I’ll do it,” says Joey. She finds the starter with her foot and steps down hard. Nothing happens. She does it again, this time only stepping until she feels resistance and then starting again. One more kick, and nothing. “Come on,” she says. “Come on.” Then, with one last kick, it starts with a whir.
Joey sprints to her own bike and peels out of the garage, feeling unsteady. She stops a few feet away, expecting Sophie to be right here with her, at her side, but she isn’t. Joey looks back to see Sophie kicking at the starter again. The engine has turned off. The bike is dead.
There’s a moment when the world slows down. Joey can hear voices shouting inside the house, and she knows it’s only seconds before they’re in the garage. She finds Sophie’s eyes and tries to communicatesomething to her, but they only have a moment. There seems to be understanding there, maybe even a slight nod, but honestly, Joey can’t tell. The rain is splattering her visor. It could be shock or helplessness that she sees on Sophie’s face for all Joey knows. But she doesn’t have a choice.
The door that leads from the house to the garage swings open, and Sophie’s head snaps around. Joey watches as she raises her hands, gesturing for surrender. She wishes she could stop this right now but she is out of time.
Joey Close has no use for religion, but she prays to the trees as she turns her head and curls her fingers around the bike handles. She prays as the bike lurches forward. In seconds, she’s peeling away, tires digging into mud and pebbles. Behind her, she leaves Sophie and the cops and Elena and everything that happened tonight. She’s muttering an idea to herself, to the aspens. One more glance back and the mountain terrain has swallowed the view of the glass house.
This better fucking work.
66Joey
Joey careens downhill without any semblance of control.
She hasn’t driven a dirt bike since high school, and she’s reminded why she hates them. They’re too fast. Too loud. Too disruptive. The bike is moving fast, away from the glass house, and the only thing she knows is that she needs to go down. Once she’s close to the bottom, she’ll figure out where to go from there. The rain, of course, is making sight impossible. She bumps over something, a rock or a root, and nearly slides off the seat. When she looks up again, there’s a tree trunk directly in her path. She swerves inches from it, a maneuver that sends her skidding out. The tires stop on the uphill side of a boulder, which is the impossible luck that saves her from tumbling to her death. She catches her breath for a second, feeling the rain relentless against her helmet.
She hears something through the din of the storm. A voice. Or voices. They seem to be coming from every direction. Up, down, all around her. From the trees themselves.“Not much further,”the voices say.“Just beyond the next ridge. Keep going.”Joey doesn’t need to search for the source of the voices. She’s heard this before. Not these exactvoices. These are more generic, more ethereal. Not like the voice she heard in the woods days ago, before all this started, before Sophie and Elena showed up. That time, it was Quinn’s voice, clear, spoken through the trees. These voices, though. They don’t sound like a resurrected human voice but like the trees themselves, and Joey doesn’t have time to question her sanity. She doesn’t have time for doubt or disbelief, not only because she knows, sheknows, these trees can talk, but also because she knows the rules. And the rules clearly state that when the trees talk, you must listen.
A faint growl echoes in the distance. Another bike.
The trees whisper once more.“He’s coming.”
67Joey
Joey jumps off the bike and lets it clatter to the ground.
The spell circle welcomes her with a tingling inside her blood, a buzzing of hornets in her veins. She’s grateful for the feeling and desperate for the magic to fill her as quickly as possible. She thumps onto the ground in her usual spot. Doubt seizes her. This won’t work. No one has done magic without the book for centuries. It’s not possible. She has a flash of inspiration. She might have a way out. But then she realizes why she’s wrong and curses—she needs the book to do any kind of magic, including a summoning spell that would bring the book to her. She wants to scream, to cry out in frustration, but instead, she decides she has to try something. What choice does she have? The police have Sophie now. There is no doubt about that in Joey’s mind. They’ll take her in, and there’s ample evidence to put her away. Joey thinks of Elena. Her snark and style and her magnificent fuck-you attitude that Joey always secretly envied. She thinks of Gael. Elena’s son. Joey’s chest tightens, and her resolve hardens.
She closes her eyes and starts to feel the magic fill her up. The feeling is pure power, like she is being alchemized. She focuses, but thenshe shifts as an idea comes to her. It’s a ridiculous idea that absolutely should not work—it’s not how she’s ever known the magic to work—but for some reason she is compelled to try. So, she turns her thoughts to the trees. Out loud, alone in the woods, she speaks. She asks the trees for exactly what she needs. A moment passes when nothing happens, and Joey repeats herself. She can feel the magic thickening her blood, and she knows not to give up yet.
To her astonishment, the whispers begin. The trees speak an incantation. Joey could cry. It’s working. She doesn’t hesitate. She listens and repeats the incantation as loud as she can. She stumbles over the words the first time, but the trees speak it again and again, and she thinks she can hear Quinn’s voice and other women’s voices mingled in the whispers, and so she listens and tries again, hoping that something will happen. She can feel the magic within her coursing with power, but nothing is happening. Desperate, she recites the incantation she hears from the trees one last time.
Then the trees go quiet.
Joey goes quiet.
Out of that silence grows the hum of an engine.
Joey hardly has time to gasp before the bike appears from behind the shroud of rain. He’s less than seven yards from her with a direct path. Six yards. Five. He’s going to mow her over. Moving out of the way is impossible. There’s no time. Four yards. Three. She makes eye contact with him for a fraction of a second, and that’s when she knows it’s over. Two yards. One. She closes her eyes and prepares for the end.
68Sophie
Sophie and Barbara sit in silence.
