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I held on tighter. “Do you want to be free of these evil new-age bitches or not?”

The three of them stared at me. Callie’s knees looked like they might fold.

“Callie,” Jess said quietly.

“Callie?” Priya said.

She kept trembling. I let go of her hand, picked up Clemency’s journal, and flipped to the long column of names. I started to read.

“Margaret H., 1884. Dreamed of a room full of flowers. Woke with petals packed under her tongue.”

Callie shut her eyes.

“Sarah P., 1891. Came back with dirt under her nails. Dead at twenty-one.”

A tear slid down her cheek.

“Marian D., 1896. Woke up screaming that the tide had come in. Drowned in two inches of water.”

She was crying silently now. I set the journal down and took her hand again.

“This is what we’re here to stop,” I said. “This is what happens if we hold back.”

Her face crumpled. For four long seconds she came apart. Then, the way I’d come apart in the cave and found the floor again, she put herself back together. Her breathing steadied. She opened her eyes.

“Fuck it,” she whispered. “Let’s do it.”

“Once more, with feeling,” I said.

They almost smiled. I looked at the mirror.

“What I choose is mine, and mine alone,” I said. “Say it with me.”

Priya said it first. Then Jess. Then Callie, her voice cracked but certain.

I picked up the journal and called her again.

The cold returned, and this time it wasn’t just there, beyond the circle, it was coming from inside me, chilling my bones before it chilled my skin.

The pressure in the room started to change, very slowly, then all at once, so that the air felt twice as heavy. The candle flames shrank to needles. The black glass clouded from within, like something had breathed onto it from the wrong side. Slowly, an image bled from the depth of the mirror, and it was an image I instantly recognized. My fingers went numb.

Clemency glared at me from her porch, in a long black dress with a white collar, a large black dog at either side of her.

Except it wasn’t an image. Clemency’s expression changed. Her glare turned to a scowl, sharp enough to make me look away and question my life choices. But I didn’t. I stared right back at her, even though my legs were ready to tear out of the room and out of the house.

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I thought she’d whisper through the room in a haunting echo. But what she said arrived directly in my head, behind my eyes, from wherever my thoughts came from.

“Speak, girl. Or I am gone.”

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I could feel the three of them staring at me as I stood there like an idiot in an abandoned house, about to become a cautionary tale.

“Marlowe?” Callie breathed.

I swallowed. It hurt. “We came to end the Bridegroom,” I forced out. “And the coven that feeds him.”

“Who are you talking to?” Priya hissed.

“She’s in my head,” I mouthed.