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Closing my eyes, I cut into my own flesh. A sharp burst of pain blurred my thinking. Over the bowl, I let my blood spill into the silver in a horribly slow trickle. Nausea rolled through me. I handed the blade to Priya. She cleaned it over the flame, then made the cut.

I couldn’t watch her do it. It was worse than watching my own blood spill. She bled into the bowl while Clemency said, “Compose yourselves. You may faint when he’s dead.”

Priya passed the knife and the bowl to Jess. She cleaned the blade and made one swift cut, silently. Then she passed it to Callie.

“Are you sure you can’t do this for me?”

“No,” I said. “Just do it, Callie,” I said, cleaning the blade and handing it to her.

She cut into her flesh with a sob that echoed off the cave walls.

Jess took the knife from her, ran a flame over it, then silently cut into her own hand.

“Something is wrong in your ring,” Clemency said, and a cold weight dropped in my stomach. “I told you once before. One of you is not what she is pretending to be, not even to herself, and she is ready to—”

“I’m sorry,” Jess said, and all three of us looked at her, pale in the candlelight. “I can’t give this up.”

She pulled her hand out of Callie’s and Priya’s, breaking the current running through as though she’d pulled out a cord. On the rock by the mirror, the sea thrift went black at the stem, fast, like ink drawn up a straw.

Jess ran.

A cold surge ran up our hands, into our wrists, everything we’d gathered slewing sideways with nowhere to go.

Callie’s hand clamped down on mine and so did Priya’s.

“Hold the circle,” I said, prying my hand out of Callie’s grip. “Both of you. Whatever you hear out there, you hold it. She’s mine.”

“Go after her,” Clemency said in my skull, half a beat behind me, and for the first time since I’d met her, she sounded like an echo. I tore off after Jess, my robe catching on rocks and algae. I slipped twice, condemning Jess to hell, but kept running.

By the time I reached the mouth of the cave, Jess was running along the beach, disappearing into the fog. Gathering the hem of the robe in my hands, I chased her across the sand, my sleeves full of wind.

I knew the sound would carry on water, so I gritted my teeth and ran with her name locked inside them.

At the gully, she grabbed the rope and flew up as if fear had given her new legs. I followed, the ravine grazing both shins and the shale rolling beneath me. My robe caught so many times that I finally pulled it off and left it on a rock, gray wool puddling into the dark. With it went the protection of the salt inside Branwen’s seams.

I felt it as soon as the robe left my shoulders. The fog leaned, the way it had when I was full of spiked cacao, a lifetime ago, and the wind off the water brought me the smell of wildflowers and wet metal. The smell of my own dream. Somewhere beyond the headland, at a shoreline I couldn’t see, something paused with its mouth full. It had noticed me, like a tongue noticing a loose tooth, idly, from the inside. I kept running, because stopping felt like answering.

I don’t know if Jess meant to run right toward the glowing light beyond the headland, the direction we weren’t even supposed to look in, but she did. I ran after her, dragging air into tired lungs that felt chafed and swollen.

I caught her arm forty feet from the security gate, where the lights cast a cold halo into the fog, and I dragged her behind the trees. A light swung across the tree line, lazy and routine, and I got my bleeding hand over Jess’s mouth and pulled us both down into the sword ferns. Through the branches, I saw a shape at the gate, phone in one hand, flashlight in the other, unhurried. Soren. Standing watch over the thing that was eating women down the beach.

Jess went rigid under my hand when she saw him. Whatever future she was still holding, I felt a corner of it tear.

And beneath the flashlight, I sensed another presence sweeping the trees, colder, slower, and deeply wrong in a way I could never name but would always feel in my bones. The ferns didn’t stir. The dream-smell thickened until I could taste bird bones at the back of my tongue. Then it slid off us and back toward its meal, like it had set its fork on a plate it had meant to come back to.

I counted to ten before I took my hand off her mouth. Then we fought the whole thing out in whispers and scratches and, for two seconds where I didn’t know myself, my hand closing around her throat. Full fury at low volume, like screaming underwater. Blood dripped from my hand, onto her robe.

“I knew it,” I hissed. “I knew I couldn’t trust you. I will fucking kill you, Jess,” I said, too furious and terrified to care that I sounded like a psychopath. “What the hell—”

“He loves me,” she said in a wild hiss, wresting her neck away from me. Her face was scratched and wet and glowing in the light of my headlamp. “You don’t understand! He actually loves me. He’s signing the lease to my store. I’m moving in with him. I won’t even pay rent.” Her voice cracked. “It’s real. It’s exactly like you and Damian.”

“Bullshit, Jess. It’s nothing like me and Damian.”

“You don’t get it. Soren put my name in front of the Mothers. Initiation. The actual thing. Membership.” She was crying now, rasping through tears. “Nobody ever put my name forward for anything in my life. Do you know what it means to be wanted for once?”

“Tell me you’re not gullible enough to believe that will actually happen. You have nothing to offer them.”

She thrashed at me. I shoved at her once, forcefully enough to almost knock her off her feet. I delivered the cut then, because in that moment, she needed to bleed a little more.