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“There you are, Marlowe,” Aurora said.

The fire popped. Bram’s bell, somewhere across the dark, gave one small tink and went still.

Aurora returned to her place in the circle. She hadn’t stopped speaking. I could see her mouth moving, but I could no longer hear her. What I heard came from underneath her voice. Whatever was in the air. The clearing now smelled faintly of something very old. Wet stone. The inside of an animal.

The smell was behind me.

I didn’t turn around. The part of me that was operational knew that turning was not a thing I was allowed to do. None of us turned, and none of us spoke, and that same part of me understood that we were now six souls around a fire instead of five, and that the sixth had taken its place, somewhere just outside the firelight, behind us.

Aurora’s voice came back. She’d been welcoming us to the rest of our lives, apparently.

I dipped my quill, because the others had dipped theirs, and some part of me was still taking instructions.

I tried to picture my twin flame. Then I realized it was just a mental image of Rhysand—wings, cheekbones, the whole High Lord package—which told me nothing except that I’d read the same books as every other woman at this fire. My wants were so basic. Someone who doesn’t cheat. Someone who puts the seat down. Someone with a personality. Someone who actually likes the company of women.

But then, staring into the fire, it came to me all at once. I knew. The cacao—whatever the hell was really in it—had pried the lid off what I really wanted.

I watched the quill move. I watched my own hand do it, the ink flowing and pooling like it came from my own vein.

To find a love so deep and true that I feel like I belong inside it.

Of course that’s what I wanted. I had a broken family scattered around the country. I had friends I could count on one hand. Or half a hand. I had a boss who called me darling when she was pleased and Marlowe when she was not. I had a spider plant I talked to.

I picked up the quill again and drew an eye with a heart as the iris, an eye that saw the truth of the love that I wanted. Then I drew a circle around it. It looked like a five-year-old had drawn it.

Callie had already finished. Jess and Priya were still bent over theirs.

Aurora was watching me. She hadn’t written anything.

One by one, we rose. Jess stood first, her movement fluid and fearless, and cast her paper into the fire without a word. Then Callie, who tried her best to smile as she threw it into the flames.

Then Priya. She fed her sigil to the fire like she was feeding a coyote.

I still had my sigil in my hand. Now they were all looking at me. The part of me tracking whatever was behind me knew something had joined us and told me to tear that sigil into pieces and run. But that part was drowned out by the cacao, by the soft warm lilt of Aurora’s voice telling me I was about to start the rest of my life. By the need to be a part of something, for once.

I folded the paper and tossed it to the fire.

Chapter Three

Idon’t remember deciding to move. I just remember Aurora saying something about the power of the ocean to cleanse us of self-limiting beliefs, and that we were walking, all of us, single file. We were on a path down through the dune grass, our shoes in our hands, Kai ahead with a lantern, the fog as thick as a cotton ball, rolling off the water.

“Fire speaks, water witnesses,” Aurora was saying from somewhere. “We go down, we let the saltwater wash our feet, and then it’s done.”

The beach was black sand and no horizon. The fog had erased the line between water and air, so the sea was just one enormous noise, coming from everywhere.

The water was shockingly cold, but I don’t remember flinching. I heard myself laugh. We all laughed. Four women in flower crowns, wading into the Pacific. It felt like the funniest, most beautiful thing.

And then the water didn’t seem cold at all. I decided it was the cacao, warming me from the inside, and a wiser part of me filed that in the same drawer as the three moons and the sixth soul and the hot honey in my tent, and then I stopped thinking entirely.

“Just to your knees,” Aurora said. “The sea knows how much it needs.”

We stood in a loose line, hems soaked and floating around our calves like pale weed, holding hands—I don’t remember taking anyone’s hand, but we were—and the surf came in slow, soft pushes, absurdly gentle, like the ocean was being polite.

That’s when the feeling came.

It started in the soles of my feet, in the sand under them, and then it rose, finding me like sun through a window, and pooled behind my sternum.

I’ve tried, many times since, to find a way to say this that doesn’t frighten me, and there isn’t one. It was the feeling of being answered. But there was something underneath it. Something that wanted in. Like a door I’d kept locked had opened, and someone was inside the room.