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She opened her mouth, but no words came out. Her lower lip trembled with the effort not to cry. She glanced behind him and Blair turned to see Gabriel striding in their direction.

“Go home, Iris,” said Blair.

“Aren’t you coming with us?”

He shook his head as a sharp pain stabbed at his temples. “I’ll call my sister.” He sensed Iris’ hesitation. She stood up and stepped closer to him, her face twisted in torment, but Blair held himself away from her. “You know, it almost would have been better if I had forgotten you both existed.”

Her expression broke like the vase he’d shattered, and her pain ricocheted through him along with her heartbeat.

Before he could change his mind, Blair turned his back on her and stalked into the woods, feeling the weight of her stare until he was swallowed up by the trees.

42

Aweek before April, Iris found herself at Audrey’s kitchen table, her head resting in her arms as she watched her friend flick globs of vibrant yellow paint onto a large oval canvas. Rain pelted the windows. The snow had completely melted, replaced by muddy puddles speckled with motor oil.

For several long minutes, Audrey worked in silence while Iris tried to settle into the moment, letting the peace of the afternoon wash over her like a downpour.

Audrey dipped a sponge into a thick pool of sky-blue paint and spiraled it across the top of the canvas to intermingle with the yellow, reminding Iris of a sun lighting up cerulean skies. Swirls of green, pink, and purple were streaked across the lower portion of the painting like wildflowers in a fertile field.

Iris hoped this serene painting foretold clear skies for them all.

She hadn’t wanted to believe Blair’s theory about Audrey’s art being prophetic at first, not after having seen the painting Audrey shared at her bachelorette party; the jagged gash ripped through the canvas, the thick globs of blood red and black, the stark slashes of white. But after everything she’d witnessed in the church basement—Blair’s great black wings, Obedience’s crimson blood, the jagged mirrors and bone-white scars on Blair and Lucy’s faces—it had become impossible not to see the connection between Audrey’s art and reality.

Several times over the past month, Iris had considered telling Audrey about her gift, but she had a feeling that her friend already suspected the truth. Audrey had dreamed about Iris, Blair, and Gabriel in conjunction with those violent shapes and colors before she’d committed them to canvas, a recurring dream so disturbing that she’d begged them to stay home because of it. That had to mean that she believed, at least a little, in her ability.

Iris clung to that idea, because whenever she tried to tell Audrey about Blair’s realization, the words always caught in her throat. Partially because then she’d have to reveal everything supernatural she’d become privy to over the past months. Audrey might not believe her, or worse, might think she’d lost her mind.

And partially because talking about Blair was always painful.

Audrey swished her paintbrush through a clear glass, the water turning as murky as Iris’ thoughts. She couldn’t stop ruminating over all that had occurred the day Blair left them; though fighting the pull of those memories was a little easier when she was out of the house and away from Gabriel, who she knew blamed himself for Blair’s departure.

She would never understand why Gabriel hadn’t done more for Blair and Lucy all those years ago, but she knew his heart, felt the enormity of his guilt, and had chosen to forgive him. And she knew that Blair’s leaving was just as much her fault as it was his.

Nothing had gone back to the way it used to be. It was as if Blair had built an addition onto their house and torn it down when he left, leaving them with an irreparable, gaping hole.

Iris had done a lot of mental gymnastics over the past month in an attempt to understand the chaos that had been Obedience, too. She knew a lot more now, but there were still a few gaps in her knowledge, as unsettling as missing teeth.

The first thing she’d done upon arriving home that day—after looking around to find that Blair’s belongings were already gone—was to round on Gabriel and demand he explain everything.

For once, he hadn’t argued.

The reason Gabriel had wanted the memory spell to be performed as quickly as possible was because he and Clement had known the witch's true identity, and they hadn’t wanted to give her a chance to hurt Blair again. “And she threatened you,” Gabriel had added, as if that alone was more than enough to condemn her.

Iris still thought that if Gabriel and Clement had allowed themselves more time to think, they might have come up with a better solution than marching them all straight into the lion’s den, but Gabriel had believed it was their only option. He'd confessed that he hadn’t known what the witch wanted with them, but had hoped that Clement would be able to complete the memory spell before any of them had to find out.

They hadn’t counted on her ruining all of the spell work Clement had done to isolate her energy inside the ring, and they hadn’t realized she’d be powerful enough to block all attempts at spellcasting, rendering his and Clement’s powers completely useless.

Gabriel believed that if Lucy had returned with a physical body—Clement said that the Lucy who emerged from the ring was little more than vapor, either because Obedience performed the spell incorrectly, or because Lucy’s soul had refused to take on a physical form—and had Obedience survived, she would have forced Gabriel to accompany her to the place where her own sister had died. There, after extricating her sister’s soul, she would have made Gabriel reveal the steps he’d undertaken to become immortal so that she could get her sister to follow the same procedure, or so that she could carry out the process herself on her sister’s behalf. Modesty was unlikely to have been powerful enough to steal immortality from Gabriel in the way Obedience had, even if she had been a witch.

Of course, Obedience could have forced Clement to accompany her for the same purpose, but it was Gabriel she had always targeted.

Iris, Gabriel surmised, was also an integral part of Obedience's master plan: a pawn the witch could threaten to harm if Blair or Gabriel refused to submit.

Nearly every night since, Iris had been plagued by nightmares replaying the moment Blair’s wings had ripped from his spine to propel Obedience into her own jagged mirrors. As horrible as it was, there was a kind of poetic justice to the whole situation, and Iris felt relieved that the witch could never target them again. Blair may no longer be living with them, but she was comforted knowing that at least he was safe.

She was so trapped inside her reverie that she actually jumped at the sound of Audrey’s voice. “I went to see Blair yesterday.”

Iris gaped, steadying a bottle of acrylic paint she’d nearly knocked over. “You what?”