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“Gabriel?” Iris’ quiet voice made him turn, halfway out the door. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

He nodded, knowing that worry was heavy on her heart, especially after Audrey’s brief, ominous visit. “This will all be over soon.” He didn’t even attempt a smile, just turned away from them to hide his expression. He straightened his long coat as he set off down the road.

The street was slick from the rain shower they’d driven through minutes earlier. Dirty snow piles lined the sidewalks, intermingled with ocher patches of dead grass. A car rushed by him. Filthy puddle water tainted with gasoline and road salt sloshed onto his pants.

At a crooked stop sign, Gabriel made a sharp left turn and headed down a second rain-soaked street. He passed by the stream that had once powered the town’s grist mill, now commemorated by a sign marking it as the location of the final witch trial of New York. The trial in question was that of Gabriel’s friend, Jane Kanniff, who was tried for witchcraft back in 1816, after Obedience leaked the location of their church safe house, thereby throwing all of them into mortal jeopardy.

The sole reason Gabriel had allowed Obedience inside the walls of the church in the first place had been to shield the accused witches under his protection, and he had failed miserably. Clement had been right when he’d said that Gabriel was good at creating messes that others had to clean up.

Still, Obedience’s betrayal hadn’t come as a great surprise, considering what he and Clement had done to provoke it.

Gabriel let his mind rewind to the day of Lucy’s death, a memory he had been suppressing for some time. In the immediate aftermath, Clement and Gabriel had tied the witch up with magic, hoping to buy themselves enough time to contact the council, who would ultimately decide her fate.

But Obedience had escaped before they could carry out their plan.

When the council at last tracked her down, she claimed she hadn’t meant to hurt the girl, that she was trying to help reverse Lucy’s condition, but her magic had proved too strong. The gormless men who ran the witch’s council wound up letting her go under the stipulation that she ceased using magic.

As retribution for alerting the council, Obedience had revealed to the townspeople the location and purpose of Gabriel and Clement’s haven for accused witches. They managed to clean the place out before the authorities could get there, erasing every trace of evidence that there had been anyone living in the wreck. It had been Obedience’s word against theirs, and as neither Gabriel nor Clement had been faced with any prior accusations of witchcraft, it hadn’t been enough to incriminate them.

They’d done everything they could to find new safe houses for those in their care, but the mob had seized Mrs. Kanniff before they could find her a new hiding place.

Tests used to identify witches were nearly always farcical, and Mrs. Kanniff’s was no exception. She had been spared the traditional practice of dunking, in which a suspected witch was tossed into a body of water with their hands and feet bound, at the very last moment. Instead, her judge—the town physician, no doubt threatened by her medical prowess—and a jury of local farmers had carted her off to the grist mill. There, they stood her at one end of an enormous scale, where she was weighed against a brass-enrobed Dutch bible. When the bible shot up to the rafters, proving that she outweighed it, the villagers decided that she was not a witch after all, and she was thankfully spared punishment.

And it was perfectly true: Jane Kanniff had no more magical blood in her than Iris (which was to say none), and she was all the better for it.

It struck Gabriel then that remembering Mrs. Kanniff as his friend may have been over-indulgent. She had certainly considered herself so at first, but perhaps not after Obedience’s arrival.

Gabriel had forbidden his charges from stepping foot inside Obedience’s area of the church, and prohibited them from speaking to her or those under her supervision. Even Gabriel had never allowed himself to get close enough to see exactly what the witch was doing, though he’d lived in a constant state of nauseous dread as he fought to ignore what should never have been ignored.

But Mrs. Kanniff had refused to overlook the sounds of pain coming from beyond the closed door as the witch inflicted spells upon her so-called weapons. She’d begged Gabriel to make the witch leave, to free the captives, or to simply allow her to free them. Gabriel had told her again and again that while he would do what he could to find the families of the prisoners, he couldn’t do as she asked, not without dooming the rest of them.

He remembered the steel in her eyes, the defiant jut of her chin as she’d said it would be worth it.

Gabriel would have given anything to go back to that moment.

This time, he would have listened.

As he turned onto the road where Obedience lived, Gabriel flexed his hands, testing the bounds of his magic. There had been very few times in his life when he’d regretted his decision to step away from practicing witchcraft, but this was certainly one of them. His power flickered feebly at his fingertips, so weakened from disuse that he could barely feel the vibrations of it. It was easier to call what little magic he had left to the surface when he was feeling frightened or protective. Hopefully, those emotions would be enough to save them if it came down to it.

When he and Clement had both been practicing witches, Gabriel had been the clearly more talented witch, a fact that Clement was quick to admit. Clement, meanwhile, had been the mastermind. He was the innovator who’d pushed Gabriel to accompany him on his path to immortality, the one who’d done the bulk of the research, who’d worked the hardest to succeed.

Gabriel’s experience with witchcraft had been a hefty dose of innate ability and just a dash of study. He’d been fortunate enough to not have to try too hard to achieve incredible feats. But now, after years of intense practice, Clement was the more powerful witch by far. Gabriel was counting on his friend’s magical prowess to get them all out of this unscathed.

A pewter lake stretched out at Gabriel’s right, glimmering in the sunlight as if its surface were embedded with tiny, luminous diamonds. Despite the brief period of rain earlier, the day was growing fine and warm. The calmness of the morning felt closer to a taunt than a good omen, a mirage spied on the horizon by the deteriorating mind of a dying man. Gabriel rolled his shoulders and pressed on.

When he reached the familiar graveyard that bordered the once-abandoned church, he stopped to collect himself.

Back in 1815, this cemetery had already fallen into disuse, though flowers would occasionally appear like offerings in front of some of the newer graves. Now, stones of varying sizes jutted out of the earth like chipped, decaying teeth, many leaning against one another for support. A line of trees separated the cemetery from the church where Gabriel and Clement had once run their haven for suspected witches. It was the symbol of everything Gabriel had tried to leave behind, and there he was, voluntarily stepping back inside what he knew would feel like a crypt, a passage to his own personal underworld.

Especially now that Obedience had taken up residence.

He hadn’t been entirely surprised when Clement had tracked down her home address to the renovated church. The witch was certainly twisted enough to decide to reside in a place where she had caused such devastation. He did think that Clement should have already known where she lived without having to locate her, but as Clement had reminded him (quite cheekily), New York was outside his jurisdiction.

Stepping past the neat row of trees, Gabriel studied the church’s exterior, a hand raised against the sun. He hadn’t laid eyes on it in over two hundred years, not since the day he and Clement had been forced to evacuate the premises.

A coat of fresh white paint gleamed in the sun, and the stained-glass windows—once caked with grime, and missing shards like bullet wounds—shone as though each colorful division had been recently scrubbed clean from all of the muck and salt that coated the roadsides. More likely, the windows were kept pristine by magic.

Gabriel gazed up at the steeple, its old brass bell silent and watchful.