Chapter 27
Marta
I opened my eyes and sucked in a gasp, focusing on the stars overhead. They twinkled off in the distance, casting a backdrop to the full moon radiating through the treetops.
The full moon.
It wasn’t waning. It wasn’t—
“There she is,” came a familiar voice from above my head.
“Bridge?” I croaked. My voice sounded hoarse like I’d been in the desert for two months instead of the liminal and, when I lifted my hands to rub my face, my muscles twinged in protest.
“You bet your sweet ass, Marts.” She leaned over me with a smile, and the sight of her bright blue eyes nearly brought me to tears.
I tried to sit up, but I got woozy and fell back again.
“Whoa, take it easy,” she said. “You’ve been through a lot.”
“Wes? Atlas?” The thought of them sent a sudden panic through my chest. Had they made it back, too?
“Over here,” Atlas said from my left. He was propped up against a tree, grinning as Leander prodded at his ankles and Val took his pulse.
Wes sat on the other side, garnering the same attention from Circe and Gullevig.
The rush of their presence coursed through my veins, settling in my chest like warm soup in a blizzard. We were back. We were together.
I wanted to be happy, to be overjoyed that we’d done it. We’d gotten out of the liminal. But even in that moment of blessed reunion, I sensed the wrongness in all three of us, almost like I’d left my entire life somewhere else with no way to go back to get it.
“Is she with us?” Crunching leaves preceded the tall, statuesque form of Lilith, the Harlots’ president and high priestess of our coven.
“She’s here,” Bridge said. “We’ve got them.”
“Good.” Lilith squatted down so she was eye level with me and grabbed my chin between her index finger and thumb.
She stared into my eyes with her umber gaze, unnerving me with its intensity.
As the leader, she had more power than any of us could ever know, and when she looked at me like that, I was terrified of what she might see.
Could she tell what we’d been through in the liminal? Could she see what I had to do to get free?
Lilith raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips before pushing to her feet.
“I want them all in quarantine until we can figure out what happened,” she said before turning to walk away.
My heart sank, and I tried again to stand, to go after her and tell her off for thinking I would go into isolation.
I’d just spent two months there, for fuck’s sake.
But maybe she had a point. Something was still off, and when I lurched to my feet, I got dizzy again.
Bridge grabbed onto my arm to keep me up.
“It’s okay,” Wes said, reaching into my mind. “They can’t take us away from each other. We’re home now, and that’s all that matters.”
I nodded and let Bridge guide me through the woods, the same forest where we’d fallen into the liminal at the beginning.
I glanced over my shoulder at Atlas and Wes just behind me, being helped by my other sisters and warriors.
But when we got to the cars, they tried to put Atlas and Wes in separate vehicles.
The thought of being parted from them, even for the drive back to Asheville, ripped my heart apart. I wouldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t stand it. The jolting force of panic squeezed my lungs until I couldn’t breathe.
“No,” I protested, digging in my feet. “We go together.”
“Marts?” Bridge furrowed her brow at me. “You okay?”
“Bridge, I go with my warriors,” I said. “Don’t force us apart.”
“It’s only an hour drive,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Please,” I said, gripping her hands, sinking my nails into her skin. “Please, we need to stay together.”
Atlas and Wes made a similar fuss a few feet behind me as they attempted to explain that they would be getting in the truck with me, or the Harlots would have to knock us out again.
Two months ago, the mere mention of having to spend an hour in a car with them would have had me growling and rolling my eyes.
Now, I feared what would happen when we were apart.
Blood binding, flesh binding, and…whatever had happened at the end, it tied us together in ways that were likely unhealthy.
And when the rest of the coven found out the extent of it, I feared they would do everything they could to break it apart.
Witches weren’t meant to bond to their warriors like this. It wasn’t supposed to be sexual, and it definitely wasn’t supposed to entail shared thoughts and physical sensations. Witches were meant to pull energy from warriors, and warriors were meant to protect their witches. And that was it.
This… This would shock the coven.
“Fine,” Circe said, holding her hands up to take them off Wes. “They go together.”
She gave Bridge a wide-eyed look that said, “What the fuck?” and nodded both of my warriors toward the truck in front of me. Atlas slid into the left side, and Wes climbed into the right side, and once I was in between them, only then did I feel any small measure of peace.
It didn’t last. On the ride home, Leander drove while Bridge explained what had happened from their perspective after we’d disappeared.
Being in the back of this pickup was strange.
We’d spent the last two months driving it around like we owned it.
Of course, like Atlas had once flippantly said, nothing was real in the liminal.
We hadn’t been driving this truck. We hadn’t really been living at the estate.
Had the magic been real? I still felt it in my veins.
I still radiated with the aftereffects of banishing the demon.
It would take me a lifetime to figure out where the lines were between reality and what had happened to us.
“We knew you were in the liminal,” she said.
“But we just didn’t know how to get you out.
We couldn’t summon you from the liminal without summoning the demon with you, and we couldn’t destroy the liminal with you in it.
Banishing the demon was out of the question, so we just kept researching, kept trying to figure out a way to contact you. ”
I grabbed both of my warriors’ hands and gripped them tight, refusing to lose myself in the memories of what had happened right before we’d gotten out: the swirling vortex, Wes’s screams, the blinding pain. I couldn’t process that and Bridge’s story at the same time.
“It’s okay,” Wes reminded us. “We’re okay.”
Were we? Was Wes still Wes? Not even an hour ago, he had a demon squirreling around inside his body, Atlas had been enraged by his brother’s violation, and I’d been overcome by enough divine magic to rip the liminal apart.
“How’d you end up doing it?” Atlas asked, seeming to take the question right out of my head.
“It was when you talked to Tita through the mirror,” Bridge answered.
“She said you mentioned Día de Muertos. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t think of it myself.
Of course that would be the perfect time.
The veil is thin.” Bridge looked over her shoulder at me, casting a raised eyebrow at our joined hands.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner, Marts. I really tried.”
Tita had saved me in the end. With the coven pulling from this side and me pushing from that side, I’d had enough power to complete the spell. I should have been thrilled at the thought of seeing her. Instead, I just felt…numb.
“What happened at the ritual?” I asked, ignoring her apology. “After we fell in, did we just…disappear?”
“Yes,” Leander answered. “Your bodies, along with the demon. You fell into the vortex, and it closed around you, and we were all left standing there with our thumbs up our asses, not sure what to do about it.”
“Lilith was pissed,” Bridge said. “I’d never seen her so angry. It took all of us to get you out tonight, a full coven. The magic was…overwhelming.”
Yeah, I can imagine.
Atlas snorted, evidently having heard that, and Wes sighed, glancing out of the window.
“So what happened on your end?” Bridge asked. “How’d you end up getting out? Is the demon still in the liminal?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know, and I was too exhausted to explain. I gripped Wes’s hand tighter and leaned my head on Atlas’s shoulder to let my eyes close.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Bridge said. “Get some rest.”
I did.
* * *
I woke up in a dark room, staring at a ceiling I’d seen a million times before.
For a moment, only a heartbeat, I thought it hadn’t worked.
I thought I was back in the liminal, that this never-ending nightmare had played the cruelest joke on me by letting me believe we’d broken free, only to swallow us back up the moment we weren’t looking.
But then a throat cleared from the corner of the room, and I came face-to-face with the vice president of the Royal Harlots, Circe.
Her dark hair was braided back away from her face, revealing her intense black stare and pointed pursed lips.
She had one ankle propped up on the other knee, her leather boot glistening in the low light, and judging by the way she pulled on her cigarette, this wasn’t going to be a happy conversation.
“So,” she said, tapping ash into the tray on the table next to her. “How’s it going?”
I grimaced and tried to push myself into a seated position, only for my tired muscles to give out on me. I flopped back onto the pillows. Then, I realized we were alone. Atlas and Wes weren’t here with me.