Chapter 45
It wasn’t very hard to find the Roderick sisters.
Then again, people who traded in dark magic for a living always left a way to be found.
It took us about fifteen minutes of digging and a phone call before we found their current location—a converted Victorian in Salem, Massachusetts, sitting three blocks from the waterfront.
We’d ported to the closest landmark Trace could identify from memory—a stretch of coastline south of the city and then picked up a rental and driven the rest of the way.
Nobody had said much on the drive. Dominic had one hand on the wheel and his eyes on the dark road ahead, though every few minutes they’d flick to the rearview mirror and find me in the back seat with a look that lingered just long enough to make my pulse trip.
Trace stayed mostly quiet, riding with his arm hanging out the passenger window of our SUV and his eyes on the outline of the passing coastline.
I didn’t say much either, choosing instead to sit with the quiet and let myself breathe through it.
There was something that almost felt like calm underneath all the grief and fury and exhaustion, a sort of peaceful stillness that came when you’d finally stopped fighting the current and started swimming with it instead.
I finally had a plan, a direction. And for the first time since we’d landed back in a world that had kept moving without us, I felt something that wasn’t despair.
Forty-five minutes later, we arrived.
I climbed out of the SUV and shut the door, tipping my head back to take in the building.
A dark, three-story Victorian that loomed beneath the moonlight with white shutters and a brass knocker shaped like an inverted cross.
Window boxes ran the length of the second floor, planted with something dark and flowering that had no business blooming this late in the year.
It somehow managed to look both immaculate and deeply uninviting.
There was an irony there I was sure I was missing.
I pulled my jacket tighter and started up the front path, the dead stalks crunching under my boots as Trace and Dominic fell into step on either side of me.
I hadn’t been surprised to find out the sisters weren’t in Hollow Hills anymore.
I imagined they probably took off the second the boundary came down.
Probably long before Ares was found and killed.
I still didn’t know exactly when the Order had gotten to Tessa and Gabriel and Ares, or how they’d done it.
I tried not to think about that. About what my sister must have felt in that moment, or Gabriel.
About whether they’d seen it coming or whether it had just.. .happened.
It wouldn’t matter soon anyway.
I raised my fist to knock on the door, but it swung open before I had the chance.
Annabelle leaned against the frame, one shoulder propped up, her blonde hair falling in a sleek sheet around her face with fringe her slicing clean across her brow. Her gaze moved over the three of us with the slow, unbothered interest of a cat watching something smaller than itself.
“Well, well,” she said, cocking her brow at me. “Look what crawled out of the grave.”
“Try not to look so crushed about it,” I answered pleasantly. “It’s giving you crow’s feet.”
The corner of her mouth pulled. Not quite a smile, but close enough. She stepped back from the door without another word and held it open for us.
We filed in one after the other, Trace at my back, Dominic closing the door behind us.
Inside, the house smelled like burnt cedar and something older underneath it, something that had soaked into the walls over years and never quite left.
The entryway opened into a wide front room with high ceilings and dark wood floors, every surface covered in what I could only describe as organized chaos.
Stacks of books in every corner, glass jars of things I wasn’t going to look at too closely, candles burned down to different heights along the windowsills, their wax pooled and hardened into strange shapes below them.
A long worktable ran the length of one wall, its surface crowded with tools and materials I didn’t recognize.
Nothing about the room looked casual. Everything had a place, even if I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Annabelle led us through to a second room at the back of the house, and the smell changed the moment we crossed the threshold. It was green and earthy, thick with herbs and something sharper underneath, almost medicinal.
Open wood shelves lined two walls from floor to ceiling, every shelf densely packed with bundles of dried plants, stoppered bottles, and shallow bowls of ingredients I couldn’t name.
A long altar table ran down the center of the room, its surface worn smooth with use, ringed with candles and covered in a fine dusting of dried petals and powder.
Arianna was already standing when we walked in, her dark ponytail over one shoulder, her eyes immediately locking on mine, as though she had been waiting in exactly that spot for exactly this moment.
Which knowing her, she probably had been.
A door at the back of the room opened from outside and Anita stepped in, carrying a bundle of freshly cut herbs against her chest, her flame-red hair pinned back at the nape of her neck.
She glanced at us without breaking stride and set the bundle down on the altar table before turning to face us fully.
Annabelle crossed to stand beside Arianna, the three of them arranging themselves with the ease of people who had spent a whole lot of time occupying the same spaces.
“We thought you were dead,” said Anita, not even bothering to say ‘hello’ first.
“Nope, not dead,” I answered as Dominic and Trace settled on either side of me. “Just touring Sanguinarium.”
Annabelle’s brows shot up into her fringe and disappeared completely. “You’re lying.”
“I’m really not.”
She huffed. “Nobody comes back from Sanguinarium.”
“And yet.” I spread my hands.
Anita’s eyes sharpened with something that looked, briefly, like actual interest. “How did you get out?”
“It’s a long story.”
“We have plenty of time,” said Annabelle as she crossed her arms and smiled at me.
“I don’t.” I turned back to Anita. “We need your help.”
Annabelle pressed a hand to her chest. “Big surprise.”
“What do you need?” asked Anita, the curiosity still present but practical now, redirected.
Before I could answer, Arianna spoke.
“She wants to go back.” Her voice was soft and distant, the way it always was when she was pulling something from somewhere the rest of us couldn’t access. Her amber eyes hadn’t moved from mine. “She wants to go back and stop it from happening. Stop Ares from dying.”
The room went quiet enough to hear the crickets outside, the sound drifting in through the open glass panels.
Annabelle broke silence first. “Considering one of your boyfriends is a Reaper,” she said, her gaze lingering on Trace for a few seconds too long, “I’m going to assume you understand exactly how time travel works. And what doing something like that could mean for you.”
I decided to ignore the googly eyes she was making at Trace on account of the fact that, well, I needed her. “I have a plan. And I know it’s going to work.”
Annabelle’s eyes narrowed, something sharper moving behind them now, the humor draining away as she studied my face like she was trying to decide whether I’d lost my mind or finally found it.
“That’s either the most tenacious thing I’ve ever heard,” she said slowly, “or the most catastrophically stupid.”
“Why limit ourselves, Ann. I can call you Ann, right? Can’t it just be both?”
“Call me Ann again and I’ll hex your vocal cords.”
A cold shiver moved through me, knowing she absolutely could. “That works too,” I muttered under my breath.
“What exactly is the plan?” interrupted Anita, ignoring both of us.
“Right.” Drawing in a steadying breath, I laid it all out as best as I could for her.
I told her about the initial port, the swap that would involve past me coming onto our Timeline while I went back onto hers, taking everything I knew with me.
I told them about the Ripple problem and why a straight port wouldn’t hold.
All of which they already knew. And I told them about my Alt and what she’d done, and the gaps we couldn’t close on our own.
When I got to the part where I needed them, I paused and glanced at Trace. He picked it up without missing a beat, stepping forward and laying out the finer mechanics the way only a Reaper could.
“The transfer itself isn’t the problem,” said Trace, his arms still crossed, his voice unflustered.
“The problem is the stabilization after. Without something to lock the new Timeline in place, it’ll try to correct itself.
And when it does, it’ll rip her right out of it…
or worse. We need something to stop that from happening. ”
The sisters listened without interruption, taking it all in. When we’d finally finished, Anita’s brow furrowed, her fingers tapping once against the edge of the table as she thought it all through.
“This is no small feat,” said Anita at last, her hands resting flat on the altar table.
“I know.”
“You’d be breaking every natural law the Order has set around sanctioned time travel. And several that predate them.”
“I don’t care about their laws or their rules,” I said, holding her gaze. “Can you do it?”
She didn’t answer right away, her eyes going distant, as though she were consulting something the rest of the room wasn’t privy to.
“It would require a Temporal Binding spell,” she finally said.
“This is old craft. Before the Order. The kind they do not teach and won’t allow access to because it operates entirely outside the constraints of their sanctioned magic. ”
I knew what that meant. Forbidden didn’t begin to cover it.
“What does this Temporal Binding spell do?” asked Dominic, stepping closer to the table.