Chapter 47
The burnt cedar smell reached me before we even made it through the door.
Annabelle was already holding it open when we came up the front path, which meant either Arianna had seen us coming or they’d simply been expecting us as soon as the sun went down.
Knowing the Roderick sisters, it was probably both.
We’d spent the day holed up in the penthouse, doing more of what we’d done the night before.
Eating, mostly. Staying close to each other.
Because if the spell ended up going sideways and today turned out to be the last day any of us ever spent on this earth, we’d agreed without discussing it that we were going to spend it well.
Annabelle led us into the front room, which was exactly as we’d left it the night before.
Books stacked in every corner, candles lit throughout the room, only there was a deep green velvet couch tucked in the far corner that I hadn’t been able to see from the hall yesterday, and the long worktable had been pushed against the wall, clearing a wide stretch of open floor in the center of the room.
A chill ran through me, knowing exactly what that was for, and I pulled my jacket tighter against myself.
Oddly enough, I didn’t feel afraid.
Standing there on the night we were going to permanently rewrite our own timeline, I kept waiting for the fear to surface, kept probing for it the way you tongued a sore tooth, but it just wasn’t there.
What I felt instead was resolved. Certain in the bone-deep way that came not from confidence but from knowing, the way you knew your own name, that this was exactly where I was supposed to be and exactly what I was supposed to do.
Anita filed in from the back carrying an armful of materials, acknowledging us with a single nod before moving to the worktable and setting everything down.
Arianna hovered near the archway, watching the room with that distant, unfocused expression she always seemed to wear post-incident.
The incident being the time I killed her.
I supposed dying and then coming back to life via your sister’s dark magic probably had a few lingering effects on you.
“I don’t suppose there’s anything to drink in this place?” asked Dominic, glancing around the room, as though he were already bored of it.
“There’s a bottle of Whiskey in the bottom cabinet behind you,” answered Anita, without looking at him.
She didn’t have to tell him twice.
Trace pressed his lips to the top of my head before drifting over toward Anita, watching her work as Annabelle closed the distance between us and started circling me like she was deciding whether or not to poke.
“I’m surprised you actually came back,” she said, barely able to contain her smirk.
“Why wouldn’t we?” I asked, tracking her as she circled me.
“I thought you might sleep on it and come to your senses.” She lifted one shoulder. “Guess not.”
“And miss the chance to spend another evening with you?” I pressed a hand to my chest. “Never.”
The corner of her mouth twitched despite herself.
Anita finally straightened from the table and glanced over at the three of us in turn. Her expression was flat, almost bored, as though this were a regular Tuesday night for her, like she’d already made peace with the strangeness of her profession a very long time ago.
She picked up a glass dish from the worktable and strolled over to where I was standing with Annabelle, her eyes locked onto mine like a snare.
“Are you absolutely certain this is what you want to do?” she asked, stopped at the other end of the small, round table between us.
I blinked at her. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
Her eyeline held on mine.
“And you understand the door only opens once, and the moment the Binding takes hold, it will close behind you,” she stated grimly as she set the dish down on the table. “For good.”
“We know how it works and what’s at stake,” said Trace, coming back to stand beside me, though Anita didn’t take her eyes off me. “We’re doing it anyway.”
She held my gaze a moment longer and then nodded curtly before tapping the edge of the glass dish. Curious, I leaned forward to look at what was inside.
Three strange objects sat at the center, each no bigger than a pinky nail.
Flat, dark, roughly oval, polished smooth on one side and raw on the other.
They caught the candlelight in a way that didn’t quite make sense, a faint iridescence that appeared and disappeared depending on the angle, there one second and gone the next.
Trace’s brow lifted slowly. He looked at me, then back at the dish, then at Anita, but it was Dominic who asked the question we were obviously all thinking.
“What pray tell are those supposed to be?” he asked, eyebrow raised.
“Your Talismans,” answered Anita as Arianna appeared from behind the curtain at the far wall, wheeling a narrow surgical tray into the room and toward us. “I need to put them inside you.”
“I beg your pardon?” he returned, his tone clipped.
“You can’t be serious.” I gawked at the instruments on the tray like they had personally offended me. “You’re not actually going to put those inside us,” I balked, my attention stalling on the scalpel.
“Oh, Hades, no,” crooned Annabelle, her tone dripping with sarcasm. “She just wheeled the cart out for the ambiance. Really pulls the room together, don’t you think?”
“Do you ever shut up?”
“No. Not usually,” she answered smugly.
“Well, you should really consider it sometime,” I said, my eyes still on the medical tray. “Might do wonders for your personality.”
Arianna made a sound that was almost a snort and then buried it immediately as Annabelle turned a withering look on her.
Anita snapped on a pair of latex gloves, yanking my attention back up to her.
“I’m going to make a small incision at the back of your neck and insert the shard there, just below the surface of your skin,” she informed as though she were simply discussing the weather.
My mouth went dry as fuck.
“Isn’t this a little excessive?”
I’d partaken in many a spell during my time in Hollow Hills and not once had any of them required someone coming at me with a scalpel.
“A standard talisman in this instance would be a liability. A potentially deadly one at that,” she said with a look that could have curled milk.
“In the event that it ever broke, or was taken from you, or simply lost, you would instantly be pulled from your Timeline. And you wouldn’t be returned to this one.
You would remain trapped in the in-between.
Permanently.” She paused. “So, you tell me. Is it excessive?”
The image smacked me right upside the head. Reaching up, I gathered my hair and swept it over to one shoulder, clearing the back of my neck without another word.
“That’s what I thought,” she said and then ripped open a sealed alcohol packet with her fingers.
The cool press of the swab swept clean across the back of my neck as I fixed my eyes on the wall and kept them there. When she finally picked up the scalpel, I held my breath and braced for the pain, but it never bothered coming.
That, or I’d simply become far too accustomed to puncture holes being made in my body.
The thought made me snicker.
A few deft movements, followed by a small closure strip pressed flat against my neck and I was done.
“That was easy,” I said, pushing my hair off my shoulder.
“And just think of all the time you wasted crying about it,” jabbed Annabelle who had somehow managed to migrate over to Trace and was crowding his personal space with the subtlety of a streetwalker.
I didn’t say a word. I just crossed the room, slid my hand up Trace’s chest, and kissed him. Open-mouthed and unhurried, my tongue sliding against his until I felt his breath hitch and his free hand come up to grip my jaw, angling me deeper before I had the sense to pull back.
When I did, he was breathing harder than he had been a moment ago, pupils blown wide and dark, his hand still curved around my jaw like he didn’t want to let go.
“You’re up,” I told him and then turned to Annabelle who was gaping at me with an expression that was a mixture of irritation and flat-out envy. I smiled at her, sweet as sugar and then walked over to the couch.
I dropped onto it and met Dominic’s gaze across the room, where he stood waiting for his turn. His mouth was skewed in a smirk as he raised his glass to me in a small approving toast.
I think he thought it was cute when I got territorial.
I smiled back and turning toward the bookshelf in the corner, resting my arm against the backrest as I tipped my head back and skimmed the titles without really reading them.
Distracted by the pretty, old books, I hadn’t even heard Arianna walk over to me. One moment the space beside me was empty and the next she was simply there, her amber eyes level with mine, her hands folded neatly in her lap.
I startled badly enough that my elbow slipped off the backrest.
She didn’t bother to acknowledge it.
“When you get there,” she said, her voice barely carrying past the two of us, “things will move faster than you expect. And there will come a moment when you hit the edge of what you can hold on your own.” Her eyes didn’t leave mine. “Don’t reach for what’s familiar. Reach for what you are.”
“You mind trying that again in English?” I asked, wholly and completely confused about what in the world she was talking about.
“The power is yours to wield and it will rise to meet you. All you have to do is surrender to it,” she continued, her voice dropping lower, taking on a cadence that raised the hair on my arms. “The moment you make the choice to incoronate, all of it will be yours. The throne, the power, and the boundless legions that serve it.” She paused.
“Per sanguinem patris mei, thronum vindico.”
“I already told you, I’m not—”
“Remember the words, Jemma,” she said and then shoved forward into my personal space, close enough that I expected to feel the warmth of her breath against my ear, but there was none.
‘You’ll need them.’
I pulled back to look at her face and felt the hair on my arms stand straight up. Her lips hadn’t moved.
Not even slightly.
“What does that mean?” I asked, my back going ramrod straight.
She rose from the couch and turned to go rejoin her sisters without a backward glance in my direction.
“Arianna—!”
“We’re ready.” Anita’s voice cut across the room. “Girls, take your point,” she ordered her sisters as Annabelle finished drawing the last symbol inside the chalk circle she’d laid out.
Blowing out a breath, I pushed off the couch and crossed over to where Trace and Dominic stood waiting in the middle of the circle. Without discussion or needing to be told, I stepped between them, already knowing where my place was. Where it always was.
Trace’s hand found my left as Dominic’s closed around my right.
“Remember your fixed point,” said Anita, her eyes moving across all three of us. “Hold it in your mind until your feet touch solid ground again. And the moment you see your Alt, you make physical contact. That initiates the swap.” Her gaze steadied on mine. “The spell will do the rest.”
I closed my eyes and pictured the fixed point we’d agreed on: Uncle Karl’s study at the Blackburn Estate, during Ben’s visit.
The one room in the house where we could arrive unseen and get our bearings before anyone knew we were there.
Holding the room steady in my mind, I layered it with detail, imagining the heavy wooden desk, the smell of old books, the cold air pushing in under the door and slowly formed a complete picture in my mind.
The sisters began to chant.
Three voices braided together into a frequency that bypassed the ears entirely and went somewhere deeper.
The air thickened almost immediately, closing in on us from all sides, charged and close and tasting faintly of copper and something else beneath it.
Something older that I had no name for. Every candle flame in the room bent inward toward the circle as one.
Dark magic crept up my legs like cold water rising, moving through my skin rather than over it, threading into muscle and bone.
It wasn’t painful. It was vast, the way standing at the ocean’s edge at night was vast, the awareness of something incomprehensibly larger pressing right up against you, reminding you exactly how small you were.
The talisman at the back of my neck began to pulse.
I gripped Trace’s hand tighter. His fingers pressed back immediately. On my other side, Dominic’s thumb moved across my knuckles as the chanting climbed higher.
The air split open and I braced for the feeling that always came with porting.
Except this time, it wasn’t there. There was no cold, no clean displacement, no sense of the world simply stepping aside to let me through.
Instead something seized me from the inside, a tremendous, lurching force that felt like being grabbed by the chest and wrenched free of the ground entirely, and the room vanished, and the sisters vanished, and Trace and Dominic vanished, and there was nothing but darkness and velocity and the sickening, vertiginous sensation of being turned end over end through something that had no floor and no ceiling and no walls.
I couldn’t find up.
I couldn’t find my own hands.
The only thing I could feel was the talisman burning at my neck, bright and constant against the bone, the single fixed point in all of it, the one thing tethering me to anything at all.
And then, I couldn’t feel that either.