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Somewhere, deep down, she’s also still the mother who used to make me chamomile tea when I was feeling sick and who would conjure a whole miniature galaxy made of sparkling witchlight to hover above my bed and act as my night light. She’s the one who raised me all on her own, who tried her best.

The mother of my childhood melds with the distant Priestess of my present, and for a moment I can’t make sense of any of it. My heart aches and tears sting the back of my eyes, but I square my shoulders anyway and take another step toward the door.

“I should go,” I tell her. “I need to get back to Eren.”

“He’s here?” she asks quietly. “In our realm?”

I nod. “Yes. He’s waiting in the woods for me. We’re headed back through the Veil as soon as I’m done here.”

“I would like to speak with him.”

“Mom…”

“Please, Allison.”

I want to say no.

Angry, devastated, some part of me feeling like the fuck-up of a witch I’ve always been, I want to keep her far, far away from this thing that’smine. Eren is mine, my life in the demon realm is mine, and the sudden ferocity with which I want to protect both sinks all the way down to my core.

“Fine,” I tell her finally. “But you need to tell him what you and the council are planning to do. You owe him that much.”

Chapter 32

Eren

Allie has been gone too long.

A minute away from her is too long, if I’m being honest with myself, but more than an hour has passed since she went to the coven hall to speak with her mother and I’m growing more and more anxious by the moment.

She’s safe there, I’m sure she’s safe there, but it’s everything else I’m worried about. I’m worried that even now her mother or the other witches in the coven might try to talk her into staying, that they might have nothing at all to help her and that all of this will have been for nothing.

It makes me crazed to think of her deciding to stay here. If she did, I don’t know what I’d do. I want to believe I’d accept it, that I’d let her go, but the claiming instinct buried beneath isn’t altogether certain that I wouldn’t just snatch her up and take her back through the Veil with me anyway.

She’d hate me for it. Not accepting the fact that we’re mates, how could she ever understand it?

No, I couldn’t do it to her. If she wants to stay, she’ll stay.

At the same time, a thread of gentle awareness tugs at the back of my mind. It’s been there, growing more and more insistent, since the very first moment I saw her. The mating bond, tying our two souls together, pulling me gently even now in the direction she walked off in, toward the coven hall.

There are other sensations coming through that bond. Pulses of uncertainty, of anger, of sorrow, brief glimpses of emotion that taste like rain and roses and make me feel half out of my mind with the need to go to her.

I close my eyes to calm myself down.

It’s a mistake.

The moment they’re shut, all I can see is Allie—pale and shaky and rattled—approaching me in the woods with that cursed book in tow. I’d wanted to take her back to my realm then, tuck her away somewhere safe to let her rest and recover, help her come up with some other plan that doesn’t include her putting herself at risk like this.

Maybe I should have. It’s not like she could have stopped me if I truly wanted to. It would have been easy enough to keep her held firmly, follow the ley line back to the Veil, step through and… no.

As much of a wreck of nerves and fear as I am, I would not take that choice from her.

It’s the worst part of this entire damned situation, trying to balance the faith I have in her abilities to handle and navigate everything that’s happening with the soul-deep need I have to protect her. It’s a physical thing, an ache in my muscles and a pain that’s seated itself in my bones. Keeping her safe is not simply an option. It’s a command that rides me with every breath I take.

With nothing to do to assuage it, I pace and pace and count each minute until she returns. It’s not much longer before I hear the soft tread of footsteps nearby and my head snaps up.

Allie’s not alone.

Walking in the woods beside her, Esme Hawthorn looks every bit as composed and powerful as she did on the night of the Tithe.