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“They don’t miss much,” Pritkin said dryly.“It was why they were brought over in the first place and were still here when the gods returned.It looks like they were enslaved thereafter—”

“Not all of them,” Zara said more quietly.“Some chose the dark path once it was in the ascendancy.Others refused and were trapped in their beast form permanently to serve, whether they chose to or not.”

“They were used to track some of us down,” Grizzled Topknot said.“When we came here for information.The Circle were the only ones who knew anything after the world fell apart, and they weren’t sharing.”

“Fortunately, we’d been spying on them for years,” the young witch said.In addition to a fall of pale purple hair, she had opalescent skin that changed highlight shades as she moved, evidencing fey blood.“Even after the Circle’s HQ fell—”

“What?”Pritkin asked hoarsely, but she ignored him as if he hadn’t spoken.

“—and the Corps was butchered,” she added, so maybe she had heard and was turning the knife, “they didn’t discover our way in.We used to come here to spy on the dark mages for updates on the war and to see how close they were to tracking down our sisters—”

“Until they caught wise, and the bastards started deploying those things,” Grizzled Topknot said, gesturing after the hyena, “to find us and rip us to shreds!More than one sister lost her life under those great yellowed teeth.”

“You see, witch,” another said, with a ginger butch cut over ebony skin.“Wedidfight until it made no more sense.Until our numbers shrank to nothing, and we had no help or hope.And even then, we tried for our sisters, for our world!”

“And where the hell were you?”Grizzled Topknot demanded, her ancient gray eyes boring a hole into my soul.

“Fighting somewhere else,” I said because it was the truth, and I had no better answer.

The old woman looked like she had a reply to that, but Zara waved it away.“Even if the beast recognized Cassie,” she said to Pritkin.“That doesn’t explain why it drew them away.It will be punished for that when they find nothing.”

“It explains it perfectly, as you well know,” he said, scowling at her.“You may have lost your way, huddled in the dark for so long, but others have not.It knew her scent, understood she was back, and realized what that meant.”

“And what does it mean?”Zara demanded, looking at me this time.“What exactly are you here to do?”

I sighed and faced up to it because everybody was looking at me, and there was no way to make it sound any better.“Save the world.”

Chapter Seven

You didwhat?” Pritkin said sometime later, looking at the small circle of witches as if they might be mad.

To be fair, several of them looked it.They’d loosened up since Zara called for a truce, and the wine cellar we’d found via Alphonse’s nose and used to get off the street hadn’t hurt any.So now we had a bunch of boozed-up witches huddled around a scarred wooden table with a dozen open wine bottles, more empties on the floor, and cackles echoing off the walls and ceiling.

Bodil was starting to look like she and Pritkin were on the same page for once, and that page read, “Avoid trusting witches.”Or at least avoid following their insane plan to get inside what had been the Circle’s HQ and now belonged firmly in the enemy camp.I was leaning hard that way myself since the location of some of the gruesome but necessary items for the raid were too close for comfort to the facility’s outer wards.

“We buried ‘em where the wards would hide the magic,” Grizzled Topknot said.

“It’s all of the black variety,” the witch with the ginger butch cut added.“Ours and what they’re using, so it blends together.Their wards can’t tell the difference.”

Now that I’d had more time to look at her, I’d realized that she was pretty young, too, maybe not as much as the delicate purple-haired one, but certainly far more so than Zara, Topknot, and a short, shriveled-up, Native-American-looking witch with a cap of frazzled gray curls.Purple Hair looked about twenty, with Butch Cut maybe five or six years older, which meant they’d probably been born shortly before or even after the fall of the world.This was all they’d ever known, I thought dizzily.

“It’s here we need to get.”Grizzled Topknot pointed to a place near the river Avon, part of which ran across the underground complex that the Silver Circle had once called home.“We left everything behind after the last mission when we lost three of us out of five.”

“I thought you said these things you buried make you undetectable?”Alphonse said, looking worried.

“To the eyes,” Butch Cut said.“And to any wards that detect light magic.But the problem is those damned hyenas.If you meet one in a hallway, you’re dead.They can smell that we’re women and not the men we’re pretending to be.”

“We had to fight our way free last time,” Grizzled Topknot added.“It wasn’t pretty.”

“Why not just impersonate female dark magic users?”Alphonse asked.

“We thought about that, but they’re not allowed deep into the facility, where the planning rooms are,” Purple Hair said.

“Misogyny outlived even the fall,” Gray Curls added sourly.

“Black magic?”Bodil asked, somehow parsing the main point of all that.

“It’s a word for anything that breaks magical norms,” I explained, staring at the crude map and wondering how I got here.