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She had never led a formal ceremony before. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the way Isadora could capture a room. Her straightforward intensity, her grace.

“Sisters.” Her voice felt like a thunderclap in the stillness of the chamber.

“Tonight, we gather to bring about the beginning of the end of this war. By the power of the Grimorium Bellum , let us purge the world of the darkness that has plagued it for too long. Let us raise up our voices as one coven to exterminate a great enemy.” Lydia felt her voice rising, filling the chamber.

“Let us usher in the golden age of the witch!” Across from her, Sybil beamed.

“In the name of the Great Mother, blessed be.”

“Blessed be,” they replied.

The silence fell back into place like a curtain. Lydia stood for a moment, feeling her heart beating inside of her. Taking one last moment for herself.

She knelt on the cold floor and placed the Grimorium Bellum before her. The book seemed to thrill under her touch. She wondered if, in its own way, it knew what was about to happen.

She opened the book and placed her fingers on the final page.

The words began to flow immediately. Humming, moaning, sounds like insects swarming, like things being born, like things dying.

The words sucked the air from her lungs, and from the vacuum emerged still more words, flowing through her so fast she was sure she would go insane.

She could feel the book crawling inside of her, exactly the way it had felt at the chateau—a hot, evil sludge inside her veins.

Panic struck her heart like a mallet. The last casting had nearly killed her, but this—The Unmaking—was a spell so enormous, so evil, it threatened to tear her apart from the inside out, even as the words spilled from her mouth like poison.

She felt the air leaving her, her lungs empty and burning, and still, somehow, she spoke.

She was suffocating, choking to death, and still the words poured forth like vomit.

She was sure she would fall dead at any moment, and that when she did, the words would continue to flow, long after her body had grown cold.

She was a vessel now, nothing more. She was a sacrifice.

But then, cutting through the madness, a second voice called out, echoing Lydia’s own.

At first, she thought the voice came from her.

Only after a third and then a fourth voice joined the chorus did she begin to understand.

The Witches of the Third Reich were joining her in the ritual.

The book was ensnaring them, taking hold of their tongues, and as it did, the burden on Lydia seemed to grow lighter, the words rolling from her lips in time with her breath.

The magic took hold of Ingrid, and Eva, and then Sybil, until the full coven was caught in the grip of the same dark magic, and the air was filled with the feral chattering of the Grimorium Bellum.

Lydia felt her head clear as the weight of the spell lifted from her. There was a blank space left at the very end of the spell, a pause in the chanting where the spellcaster could give name to their enemy, and the spell would be complete.

Lydia knew the language of the book now, knew it as surely as she knew the King’s English. All she would need to do to complete the ritual was speak the name of her target in the book’s own language. The coven would speak the word back to her, and just like that, The Unmaking would be unleashed.

Lydia was barreling toward the spell’s finale on a string of words that crackled like fire.

The speed and intensity of the spell was overwhelming, terrifying—there would be no room for mistakes.

In the ancient language of the Grimorium Bellum , she sang out to the coven, telling the story of the unmaking of a great enemy, and the coven sang the words back to her.

She told them of an extinction, a silent death sweeping over the land, claiming its victims, not with violence, but with a perfect, bloodless efficiency.

There would be no battle on this day, the book promised. The battle was already won.

At the edge of her vision, Lydia saw a churning mass of shadows, lurking between Eva and Johanna as they chanted in feverish unison.

It looked almost entirely like a woman now—young and slim, wearing a black, floor-length gown, with long sleeves and a heart-shaped neckline.

A thirteenth coven member, with swirling black hair and glowing gray eyes, her shape as familiar to Lydia as her own reflection.

Don’t look at it , Lydia commanded herself.

With the small sliver of conscious thought she had remaining, Lydia searched the language of the book for the right word, the name of the evil she would wipe from the earth. She found it, the sound forming effortlessly inside her mind.

Are you sure? She heard a voice inside her mind, soft and familiar. The voice of a friend, but with an edge of something insidious lurking beneath. A clever mimic, speaking through a mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth.

Lydia glanced up and saw that the shadow had drawn closer.

Yes , Lydia thought. Yes. I’m sure.

The moment came, the spell falling away under her feet like a broken bridge, and when it did, Lydia didn’t hesitate. She spoke the word that had formed inside her mind just a moment before, pronouncing each syllable clearly and carefully.

Lydia spoke the name of the Witches of the Third Reich.

Time seemed to slow. Lydia saw the shadow grin as it relinquished its woman’s shape, morphing into something terrifying and primeval.

A sound filled the air, a shriek like a train whistle, as the shadow expanded, growing tendrils and tentacles, all exploding outward at once with unnatural speed, enfolding each witch in its inky embrace with a single, violent motion.

Then, just as quickly, the thing drew back in and disappeared, blinking out of existence like a dying star.

The stillness that followed felt like an explosion, sudden and perfect and deafening.

Lydia blinked, shaking off the dark magic that still clung to her like raindrops.

All around her, the Witches of the Third Reich stood, arms outstretched, faces turned toward the sky, transfixed.

Lydia took them all in, and for one terrible moment, she was certain she had failed.

And then, Ingrid crumpled to the ground.

She didn’t fall the way a person falls. She seemed to collapse inward on herself, her body suddenly nothing more than ash. The ash landed in a heap, with one side of Ingrid’s face still intact, frozen in a mask of death.

The rest followed. One by one, gravity took hold, pulling the figures down in a cascade of ash. Some fell all at once, some more slowly, dropping pieces of themselves before they lost their form entirely, replaced by lifeless piles of dust.

All except one.

Sybil watched, gray faced, as all around her, her coven turned to ash. When the last body fell, Sybil screamed a full-throated shriek of grief and horror. She held herself tightly, as if expecting that she, too, would fall to pieces at any moment.

“What is happening ?” Her eyes seemed to move without seeing. “Lydia! Great Mother, what is happening? Lydia, goddamn it, girl, say something !”

“ Faeste wyrde ,” Lydia said flatly, binding Sybil’s tongue.

Sybil choked on her own words and fell silent. She looked bewildered. Her lips continued moving, but no sound emerged. Finally, her face darkened as the truth settled onto her like a storm.

Good , Lydia thought. They understood each other now.

Lydia rose to her feet. “You should know that I was going to let you die with the others.”

Sybil tried to speak, but all that came out was a frustrated moan.

“I thought about it a great deal. Watching you turn to ash along with the rest of your wretched coven. Lord knows you deserve worse. You murdered Isadora, after all. And Kitty. You betrayed your country and your coven. Poisoned me. And you kidnapped my mother .” She stepped closer and watched Sybil’s blue eyes pulse with fear.

“I was going to let you die, but then I remembered what Evelyn said to me, the night I learned what you truly are. We had quite a bit of time to talk about it, while I was purging your poison from my body.” She paused.

“I was so angry with you. And with myself, for believing your lies. I wanted to turn you to a column of ash and forget you’d ever existed.

But Evelyn convinced me that you should answer for your crimes before the high council so they would know what happened here.

So they would continue to fight . And so that for the rest of time, your name would be synonymous with your betrayal.

” Lydia smiled. “It was her magic that saved your life, you know.”

Sybil’s eyes narrowed.

“The wine. Even I don’t know everything she put in it. It’s a very clever potion, actually. It protects against dark magic, like the kind in the Grimorium Bellum, but I’m afraid it’s useless against something as mundane as a simple tongue binding.”

Sybil held Lydia’s gaze, fury and hatred spilling out of her. A flash of movement caught Lydia’s eye as Sybil’s hand moved to the bone-handled dagger on her hip.

“ Astyffn ban ,” Lydia said, and Sybil froze where she stood.

Lydia crossed the space between them, gray ash collecting on her shoes and the hem of her skirt as she walked.

She leaned in close, close enough that she could smell Sybil’s rose-scented perfume, and the metallic scent of sweat and fear that wafted from her skin.

She reached out and took Sybil’s hand, and for a moment, she thought she saw something like hope spark behind those still blue eyes.

Then she slipped the moonstone ring from Sybil’s finger and watched as it was snuffed out.

“I want you to remember,” Lydia said, “for the rest of your days, however few they may be, that you only survived tonight because of the love I hold for my mother. Her. Not you.”

Sybil stood immobile, but Lydia thought she saw a glimmer of something new behind her eyes. Resignation? No. Rage.

Lydia felt strangely hollow, as if some essential part of herself had been scooped out.

She had survived the ritual with the help of the coven, but she felt the price of it in her bones.

She returned to where the Grimorium Bellum lay open on the floor, a film of gray ash now collecting on its pages.

She felt stronger as she bent to touch it, but she knew the feeling wouldn’t last. She still had a few moments left before the last rays of sunlight were gone, and she intended to use them well.