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“What do you think they’re having that confab about?” Matilda demanded.

Jasmine gave her a fond look. “Something to do with magic, I presume,” she said, putting the last of the dishes into the dishwasher and shutting the door. Outside, a fat, full moon twinkled over the snowy hills.

“Don’t you want to know more than that?”

“I’ve come to terms with the fact that I neither understand nor especially wish to understand the niceties of sorcery,” Jasmine said serenely. “You are the sort of person who likes to know everything , my love. I am not.”

Deeply dissatisfied with this, Matilda glared out the window, her head cocked to one side like she was hoping the new angle would somehow grant her the power to hear what Sera and Luke, who were halfway down the garden, were saying.

Sera and Luke had returned from the Guild’s castle two days ago.

Nobody had failed to notice that Clemmie had not come back with them, but the quick, warning shake of Luke’s head was enough to stop everybody from asking any questions.

In Jasmine’s view, questions were overrated anyway, so she’d simply plied them with hot chocolate and buttery pancakes.

After that, the inn had more or less settled into its usual rhythm, but all too briefly.

Jasmine, typically the earliest riser in the house, had woken this morning to a wrongness she couldn’t put her finger on.

It was like someone in the next room had tuned a radio to a high, keening frequency that was almost undetectable to her ears.

She had eased herself out of bed, making sure to tuck the covers back around Matilda, and had limped out to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

Someone had beaten her to it. The room was empty, but the kettle had been gyrating on its cradle, already on the boil.

Jasmine had looked to the open back door, where Sera stood on the step, almost invisible in the predawn mist. Her feet had been bare, her coat absent, and her dark hair rippling in a breeze that was not wholly natural, but she didn’t seem to notice the cold.

She had turned her head as Jasmine had approached. “You can hear it too, can’t you?”

“Just about,” Jasmine had replied, more concerned with the practicalities. “My love, what in the world are you doing out here without your coat or even a pair of socks—”

“It’s the house,” Sera had interrupted, nodding at the inn.

“I have no doubt it is, dearest, but pneumonia is no laughing matter.”

“It’s a warning,” Sera had added, like she hadn’t heard a word Jasmine had said.

Jasmine was not by any means a fanciful sort of woman, but in that moment, she could have sworn that the mist that was tangled through Sera’s hair and twined around her limbs was turning into long, spiky feathers.

“Darling, what are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid,” Sera had said, turning back to face the dawn. “I’m ready.”

There were people who might have reacted to such a pronouncement with alarm, but Jasmine was not one of them.

Briskly, she had said, “I have no doubt that you have a sensible course of action in mind, my love, but consider for a moment that you might find yourself even more ready if you were to put a pair of shoes on.”

Later, Sera and Luke had abruptly announced that Theo and Posy would be going to stay with Malik, Elliot, and baby Evie overnight, and it was this, the haste with which the children were sent away for an evening of movies, popcorn, and far too much sugar, that had had Matilda in a tizzy of unsatisfied curiosity ever since.

“Do you know what your great-niece said to me earlier?” Matilda demanded now, still staring fixedly at the two standing outside in the cold.

“She said, and I quote, there’s a storm coming .

Let me tell you, that was the first time in my entire life that I have been bereft of speech.

Have we or have we not established that I’m supposed to be the dramatic one? ”

Anxiety disrupted the composure Jasmine had been steadfastly maintaining (no, clinging to) all day.

She, who had known Sera since her toddlerhood, knew full well that when Sera was confronted with feelings too big or too unwelcome, she hid them (and from them) with an exaggerated air of grouchiness and theatrical hyperbole.

“Sera’s afraid of something,” Jasmine admitted. Matilda turned to look at her. “She says she isn’t, but…”

“Afraid of something?” Matilda’s voice was thoughtful. “Or afraid for something?”

That was when Jasmine noticed movement at the bottom of the garden by the gate. She stiffened.

Sera and Luke had noticed it too, but neither of them seemed surprised.

“Matilda,” Jasmine said quietly, watching Albert Grey striding up the garden. “Could you fetch Nicholas, please? And maybe ask him to bring his sword?”

Matilda had spotted their unwelcome visitor as well. “Him! What’s he doing here? Isn’t Sera’s spell supposed to keep people like him away?”

“As I understand it, it doesn’t work on witches who know it’s there.”

“NICHOLAS!” Matilda bellowed, and then, taking no chances, bustled off with all haste to physically retrieve him.

Jasmine went to the threshold, hand clenched over her cane.

As she stared down the length of the garden, dappled by starlight glancing off the snow and lamplight from the house, she thought for just a second that she’d been mistaken.

She had only ever met Albert Grey twice before, but she remembered both of those entirely unenjoyable occasions only too well, and the man from her memory had been dismissive, haughty, and completely in command of himself.

This Albert Grey was not that man. Electricity seemed to crackle dangerously around him, but it was, somehow, less frightening than the seething, palpable rage in his face.

It’s a warning. That was what Sera had said this morning.

The magic woven into the very bones of their home had been warning her.

That warning had put Luke on edge all day.

It was the reason Theo had been subdued and Posy had kept her headphones on.

They’d felt the wrongness Jasmine had felt, only worse, but it was only Sera, the most powerful of them, the one who had woven that magic into the house in the first place, who had understood. There’s a storm coming.

Here it was.

Albert slowed as he drew closer. The crackling, hateful intensity of his stare didn’t waver from Sera. It was like nobody else existed. “How dare you.”

“I don’t like to say I told you so, Albert, but I did tell you so,” Sera replied. “Right here, fifteen years ago, I told you you’d rue that day. And here you are. Rueing.”

Even from where she was standing, Jasmine couldn’t mistake the sound of Luke’s resigned sigh, and truly, she felt it like it was her own.

A person less versed in Sera’s ways might have hoped she would employ even a single survival instinct at this point and not provoke Albert any further, but Jasmine and Luke knew better than to cherish any such hopes.

Albert’s power crackled so violently that the snow under his feet turned into steam. “Do you really think your failings as an apprentice justify engineering a vote to expel me from the Cabinet? That they justify turning my own daughter against me?”

“If you had ever spared a thought for anything other than yourself, none of this would have come as a surprise to you,” Sera said in exasperation.

“All I did was break your contract. I had nothing to do with the outcome of the Cabinet’s vote.

I didn’t turn Francesca against you. You did that all by yourself. ”

“They wouldn’t have dared to expel me if it hadn’t been for you!”

“Do you even hear yourself? They wouldn’t have dared to expel you? Meaning what? You thought you’d cowed them into submission?” Sera threw her hands up. “Does that give you a little hint, perhaps, about why they wanted rid of you?”

Albert’s temper got the better of him. Without warning, there was an unnatural crack and a shaft of lightning speared into the snow at Sera’s feet. Jasmine let out an involuntary cry.

“Stop it,” Sera snapped. “You don’t get to play these games anymore, Albert. You don’t get to scare me like you used to. Empires always fall, one way or another, and yours is finally done.”

Abruptly, Albert started laughing. “Oh, Sera. So fierce, so angry. So determined to hide that you are scared. You never learn, do you? You make it so easy . There are so many exposed places between those prickly feathers of yours.” His eyes skimmed pointedly over the inn, over Luke, over Jasmine.

“You have power, but you’re still just one person.

How many of those soft, exposed places can you really protect at once? ”

“Let me at him!” Matilda shouted in outrage, popping up beside Jasmine and startling her. “I have a sizeable pumpkin that would make an excellent projectile!”

Then Nicholas was charging past Jasmine and Matilda, sword in hand. “Halt, fiend!”

Albert gave him a contemptuous look, flicked a lazy hand, and turned Nicholas to stone.