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T he whole hilltop dropped out from under us, and we fell. It would have been to our doom, but the little bench we’d been sitting on caught us. It followed us down, scooped us up, and sent us rocketing through utter darkness, clinging to the weathered old slats without any idea where we were going or what we’d find when we arrived.

The journey didn’t take long. The demented little thing fell almost straight down for a few seconds, to the point that my butt lifted off the seat, then shot ahead at what felt like the speed of sound. Or maybe that was just because my screams were blown away almost as soon as they left my lips.

They echoed somewhere behind us as we abruptly dropped again, into utter darkness, the pale moonlight from above having been cut off by what I guessed was the top of a tunnel. And then we stopped so fast that it would have given me whiplash if Pritkin hadn’t been holding onto the back of my head. Until the bench abruptly tipped over and dumped us both out.

I lay on what felt like hard-packed dirt that bunched under my nails as I pressed them in, trying to ground myself. That didn’t help much, with my head spinning, my gut roiling, and my sense of direction too confused to figure out which way was up. Leaving Pritkin to handle this, whatever this was.

It seemed to involve many people crowding us on all sides and muttering things I hoped weren’t curses because his magic was sitting on empty, and mine was already there. I swallowed my nausea back down while he said stuff I couldn’t concentrate on, being too busy trying to focus my eyes, only that wasn’t working, either. Everything was black as sin, to the point that we might as well have been blindfolded, which we probably were, I realized.

Another spell, I guessed, but I didn’t have a chance to ask before I was snatched off the floor and half marched, half dragged down a hall.

I only knew that’s what we were in because the echoes changed, bouncing back faster inside a more confined space. But I still couldn’t see, and I guessed Pritkin couldn’t either, since he was cursing up a storm from behind me. But we didn’t fall, as whoever was manhandling us never gave us the opportunity.

My feet only touched down one out of every three or four steps, and the people hustling me along weren’t stopping to rest, maybe because they didn’t have far to go. We soon burst out of the tunnel into a much larger room; I could tell that much by sound, but nothing else. Until I was thrown back onto the floor, a rough stone one in this case, and someone began speaking.

“Cassie Fucking Palmer. Why am I not surprised?”

The blindfold I wasn’t wearing dissolved, and I blinked around in the dim light of a torch-lit cave. And realized why the voice had sounded familiar. Jasmine, I almost said, looking up, but caught myself in time because that wasn’t her name.

It was who she’d reminded me of when we first met, the beautiful, sloe-eyed, dark-haired princess of Agraba, or in reality, the Mother of one of the few covens who had been willing to send girls to my court. I stared up at her, trying to remember her real name, which shouldn’t have been difficult. But if I’d ever doubted that fifty years had passed, I didn’t anymore, and the years... had not been kind.

“Look at you,” she said, coming forward through a crowd of what looked like a couple hundred witches and crouching in front of me, her black robes pooling on the dirt. “Look at you!”

I really wished she’d stop looking at me because then I had to look back. And the changes were startling. Something I guess I wasn’t great at concealing because she smirked.

“It’s been a long time.”

“Yeah.” It came out as a whisper.

I was trying to get myself under control, but it had been a hell of a few days and a hell of a month before that. And, frankly, most of the year hadn’t been so great, either, so I was having trouble. But my problem was mostly because the face in front of me kept tearing my thoughts apart whenever I tried to form any.

The eyes were the same, if sunken in acres of wrinkles she shouldn’t have had. They were still dark, mysterious, and lovely, and were how I’d recognized her along with the voice, as nothing else was familiar. Instead of looking fifty years older, which for a witch would equate to maybe twenty for a human, she looked three times that, enough to make the almost two-hundred-year-old witches who had helped to guard my court seem young by comparison.

“It’s the mileage,” I whispered before I could stop myself, and she laughed.

That was the same, too, full-throated and genuine. “Yes, while you haven’t aged a day,” she informed me. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you above. So sweet, so innocent, so earnest . The golden-haired goddess... who left us all to die. Including those girls I sent you.”

The words were bad, but the expression, the change in voice, and the sudden stillness as everyone stopped talking at once were worse. I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. Because the significance of what she’d said hit and hit hard.

Pritkin was talking again, loud, angry words that cut through the silence like a knife, but I didn’t hear them. All I could focus on was my girls. The ones bound to me, the ones who had made up my little coven, the ones who had trusted me.

A terrible, echoing emptiness opened up under my breastbone where their presence should have been. I’d felt weak since I came here, but had put it down to sheer exhaustion. Now I knew better, but the lack of the power boost they gave me wasn’t anything compared to the slew of images that slammed into me like a freight train.

Little hands reaching up, wanting to show me their latest artwork; little eyes, shining with pride when I noticed them or gave them praise; little hands, so chubby and clumsy, yet trying to weave a spell out of the Pythian power that hovered around them like an unseen nanny, golden and benevolent; little bodies running around my court in long, old fashioned nightwear, because my acolytes were from a different era and didn’t approve of Hello Kitty and Disney character stuff.

An exception had been made for Mira, the dark-skinned diva, who clung to her ratty pink bunny suit with all the ferocity of the formidable witch she would someday be. Even Hilde, my chief acolyte and self-proclaimed battleax, had decided that that wasn’t a fight worth having and let her keep it. She’d finally started outgrowing it right before I left.

Before I failed her, as I’d failed all of them. Trying to save Faerie when I should have been looking after my responsibilities, my court, my coven. My girls —

“Left them behind, didn’t you?” Jasmine’s voice said, echoing my thoughts. “You promised me you’d take care of them, defend them with your life, but you left . And barely a month later—”

“How?” Pritkin demanded harshly. “How did this happen?”

But Jasmine acted as if he hadn’t even spoken, and those eyes, those beautiful, beautiful eyes, never left mine. “No, you left us all to deal with an army of gods . You were our only chance, and you weren’t here . The Circle went first, the only satisfaction we had, watching them throw themselves at the oncoming tide as uselessly as—”

“All of them?” I whispered, unable to take it in. The Circle... couldn’t be gone. They just couldn’t.

The Silver Circle had been the bastion of order in the magical community for as long as anyone could remember. Their methods hadn’t always been pretty, but they’d brought peace, stabilized a chaotic system, and maintained order. And now they were gone?

“Oh, not at first.” She sat back on her heels, allowing the others to crowd close, with hateful, vengeful faces everywhere I looked. “They attempted a few frontal assaults, got annihilated, and then the rest regrouped to try more subtle approaches. But they didn’t have time.

“The gods were like a ravenous tide rolling over the landscape, full of hate and hunger. They can sense magic like we smell food, and they were starving. They hunted down the Circle’s men—oh, not the greater; they had bigger prizes. But the lesser gods, the little bastards, skeletal, half-dead zombie-looking things, who hadn’t been allowed to eat at all back in whatever misbegotten world they call home...

“That kind weren’t so picky. They took anyone they could find with a scrap of magical blood. They took our people, so many and so fast, that we barely knew what had hit us before they were gone. Including Evelyn,” she added, calling up memories of a cap of steel gray hair, a wardrobe of no-nonsense business suits, and someone who in no way had resembled the typical image of a witch.

Until you looked into her eyes and saw the power there.

“Evelyn,” I repeated, disbelieving, because she’d had the permanence of a mountain, the indestructibility of a force of nature. Yet she was gone?

“And Beatrice,” she added, bringing up the image of a tiny, four-foot-seven, caftan-covered dynamo with a ‘fro almost as big as she was and enough gold jewelry to buy a house—or two. “They went to your court to try to get the girls. They failed.” It was stark.

“I’m sorry—”

“Save it for someone who gives a damn! If you’d been there—but when were you ever? Popping in and out—”

“She was fighting a war!” Pritkin said and was again ignored, except for rumblings from the surrounding witches, several of whom dragged him back when he tried to move forward.

I shook my head at him. I was a coven leader—technically—and thus able to speak. He was an ex-war mage, and I wasn’t sure that they knew about the ex. He saw the gesture but only scowled at me, so I didn’t know if he would be quiet.

But if not, it wasn’t likely to go well.

Of course, neither was this.

Jasmine, whose real name I had finally remembered—Zara—had gotten up and started striding around, witches scattering out of her way. “I would have been with them that day if I hadn’t been busy putting out another fire,” she said, her robes snapping and her mane of gray hair crackling like a lightning bolt had hit down nearby.

Her power had always been strong, but not that strong, I thought, staring about at the witches who were lending her part of their strength, as my coven had once done for me. And lending her part of their rage, because she’d always been the calmest and most reasonable of the mothers I’d known, the most willing to listen. But she wasn’t listening now.

“And when I heard,” she added, rounding on me. “I didn’t even have time to grieve before witches were flooding in here from all corners of the Earth. Pitiful, glassy-eyed, clutching their few belongings and telling stories of the same thing happening everywhere.

“We took them in, those who made it this far, yet most did not. And those covens who did were broken, their leaders killed fighting a desperate rear-guard action to allow some of their people to survive. Unlike the Circle, whose leadership had to be rooted out from their holes underground after their armies were annihilated, Mothers don’t lead from behind, they don’t cower, they don’t run .”

“The Circle doesn’t run!” Pritkin snarled and received a fist to the groin for his trouble.

“They stayed,” Zara said, going down on one knee again, getting in my face, making me look at what the struggle had cost her. “And they fought, and they died , to a woman. Leaving me, only me , as the last remaining Mother on Earth!”

Yeah, that would explain it, I thought, staring at her dizzily. The covens had lacked cohesion since their long-ago struggle against the Circle had destroyed their leadership, and they’d never been able to get it back. Quarrels, fights, and chaos had been the order of the day, with each coven going its way under its own Mother, with no head witch or council on top anymore.

Looked like that had changed.

“Do you know what that’s like?” she hissed. “Do you have any idea? ”

“No.”

“No, of course, you don’t,” her once beautiful lips, now lost in a mass of tiny lines, curved into a sneer. “You weren’t here. But I was, and they came every day, spilling out of our portals as tattered, traumatized refugees with no coven leader, no idea what was happening, and nowhere else to turn.

“We took them in, fed them, clothed them, gave them a chance to survive while the gods were busy hunting the Circle—and every other magic user they could find! And when they finished with them, they turned on us, tracking us down, decimating the raiding parties I sent out, looking for supplies, both here and in Faerie. And circling closer every day, with each use of our portal network helping them to hone in on our location, the last remaining bastion of magical power on Earth!”

I stared around at that, but my watering eyes saw only a blur of faces flowing with firelight. Hundreds of them; I wasn’t sure how many, as darkness ate at the edges, leaving parts of the throng in shadow. But hundreds...

Out of millions.

Was this it? Were these the only covens left in the world? Or the only coven, I corrected myself, because they were all under Zara’s control.

“And now here you come,” she hissed, “to lead them right to us. Cassie fucking Palmer, who abandoned us at our gravest hour, and now returns to what? Save your hide by turning us in?”

“No! I swear—”

“And what do your assurances mean to us? What does anything that comes out of your lying mouth mean? I trusted you once, defended you, stood by you when I should have helped the others kill you before you could betray us! But that oversight can be remedied.”

“Does coven law mean nothing, then?” Pritkin said, his voice ringing out so loudly that he must have enhanced it. I guessed to reach the cheap seats in the back, although why he was bothering, I didn’t know.

I doubted they had a different opinion.

“Silence him,” Zara snarled. “If he breaks the spell, kill him.”

“Yes, you can kill me,” Pritkin said, deflecting the half dozen spells sent at him and causing witches on all sides to hiss and duck. “But you can’t do it to her. Not by your laws. Not without a trial—”

“What do you think this is?” Zara snapped.

“Not that kind of trial. She is a coven leader, and by your laws—”

“Don’t you dare quote our laws to me!”

“And yet, it seems someone must,” he said calmly, even though we were surrounded by a group of very angry, very dangerous women. “For you seem to have forgotten them.”

He glanced at the circle of witches who had somehow eluded the gods’ purge all these years. They were survivors and looked it, many with visible scars that they weren’t bothering to conceal, tattered clothing, and gaunt faces. But magic was snapping around them so thickly that it distorted the air, turning the vengeful faces under the flickering torchlight monstrous. They wanted someone to blame for what had happened to them, for all they’d lost, and they’d found one.

And it didn’t help that I wasn’t sure they were wrong.

What had I done?

“What you had to,” Pritkin said because I guessed I’d spoken that last part out loud. “The best that anyone possibly could have.”

“You call this the best?” Zara spat. “She left us to die—”

“She left you to fight , which is what she has the right to do here. Or do your laws and customs mean nothing? Are you the freedom fighters you always claimed to be, rejecting the Circle’s forced compliance, or are you feral animals crouching underground, looking desperately for a scapegoat—”

That was as far as he got before a dozen witches fell on him, but it was enough. He’d bought me a moment to fight through my shock and given me the information to save at least one of us. Along with our party up top, if he could reach them.

“Get off him,” I said, standing up.

“Or else what?” Zara hissed as the witches fought to take down Pritkin’s shields. But demon magic didn’t seem to be something they understood, and they were struggling with it. They’d manage eventually, but not quickly enough.

Not if I redirected their hate at me.

“Or else prove him right,” I said, projecting my voice the old-fashioned way by yelling my head off. “That your laws mean nothing , your customs mean nothing , that being the Mother of a coven—”

“You have no right to that title!” Someone yelled, to shouts of agreement on all sides. The fight seemed to have brought the witches back to life, with the former eerie stillness being replaced by what looked and sounded a lot like a torch-wielding mob.

And Zara agreed. “Your coven is dead!” she spat.

“But yours isn’t,” I said, meeting those dark, glittering eyes as steadily as Pritkin had. “And I challenge you for it.”

Once again, the room went deathly silent, as abruptly as if someone had thrown a switch. Once again, a pin drop would have echoed loudly, or in this case, my harsh breathing. And the blood rushing in my veins, which was all I could hear as I’d just signed my death warrant.

“What?” Zara said, in a more normal tone of voice, as if shock had jolted her back into her old self for a moment.

“You claim to be Mother of this coven,” I said harshly. “Then prove it. Or prove yourself unworthy to lead the last remaining witches on Earth. They deserve a leader who will fight for them, as I will.

“Will you? ”