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W e left with Obie’s dragon scale. He hadn’t shifted into his dragon form, praise the Goddess. While I entertained zero doubts of Obie’s glamoring capabilities—the being had hidden himself and his three dragonets in Pittsburgh, for fuck’s sake—we no longer enjoyed the luxury of time. With Bea as our enemy, a proven killer with a body count numbering in the hundreds…Too many people I cared about lived under her lethal influence. Griffith, Finnegan, and Skip. Every guildie in the Towpath, not to mention the other guilds Griffith’s second-in-command interacted with. The Dyers. Megan. My mom.

I couldn’t return to Cumberland fast enough.

Fortunately, when Obie stood, he dug a hand into his back pocket and withdrew an iridescent blue dragon scale from it. Odd that I hadn’t spotted the telltale bump in the denim or recognized the zing of magical energy emanating from the palm-sized plate he offered to me. Mesmerized, I bent closer to examine the scale. I’d never seen one this close. What was a dragon’s scale made of? Enamel and bone infused with power. So much power. The scale’s magic enlivened my senses, zipping through me like an electric current.

Obie chuckled. “Go ahead. I won’t bite…” He swiveled his head to smirk at my demon. “…you.”

I gasped my surprise at the heat when I touched the scale. Obie was a water dragon. I expected the surface to be cool, like the three rivers that met where he and Ricia had nested, but his magic burned. I ripped away my fingers from the fiery licks of power and Obie beamed at me. “Good. You respect what has been given to you.”

I didn’t know that I respected the scale, but I feared it. What magic must this tiny, dense plate contain? An entire treasure’s worth? More?

What would such power do to Teddy’s array?

I frowned, though. Because the array wasn’t of Teddy’s creation, according to the dragon. Dad had stumbled upon the evidence of Bea’s attempt to channel its magic and she, in turn, had stolen the array before he had.

What had she hoped to achieve?

What did the array do?

Nerves jangling, I plucked the dragon scale from Obie’s palm. “Your sacrifice will not go unrewarded,” I said.

“Kill our enemy and I will render your debt paid. Go,” Obie said, malevolence threaded through his rumbling voice. “The Hunter’s Moon rises.”

Jae and I returned to the Bronco, leaving behind the wily dragon who watched us retreat from the cement picnic table. I stabbed my thumb at the key fob to unlock the doors and climbed into the driver’s seat.

By the time my demon clambered into the cab next to me and I glanced at the picnic area again, Obie was gone. Vanished.

Poof.

“I need to warn Griffith,” I said, staring daggers at the glove compartment containing the burner phone. I didn’t reach for it, my fingers curling around the steering wheel instead.

“The betrayer will attack and kill many before she escapes,” my demon said, his voice a low rumble, “ if she senses danger.”

The sheer hell of it was I didn’t believe Bea would run. Not a chance. She’d invested too much, murdered her own brother to keep her operation running, and fed countless other lives into the inventory she’d sold. Bea had butchered my dad, a more experienced druid than I was. She’d think eliminating me a straightforward task compared to that, with my demon binding me or not.

Of course, she had no clue Jae had mated me, too.

Goddess only knew what that had done to my base of powers. Or Jae’s.

She could kill a lot of people I loved before I got there to protect them, though. If I gave her opportunity. If I uncovered her lies while I was too far away to matter when she was threatened and most dangerous.

No frickin way.

Rather than answering my demon, I slid the key into the ignition and fired the engine. I took the ramp back to the highway. “I’ll take the next exit to turn around,” I said, the burner phone still safely ensconced in the glove compartment.

Minutes later, we headed south. The miles zipped by, the silence in the Bronco interrupted only by the hum of the engine and traffic zooming around us. “Driving doesn’t take as long as biking. We’ll be there in about an hour,” I said, stress knotting my stomach. “Go straight to the nexus?”

Jae grunted his assent.

“Hopefully, Andrew Dyer found the claw Peaches lost.”

Everything else should be ready. The full moon last night would’ve charged the water I’d instructed Skip to leave out to absorb lunar energies and the quickening power of the nexus should have steeped the tinctures I’d started. Enough? In only two and a half days? Possibly. Skip had melted wax for the candles I’d infused with fresh herbs, then etched the tapers with runes for the array’s third layer. Teddy’s grimoire had instructed me to collect offerings for the fourth layer, which were native plants and other things I’d gathered before we’d made our circuitous route to the Passage what felt like epochs ago. Several species of flowers, a cluster of ferns. Inky raven feathers. Shale. Teddy hadn’t specified what the offerings should be, only that the items originate in the nexus and encircle the other layers of the array.

The first layer had needed to charge near the nexus’s young heartwood tree, but once my moon water had charged and the tinctures ripened, nothing impeded activating the remaining layers.

No one could stop us.

Only the cardinal totems of the last layer could. Jae would sacrifice his hair. The frenetic energy of the dragon scale, even now, rattled me inside the Bronco. Peaches’ discarded claw. A sliver I’d harvest from the heartwood once we returned to Frostburg from a branch unlikely to damage the tree’s growth.

That left only the bone of the betrayer to place in the final layer’s center and for that, I had no clue.

Bea Hocking was certainly a betrayer, but every sense in me screamed her bones wouldn’t activate the array. The layers of magic were a mix of human and demonic, a First Blood tribe ancestor of Jae’s. Tackling the issue from my contemporary human perspective felt wrong.

“You recognized parts of Teddy’s array,” I finally said.

“The totems speak to me and the power of the daemonica realm. They are significant to my tribe.”

“You know what power the magic calls into being.”

“Issa.”

But that was all he said. Mouth thinning, I tore my stare from the highway to glare at him. “That’s it? Just yes?”

“The magic will prove my troth to you,” he said, glowering back at me. “You will never trust me or my binding promise otherwise.”

Irritation flared inside me. “You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

He snorted a laugh.

Stiffening my spine, I shifted in my seat and continued driving. “Do you have the magical reserves to glamor us?” I asked him once we drew near the state line and Allegany County. “Other demons, the Maces, and Bea’s henchmen still search for us.”

Jae brushed aside the armor plate protecting his left thigh and sent a crimson spark of magic into a sigil etched onto his skin. His power washed over me, like the trickle of a burbling brook. “I hate squandering your magic.” I frowned. “We’ll need it and everything the pair of us can muster.”

My demon rolled his red eyes at me. “I will have fire once we return to the nexus.”

I suspected he was correct. Once we reached Frostburg, we’d experience fire, explosions, and blood aplenty. But if we survived? Well. We wouldn’t have peace. Perhaps mundanes enjoyed the luxury of such fantasies, but magicals lived in the real world most of the time. I could hope to not be the target of a murder plot for a while, though. Maybe.

I steered the Bronco from I-76, merging onto the highway in Cumberland, and my stomach flipped, my anxiety climbing, as the car ate up the miles to Frostburg. A pair of demons soared in wide circles overhead, but Jae’s magic must have concealed us because neither hunter dipped in flight to attack. I moved to the right lane to exit. Heartbeat racing, hands shaking, I took a left at the T, minding the speed limit as we drove through town.

To the botanical garden.

Other, easier routes to the nexus existed. The SUV Clara Trask’s friend had left for us would’ve handled the rutted private road beyond the turn into WMBG and to the Dyer farm without difficulty. Andrew might not have welcomed our return so soon, but Henry would’ve sensed our coming. Unless I was mistaken, their house wasn’t far from the heartwood tree at the nexus’s center.

After working for Megan for years, no one was more familiar with the land and trails of the botanical garden than me, though. My place of employment would be monitored, but except for Andrew Dyer, no one knew the service and access roads threading through the forest here better than I did.

Instead of driving to the Visitors Center lot to park, I eased the Bronco to the left, onto an overgrown service road. We used the shortcut on narrower ATVs to fetch samples to test water in the garden’s pond, but as I’d surmised, the Bronco handled the rough terrain all right. With a wince, I whipped the wheel to take us off-trail before reaching the pond and our tires bit into a blackberry thicket struggling to establish in the understory. Briars and brambles screeched at the side panels, scraping the paint. When I was confident the canopy overhead hid our SUV, I tapped the brake and shoved the gearshift into park.

“More than our magic stirs this place,” Jae said, his features the mask of a predator.

“I feel it, too.” I exited the vehicle. “Bea and her henchmen.”

Jae wrinkled his nose. “Despite her failures to complete my tribe’s magic, our enemy has begun charging a duplicate array as well.”

Alarm zinged through me and my glance skipped to the Bronco and the burner phone still tucked inside the glove compartment. “Should I warn the Dyers to guard Peaches?”

My demon shook his head, snaking his hand through the open door on the passenger side to snag the backpack he’d carried up the Great Allegheny Passage. “They know.” He thumped the dash with a clenched fist, popping the glove compartment open. Jae tossed the burner phone to me. “To gather your warriors.”

As soon as I turned the phone on, it vibrated in urgent demand. Brow furrowing, I tapped the screen to answer. “How did you even get this number?”

“Magic,” Griffith said on a snarl. “What the fuck are you doing?” the guild boss shouted from the phone’s speaker. “Don’t lie that you’re in Pittsburgh. We felt demonic power flaring from the nexus hours ago.”

“It’s playing hell with our senses, too.” I winced when a chaotic burst of that frenetic energy surged through the signal, graying out the coverage with scattershot volleys of white noise. “But that’s not us. It’s Bea,” I said over the scratchy sprays of static.

“It’s what? Listen, you need to get out of here. Your grandparents flooded downtown Cumberland with battle mages. They’ve surrounded the Towpath and—”

“I said it’s Bea. She murdered Teddy. And Clark.” I nodded to my demon, who scrambled ahead of me as I pushed through the underbrush, forging my way to where the frisson of power concentrated most. “Dad stole the array from her, and she’s trying to power it up again.” Cringing, I ripped the phone from my ear as feedback screamed from it. “She must have already activated the first layers if the disruptions to cell service are this terrible,” I yelled into the phone during a lull in the static. “My first layer wouldn’t flare the nexus’s power like this. She must have progressed through the layers farther. A lot farther.”

“What’s that about Bea? I assigned her to guard the nexus,” Griffith said, the words loud and clipped.

“Bea Hocking is the leader of the trafficking ring,” I shouted to be heard over the tumultuous bursts of white noise, and praise the Goddess, the signal cleared.

The silence from Griffith in the pristine stillness that followed was deafening.

“To hell with the Maces. I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Griffith finally said. “We all will. Wait for us.”

“Our enemies surround us,” Jae said on a growl, his muscles taut as he slithered through the brush on quiet feet. “They hunt.”

“We’ll be at the heartwood.” I ended the call and shoved the burner phone in my pocket. Spit dried up in my mouth. I scanned the woodland thickets for any sign of intruders, of threat. “Can you get us to the array? Our array?” I asked on a whisper as I shadowed my demon’s path forward.

He dipped his head, then jerked his chin to the left.

I couldn’t see anyone, but I felt the throb of magic emanating from a distant cluster of dogwoods like the ache of a sore tooth. Gulping down the knot of stress and fear lodged in my throat, I nodded my acknowledgment to Jae. Yes. I sensed our danger. Couldn’t miss it.

Jae reached for a faint sigil etched into the skin on his neck and fed it a spark of red power. His magic trickled over me, no longer foreign to me, uncomfortable or strange. I didn’t know what his spell accomplished, what trickery he’d put into play, only that whatever that was, his power would help keep us alive. Get us to the array. And I was grateful.

For the first time, I witnessed my demon’s prowess as a warrior, what Jae must have been like in the daemonica realm. I’d seen him fight, but I hadn’t watched him glide through jeopardy, his body tense but elegant as he danced through the undergrowth with silent intent. He hardly disturbed the dense foliage that marked his path. I tried to mirror him, guarding my every step, so I didn’t crunch dead leaves or snap a stray twig, but I was human, not a demon.

Luckily, the enemies searching for us were human, too.

We both still wore the Towpath bangles deadening our magical signatures, so the mages searching for us wouldn’t pinpoint our location, not added to whatever magic Jae had cast over us. Jae and I crept through the woods, sneaky and quick. Whether Bea sent our enemies or they’d originated from my dad’s parents didn’t matter. If they snared us in the net cast over the nexus, we’d be equally dead regardless of who pulled the trigger, but as we skirted by a fire mage looking for us, I recognized his face from the crowd that had attended the Towpath guild meeting following my retest days ago.

I almost wished for the Maces. While the mercenaries they’d hired to erase the embarrassment of my existence would be more formidable opponents, at least I’d never met them. Ma hadn’t cooked for them. We hadn’t shared coffee or laughter. Shouldered the same burdens inflicted on us by a mundane majority who did not give a fuck what cruelty and hardships their rules caused us.

Closer to the heartwood marking the center of the nexus, Skip sidled next to me and I jolted, stifling my startled gasp. I froze in place, my wide eyes taking him in from the mussed hair sticking up at odd angles on the crown of his head to his grubby feet, barren of shoes and boasting a single formerly white sock. Dirt streaked his board shorts and legs, ash singing a jagged line across the middle of his FSU T-shirt. The hem at his right shoulder had torn loose, that short sleeve dangling down his biceps.

When Jae halted, glancing over his shoulder to check why I’d stopped, he winged up an eyebrow at my imp familiar. Skip lifted a finger to his lips, urging us to hush, then waved his hand to gesture ahead. “Keep going,” he didn’t say, exaggerating the movement of his mouth so we’d understand the words without him making a sound.

My demon returned his attention ahead and, indeed, continued onward.

A thousand questions, doubts, and fear rattling inside me, I followed him. What else could I do? Check my duplicitous friend for injuries and thereby attract the notice of the mages who had inflicted that pain on Skip to start with? Scream my agony and frustration that, once again, this fucked-up world—that magic —had yielded another bumper crop of suffering? Had, by the look of my imp, almost gifted me with the loss of someone else I cared about?

I trudged in Jae’s shadow, a little more reckless now. A lot less quietly, despite the frown Skip flashed at me and the hand he rested on my shoulder. I shivered at whatever power he fed to me in an electric sizzle, but I could not creep, would not slink as my demon did, to the array we’d concealed at the heart of this nexus. I wanted our mage predators to see me. Hear me.

I wanted to rip them apart.

My years of cowering at the horror inflicted on my father were finished. I knew my enemy now. I was no gawky beanpole of a boy. I’d grown into a powerful druid with a badass demon mate and a familiar gifted to me by a goddess.

I would fight.

Not just to avenge my dead father, though that rage still burned inside me as fiercely as any sun, and not only because our only route to safety meant removing the threat Bea and her henchmen represented. I’d give my blood, my power, everything that I was and would ever be, to eliminate this evil from my mountain home because fuck them. They didn’t get to hunt and kill beings at will anymore. They wouldn’t strip away every sense of security magicals could hope for in the nefarious pit of persecution mundanes foisted upon us. For not one more stingy minute would Bea rob us of our limited freedoms and prey upon those who longed for peace, a simple life. Space just to breathe.

I would not allow these carrion feeders of the magical community to steal that away from us a single moment more. Not one.

I forbid it. I forbid her .

Skip must have exercised his own magic, though, because despite the noises of my furious march behind Jae to the heartwood, none of Bea’s mages interceded to disrupt our path.

I stumbled to a halt, though, my breath catching in my throat.

Because the heartwood sapling we’d left inside the nexus short days ago had shot up ten feet, maybe taller, and the spindly trunk I’d noted then had widened beyond the span of my splayed fingers. Before, thin branches had jutted from the sturdy if narrow timber of a vulnerable tree. The heartwood now bloomed to adulthood, twigs grown to fulsome branches forming a healthy canopy thick with leaves above us. Fat roots pushed up mounding earth at the base and my heartbeat kicked with sudden worry that the explosive growth of this vital tree that governed the strengthening nexus might’ve spoiled the array Jae and I had set, but no. The fat tangle of serpentine roots disturbing the soil had formed a neat circle around the five stones marking the start of our magic. My stunned and startled focus noted the crude pottery at the array’s center—water my familiar had positioned last night to best absorb the charging light of the hunter’s moon.

Short days ago, finding the heartwood had challenged us. Even with Jae’s blood trail to guide us, I wasn’t sure we would’ve located the sapling at the nexus’s center, no matter my waking magic or Skip’s affinity with an earth-centric goddess. That heartwood had been too young, swallowed up by western Maryland’s old growth forest.

That tree had matured. The heartwood didn’t just vie with the oaks, beeches, and maples native to my mountains. The young heartwood now dominated the woodlands, ruling over them with vines heavy with wild grapes and its bark now blanketed in a cozy layer of vibrant green moss.

Skip rose from his stance of kneeling supplication, which he’d adopted once we’d reached the nexus center. “We can talk now. They won’t hear us.”

Ignoring the sudden roaring explosion in the valley behind us, I stumbled to the trunk of the heartwood, my awe forcing my hand up toward the thick moss covering it. My fingers curled, halting a hair’s width above the abundant plant life. I dared not touch or disturb what my senses drank in with infinite, dazzled wonder. “What happened?”

When I pried my astonished stare from the glorious miracle of the mature tree, I focused on my demon crouching low at the center of the array we’d arranged. He grinned, lips curved in malevolent glee. “We happened,” he said with a wave at the stones we’d set. “Our magic did.”

Skip circled around the array in its canyon of damp tree roots and retrieved slender amber bottles from a pocket. “The power of the waking nexus fed its heartwood,” he said, passing the tinctures I’d started to me. “Let’s rouse it some more.”

Goosebumps pebbled my arms, but I grabbed the tinctures. “I need Teddy’s grimoire.”

Jae plopped to the verdant earth and threaded his arms through the backpack. He yanked at the zip enclosure.

“How close?” I asked Skip, sweeping the surrounding thickets for any sign of the intruding mages we’d sneaked past during our hike here.

“The nexus grows stronger and already defends itself.” My familiar dipped his head at the heartwood. “The mages could not find the center, but the magic we fed into the nexus with the first layer of the array is new. Your combined power allowed the nexus to conceal its heartwood from enemies to it and us, but only a little. Just enough.”

I scowled at him. “It’s a simple question, Skip. Where is she?”

“A few hundred yards. Up that hill, on the ridgeline.” Wrinkling his nose, he pointed to our left. “They almost caught me, but I saw how far they’d cast the blasphemy of their array before I escaped them—to the last layer.”

“Bea doesn’t have the cardinal totems,” I patted my pocket, where the dragon’s scale still hummed with strange, vibrant magic “She deals on the black market. As rare as those items are, she could get some of them. But not all.”

“She plans to steal them from you.” Jae rose from the ground and marched to my side, handing my dad’s grimoire to me. “Our time is short.”

“Then let’s finish this.” I offered him my open palm, smothering my wince when his claw pierced the center. We returned to the array we’d begun to set while he stabbed his own hand, which my demon clasped with mine.

The nexus hadn’t just grown stronger. The connection between Jae and I had blossomed, too. The conjoining of our magics flooded over me in a tingling rush as the two of us settled in the middle of our array, my demon at my back and his thighs bracing my hips. I ignored the sting of the grimoire’s barb pricking the pad of my thumb. My father’s words raced to unscramble as the first drops of my blood smeared the metal. Love and welcome to my son Davey…

“Thanks, Dad,” I said on a murmur, my grief and pride for all my father had tried to do co-mingling inside me. Swallowing that down—later, much later, I would honor and remember him—I flipped the pages to the sketch of the second layer of the array instead. “Essence of rosemary first,” I said, bending over the assortment of tinctures I’d retrieved from Skip, who settled onto a cluster of roots next to us.

“The nexus thirsts. Use all of it,” my demon whispered in the shell of my ear and I shivered at the heat of his breath.

I heeded him, though. When my familiar passed a ruler, a compass, and string to me, I measured the angles to determine the focus points of the array’s second layer, though my fingers seemed to recognize the precise locations where each bottle’s contents should spill to the earth. Like the array’s first layer, the second formed a pentacle. A star. The apex of each point, however, kilted just a little off-center of the crystal layer underlying it. The first layer had needed to be set to true east, where the sun first crept over the mountain ridges to wake and light our world. This potion layer slid just a smidge off plumb, discordant to my senses, the magic startling and jarring as I laid it. The creeping sense of wrongness, of alert, intensified with each of the bottles I emptied into the soil, ending by dumping the charged moon water Skip had gathered for me between my spread thighs at this array’s middle. I shuddered, my belly flipping, as the power activated and aligned with the first layer’s crystals. The joined magic of both the crystals and the second layer’s potions swamped me with a shiver of dread. And urgency.

Jae purred his satisfaction into my ear. “Go on.”

Tapping down the foreboding alarm coursing through me, I shifted my gaze to Skip. “The candles.”

He whipped his arm behind him, under his T-shirt and to the small of his back. When he returned his arm to his front, he clutched the tapers we’d made what felt like a lifetime ago in his grip. “They are damp from my sweat,” he said, passing the candles to me. “I’m sorry.”

My demon grunted. “Adds a boost of power from you to our magic.”

“It’s fine.” I accepted the tapers with hands that shook. The wax was, indeed, a little slippery, but the herbs we’d added to the melted wax disrupted the surface enough for my fingers to find their grip, as did the runes I’d etched into each. “You did great, Skip.”

His spine shot straight, his shoulders squaring. He grinned. “I did, didn’t I?”

“Issa,” Jae answered him, then nudged me. “Set the candles. I will light them.” He rested his chin on my shoulder and then tilted his head to stare at my familiar. “Fetch the offerings he gathered for the next layer while we work. They are coming.”

Skip scrambled while I anchored the nubby ends of the tapers into the ground, the points of this layer of the array also a pentacle, each candle placed to the side of the preceding layer marked by wet dirt. This time, I ignored the tools I should’ve needed to situate the layers of magic to best and most efficiently marry with the preceding two layers. I didn’t need them. The magic we created guided me. Cried out to me. Demanded and commanded me.

The tapers themselves were but crude representations of what an offering of fire should’ve been. Finnegan hadn’t packed much wax for us to work with, so the candles were short, each stretching no taller than the width of my four fingers. That Skip hadn’t lost them in his mad scramble to reconnoiter our enemy and stay alive while we’d gone to see the dragon was a miracle for which his goddess would no doubt demand credit. The size of the fire we fed to the array didn’t matter, though, not really. Nor the smoothness of the wax or the prettiness of the runes my fingernail had etched upon the tapers.

What only mattered was our intent, mine and Jae’s. Skip’s, too. He was my familiar, after all, the power vested in him a boon and a boost to me.

While I didn’t understand the magic Teddy’s array would accomplish and feared that in my core, I’d no less committed to bringing that power into being, had sacrificed and would continue to pay whatever price the magic demanded to see it through.

Because Bea had also built this array. Had killed my father for it, not just Teddy but her brother Clark. So many magical beings. Too many.

Whatever this magic did?

That psychopath must not possess it.

So I set the candles and, shifting to trace the lines of my dad’s inelegant scrawl in his grimoire, I read the text he’d written. I concentrated, focusing my power from the vast wells inside me, murmuring words I did not recognize, the language as foreign to me as the laughable notion of safety I’d craved since Teddy had died. Not Latin. Not English, either.

Daemonic?

Jae waited for me to finish chanting each set of lines before he reached around me to hover a tip of his extended claw over the respective candles. A red spark of his magic jolted from him to ignite the wicks in a startling flash of flame. He, too, repeated the words, though Jae didn’t read from Dad’s grimoire. He knew them by rote.

My alarm mounted. I didn’t hesitate, though. Together, my demon and I set the third layer of the array in brief minutes. When all five candles blazed, I squirmed inside the cradle of Jae’s thighs. “Good thing the candles are short. We need to wait until the wax melts down to start the fourth layer.”

With Skip returning, his arms laden with bunches of plant, mineral, and animal matter we’d foraged from the nexus before Jae and I had left for Pittsburgh, Jae grunted. “No time,” he said.

I felt him drawing from my power as a stinging zap, a yip of discomfort climbing up my throat and judging by the pained groan from Skip, my demon had siphoned magic from him, too.

Indescribable heat washed over us, an odd and dazzling flash blinding me.

When I blinked the white dots from my eyes, the tiny hairs on the forearm I’d outstretched to trace the incantation from Teddy’s grimoire had singed away, the skin pinking but not forming blisters. The burn was minor. I’d experienced worse at the beach last summer, but I still glared over my shoulder. “You could’ve warned me.”

Jae smirked. “Begin the offering.”

His skin considerably more reddened than mine, Skip passed the bunches to me one by one. My nerves crawling, I placed each in a wide circle around us and our array. A tangle of white Queen Anne’s Lace. A handful of bark scraped free of an obliging Eastern Hemlock. A wet, slimy clump of clay and a ball of shed fur I’d discovered not far from here. Teddy hadn’t specified how many items should ring the array in his grimoire, but he hadn’t needed to. Twelve. The number of creation, representing optimism and inspiration. Twelve carries the energies of both its components, one and two, which reduce to the single digit three. One spoke of independence and individualism, while two added an essence of teamwork and partnership. Three? Tolerance, self-expression, and social interaction.

I had to gather twelve offerings. I had to. Because whatever magic this array hoped to achieve, what we gave to it must represent us, me and Jae. Unique individuals, different in our attitudes, experiences, and genetic makeup, but joined. A team. As difficult as our entire relationship had been to me and to him…We were together. Not just because we were binding each other and not because we’d fucked, although both were foundational, a solid start to what we were and would grow to be. Jae and I were partners because we’d chosen to be. Grudgingly. Certainly distrustfully, but I couldn’t have done this, any of it, without his support and no matter his growling bitchery or his waspishness, I knew he needed me, too.

We would survive this. I felt that confidence in the marrow of my bones and when we did, because the fires of peril surrounding us had tested and proven our unshakeable connection, we’d be unstoppable.

So. Twelve offerings from the fruits of the waking nexus. From the wildlife, from the rocky ground, from the abundant and verdant plants. My heart full, I placed the many riches I’d gathered around my demon and me, encircling our array, which focused our distinct magical energies. Combined and married them. The power forged inside me melded with the foreign and yet alluring magic of my demon.

The synergistic vitality we two brought forth dazzled me. Enlivened me.

Gave me hope.

Jae twined his arms with mine, supporting me as I laid out our offerings, the steady hum of his power beseeching as fiercely as mine did. We begged of the universe, of magic, and of fate to be kind to us just this once, to grant resolution to our supplications. To bless us with an end to the tribulations we’d suffered. To give us peace.

I placed my final offering at the prime location in the circle, due east, by nestling in the dirt a cluster of black feathers that obliging ravens had shed. A positive omen, they represented transformation and change, standing as a symbol of birth, death, and rebirth. I closed my eyes, sending my silent prayer to the heavens.

Wrapped in his arms, my demon squeezed me tight. “It is done,” he said.

I couldn’t speak around the knot of emotion clogging my throat, so I shook my head. “The fifth and final layer.”

“Once we find Henry, we’ll complete that magic. He’s the only one small enough to crawl under the Dyers’ deck in search of Peaches’ lost claw,” Skip said, already bending to snatch the grimoire from me and the backpack from Jae’s grasp. He stuffed the book inside it, then anchored the pack on his shoulder. “You have the dragon scale?”

My demon stood and reaching down, he helped me to my feet, too. “In my pocket,” I said.

“Excellent. The heartwood will gift us with a sliver of wood at the right time, which leaves only one totem left to obtain.” Skip cringed as the distant rumbles of battle exploded into full-out war. Above us, lighting danced across the sky. The scent of scorched ozone lingered in our nostrils. “Oh good. Griffith’s arrived with reinforcements.”

Squaring my shoulders, I grabbed my demon’s hand. Together, we faced the valley, where blue sparks shot to the sky and plumes of thick, black smoke. “Time to finish this.” I flashed a shaky grin at Jae. “Let’s go.”