Page 28

The beautician did a fantastic job on my haircut, buzzing the sides and back short. My neck and shoulders were free. She’d kept the top longer, ruffled with an easy-to-follow product regimen. I’d enjoyed the new look so much, I allowed her to add the blond streak in my bangs that were curled backward above my forehead in this pompadour style, which basically looked like a knockoff Elvis.

Carlie immediately squinted when I walked inside, likely judging how I found the time for a haircut but not her mealtime. Charlie, on the other hand, avoided me, nose raised high as he strutted around the kitchen. He was mad. For weeks now, I’d spent so much time at Milo’s place during all my free time, stopping home less than when I worked in a building.

To be honest, assigning lessons online, walking away, and only returning to supposedly grade them wasn’t work. Not the work I was used to, not the work that’d help shape young witches into productive citizens who’d mastered their magics.

Once I’d fed Carlie and set up her treat toys, I walked into the living room and called over to Charlie, attempting to gain his love. I lay out on the floor, head pressed against the carpet and arms outstretched, begging for Charlie to come cuddle. It took time, lots of time, patience, but he finally rubbed his head against mine and playfully bit my new haircut.

My betrayal had been forgiven. “Thank you, Charlie!”

After kissing and hugging and holding Charlie, my telepathy was drawn to Enchanter Evergreen, who winced as he flew across the city, making strategic stops meant to draw attention and quietly announce his return. Based on the buzzing thoughts, that quiet announcement would be raging in a matter of hours, which was probably the intention.

Milo arrived at a secluded dock end with empty warehouses based on the lack of thoughts—except for one that wasn’t a warehouse building at all. Merely a glamour. Not that I could tell, but Milo had some opinions on the shoddy craftsmanship. Rushed work with easy tells.

“Relieved to see you doing well,” Gladiatrix walked toward him, dressed down in a pair of jeans, leather jacket, and heels. “The city has missed you.”

“It’s been calm in my absence, too.” Milo nodded to her. “Thank you for that, Gladiatrix.”

“It’s just Alicia today.” She smiled, then gestured to the warehouse door to usher Milo inside.

Despite keeping her profile almost completely hidden from the public eye, Alicia discreetly dealt with any issues that threatened the city beyond guild capability, which turned out to be few and far between. Still, to imagine one of the strongest witches in the world setting up shop to protect Milo’s city sent a rush through his body, energizing him.

It made sense she’d taken off her garb as Gladiatrix, it allowed her to handle problems without drawing massive media attention which was something the Global Guild wanted to avoid in Chicago all things considered.

Once they’d stepped inside, Milo was greeted by a smiling Enchanter Diaz, posing beside his familiar with his phone raised high for a selfie.

He wore a black corset vest with magenta laced strings and embroidery that matched the hot pink cowboy hat he and his familiar wore. “Her fans have been missing her candid shots.”

I wasn’t sure he knew what candid meant. Or maybe I didn’t.

“This place might be on the DL, but we gotta update her followers on something.” Diaz smooshed his face close, kissing Priscilla’s snout. “She’s got an unbearably loyal fanbase.”

The bear pawed at Diaz’s head, nudging him away.

“She’s never been a fan of my jokes. Not an ounce of humor in her. And she’s got a lotta ounces.”

Priscilla roared.

“Kidding, baby gurl.”

Wadsworth stepped into the room, looking like his old self. Quite literally, in fact. His wrinkled brows furrowed into a deep frown.

Relief swelled inside Milo as he took in Wadsworth’s approach. Even if the enchanter had healed his wounds, Milo saw his impaled chest, and he sensed the various outlier possibilities where the extensive casting pushed well beyond Wadsworth’s limitations.

Wadsworth took a deep drag off his cigarette and then exhaled his aggravation. “If you slackers are done goofing off.”

“Slackers?” Milo asked, aghast in the phoniest sense possible. “I’ve been on the mend, healing. Recovering from—”

“Lazy.” Wadsworth scoffed. “All of you.”

“You’ve also been recovering.” Gladiatrix folded her arms. “Doing nothing.”

“Yeah, old man. You’re a bum, too.” Diaz tipped his hat. “Welcome to the slacker’s club.”

“We meet every third Thursday of the month,” Milo said with a smirk. “Although, we tend to skip the meetings, slacking off and all.”

Diaz snorted. “I heard jacking.”

The pair nearly exploded in a fit of laughter until Wadsworth’s scowl tempered their teasing.

“I’m not young and spry like I used to be,” he explained. “Accessing my full rejuvenation form hits a lot harder at a hundred and thirty-eight.”

“ What? ” They all thought with slack jaws and utter disbelief on their faces.

And for good reason, everything in the media said Samual Wadsworth was in his seventies, but I supposed a co-founding member of the Global Guilds could manipulate details over the many decades. Very many decades in his case.

Unwilling to offer any more explanation for his comment, Wadsworth led them deeper into the building. Further inside, this glamoured warehouse started to resemble the Global Guild-level detainment facility that it was, something privately funded and off the books, according to Milo. I wasn’t sure whether the sinking pit of skirting around government sanctions came from me or Milo.

The security was top-notch. It held wards meant to repel psychic magics, yet I slipped inside all the same. Whether I’d intuitively retained some of the sleuthing under the radar skills my Doppler shared before his demise or my fully formed branch simply overpowered the protections put in place, I didn’t worry. Too much, anyway. Wadsworth had special forces positioned throughout this small facility, rotating through actual guild members like himself, Gladiatrix, Enchanter Diaz, and Milo.

“We keep the place moving,” Wadsworth said, going on a long tangent explaining the primal and cosmic magics used to move the building from one location to the next undetected.

“Cool deal.” Milo nodded approvingly, mind scouring potential futures where this place would be compromised, yet given his calm expression, I’d wager he didn’t see any.

“I should’ve just done this to begin with,” Wadsworth said with a huff. “But knowing that trashy True Witch, she would’ve attempted putting up a real fight the first time we’d grabbed her if things hadn’t gone her way.”

“In a nutshell,” Milo said.

Convincing The True Witch her plan was working seemed like such a clever idea at the time, planning around every potential scenario and luring the other Celestial Coven members out. And while she was still out there, Theodore was out there with her, I took refuge in the successes. Three pillars of the coven had been stopped. Two were captured and now detained in this private facility. The third, The Sisters Three, had died and finally gone from this world.

Wadsworth stopped at a completely sealed chamber made of glass. Multiple layers that looked like smaller transparent boxes locked inside of each other until the final glass box about the size of a milk crate. It hovered in the center, each glass box rotated continuously, and the light of the room revealed the subtly carved enchantments on the glass.

In that final box lay a pile of dust.

“This is what remains of the skeleton witch,” Wadsworth grumbled. “Not how I hoped to detain him, but the fucker kept coming, so I had to smash him.”

“Guess we don’t have to ask pass or smash.” Milo grinned.

“Nope.” Diaz wheezed. “Wadsworth is smashing all them bones.”

“And making sure he kept coming ,” Milo added.

Those two dolts burst into laughter because they had the sense of humor of twelve-year-olds.

“I did it so he’d stop coming,” Wadsworth interjected, clearly missing the phrasing that played through Milo and Diaz’s minds.

“There’s gotta be better ways to stop bones from coming,” Diaz said with a bellowing laugh.

“Oh, trust me. There are lots of ways to handle a bone that’s coming.” Milo clutched his ribs, ignoring the slight pain that came from laughing, lost in the joy of joy with his new annoying enchanter friend.

They both laughed so hard they floated momentarily, one light breeze away from twirling round and round.

“Anyway,” Wadsworth glared at the pair, waiting for them to finally stop laughing.

That didn’t happen until Gladiatrix flicked them both on the back of their ears, sending a searing pain reminiscent of a really horrible piercing experience. Not that either of them knew what that sensation felt like, but I’d drifted in enough minds to retain the awful feeling of a needle jabbing the skin in the wrong way and lingering for hours or days to come.

“He’s still in there, still radiating magics,” Wadsworth explained. “But our psychics can’t find much of a foothold to investigate his mind.”

No wonder they couldn’t. His thoughts were as shattered as his bones. The teensiest fragments of memories floated around his being like algae. If he weren’t a member of the Celestial Coven, the Western Pillar of the Four Corners, I’d have sworn he was dead and gone. I couldn’t fathom how a mind this broken could ever piece itself back together, but Wadsworth seemed certain, Milo seemed certain, and I’d watched Grim repair every broken bone after Gladiatrix punched them to bits.

“Are we gonna tape him back together or what?” Milo asked.

“We’ll wait patiently,” Wadsworth said, which was absurd since he was the most impatient member of their group and possibly the only person in the world who wanted The True Witch dead more than me.

Still, his thoughts, those on the surface, didn’t carry cunning or calculated deceit. He was genuine, it seemed.

Wadsworth moved them to the opposite side of the facility to an iron chamber filled with dozens of chains looped every which way and holding a bloated, rotting body in the center like a forgotten meal in a spider’s web.

Each link of the chains held a sigil meant to prevent this corpse from escaping, prevent anyone from entering.

“Yeesh.” Gladiatrix grimaced, biting back the foul taste that wafted down her throat like sludge from a single poorly timed inhale through her nose.

Despite the layers upon layers of iron walls, the fact they observed this corpse through a camera in the neighboring room, the enchanter with supreme senses still caught a whiff of the terrible odor.

“Why are you keeping this one?”

“I killed Lazarus twice in combat when he tried to escape the MDC,” Wadsworth said, mind flashing back to the difficult battle he faced while pitted against two pillars of the Celestial Coven. “Little bastard got back up almost instantaneously like death hadn’t gripped him.”

“Maybe it hadn’t.” Diaz shrugged.

“Trust me,” Wadsworth said with flashes of his battle surfacing. Images of Lazarus’ snapped neck, of his bloody heart in Wadsworth’s grasp, of a thousand other injuries inflicted that brought each witch to the precipice of death. “I know how to kill someone.”

“I figured it out.” Diaz slammed a fist into his palm. “He’s got cat magic, and it gives him nine lives, but now he’s run outta lives. Game over. No save file.”

Milo shook his head. “That’s not a magic.”

“He’s playing dead.” Wadsworth glared at the corpse his team had taken every precaution to trap, but not one to preserve the corpse.

There was a spike of hate from Wadsworth, a whisper of hope that the witch felt some pain, some disgust in the rotting shambles of his being.

I doubted Lazarus felt anything in his current state. His magic and mind had stilled. I didn’t understand the full extent of his resurrection branch, but as I glossed through the memories I’d acquired from The Sisters Three, I found glimpses of Lazarus in similar conditions awakening and healing without a trace of death lingering in his body.

It was a bizarre sensation, rifling through memories that weren’t my own. Sorting through thousands of years of knowledge seemed impossible, yet when I searched for some in specific, the memories appeared without question. It was sickening, like having a search engine at my fingertips from the minds of three witches I’d slaughtered. Ultimately, I felt worse for their victims, the tens of thousands, and the millions more they intended on killing.

“So, what’s the next step?” Milo asked.

“We wait for these two pillars to recover, then you do your psychic mumbo jumbo, we get a lead on where The True Witch fled, hopefully more intel on the identities of the other coven members, and then we fuck ‘em all up.”

That was right. Despite the four most powerful core members of the Celestial Coven attacking the city, they had many others over the centuries. From the flashes of memories I’d searched from The Sisters Three, they seemed to keep twelve witches at all times, one for every branch. When a witch died, their essence was transferred into the bone staff that I’d destroyed.

There was so much more that The Sisters Three had answers to, yet I needed to find it buried in the memories I’d taken. They’d walked the world for thousands of years, one of the pillars beside The True Witch, and yet she still kept so much of the workings a secret. I wasn’t sure if The Sisters Three didn’t have the identities of current members in the Celestial Coven or perhaps they’d destroyed that memory before I took it. Seemed like something spiteful those goddesses would’ve done.

I reeled my telepathy away from Milo and his Global Guild comrades, delving deeper into my own mind so I could hopefully unravel some of the mysteries behind the Celestial Coven.

In the corner of my eye, at the edge of my inner core, sat the visions I’d absorbed from Milo’s mind more than a year ago. The visions I couldn’t make any sense of for the longest time. And now, I’d warped them into small marble-shaped lights so they’d be easier to store.

One in particular shined a bit brighter, the crimson sparkle carrying an allure.

I’d mostly ignored Milo’s visions after I’d finally learned how to keep them under control. But this one called to me, similarly to a strong mind that reached out. I’d say my connection to Milo provoked this spark. Although, every vision stored in my head came from my connection with Milo. Surely, there was something special about this one. Something that urged my magic to reveal it above the others. Something to indicate why it held so much pain in a tiny glimmer of light that radiated through my body as I attempted to work.

Pulling the vision from the pile, I held the tiny light between my hands until the images of an unknown possibility revealed itself in the form of a fast-moving scene throughout the city.

Not an unknown possibility. I’d seen this vision before, this terrible and horrifying vision of death. Death everywhere in Chicago. Death that took everyone. This vision had awoken me weeks ago in the middle of the night, haunting and horrible, yet Milo promised it was impossible to achieve. A future that required his death first. A future he’d done everything to divert. This awful night would never happen.

I shivered, taking in the reality of Milo’s near fatality, the reality of this vision.

Fire burned. Buildings crumbled. The earth had split open and swallowed thousands. Debris and death hit with every single breath as I whirled faster throughout the city, looping to the end of this vision.

Visions weren’t always literal, not an actual depiction of how the events would play out. That much I’d learned from Milo’s experiences. But my chest still tightened when I reached the mountain of corpses, finding my homeroom coven sprawled across the sea of bodies. Former homeroom coven. It was almost summer. They were done with their classes, and they’d be third-year students focused on internships and reporting to the newly appointed Dean of Admissions, whereas I’d find myself working with a new batch of first-year witches again.

I panicked, averting my eyes as I hovered over the bodies of my dead students and reached the peak of this disgusting mountain.

The perpetrator of this destruction and devastation stood proudly with a smile painted in blood on his face. Theodore Whitlock.

His shadow conjured monstrous silhouettes of demons, demonic energy he controlled, and hellish beasts he sought to unleash upon the world.

I leapt forward, startling poor Charlie as I returned to the living room of my house, blinking away the splotchy remnants of the worst possible future in existence.

And it was possible, too. Despite everything Milo had done to prevent this potential outcome, to change fate, Theodore Whitlock had escaped with The True Witch. He roamed the world, conjuring new and awful ways to hurt, to maim, to torture, and slaughter everyone.

But I could stop him. I’d come close during the attack on the academy. I’d come close to finishing him and Amara.

The academy. The academy that continued changing, growing, evolving into something better. A better brighter version I couldn’t see myself involved in. Not currently. Not until I’d done something about this impending vision. I wouldn’t allow it to become a reality.