Witches weren’t meant to bond to their warriors like this. It wasn’t supposed to be sexual, and it definitely wasn’t supposed to entail shared thoughts and physical sensations. Witches were meant to pull energy from warriors, and warriors were meant to protect their witches. And that was it.
This… This would shock the coven.
“Fine,” Circe said, holding her hands up to take them off Wes. “They go together.”
She gave Bridge a wide-eyed look that said, “What the fuck?” and nodded both of my warriors toward the truck in front of me. Atlas slid into the left side, and Wes climbed into the right side, and once I was in between them, only then did I feel any small measure of peace.
It didn’t last. On the ride home, Leander drove while Bridge explained what had happened from their perspective after we’d disappeared. Being in the back of this pickup was strange. We’d spent the last two months driving it around like we owned it. Of course, like Atlas had once flippantly said, nothing was real in the liminal. We hadn’t been driving this truck. We hadn’t really been living at the estate. Had the magic been real? I still felt it in my veins. I still radiated with the aftereffects of banishing the demon. It would take me a lifetime to figure out where the lines were between reality and what had happened to us.
“We knew you were in the liminal,” she said. “But we just didn’t know how to get you out. We couldn’t summon you from the liminal without summoning the demon with you, and we couldn’t destroy the liminal with you in it. Banishing the demon was out of the question, so we just kept researching, kept trying to figure out a way to contact you.”
I grabbed both of my warriors’ hands and gripped them tight, refusing to lose myself in the memories of what had happened right before we’d gotten out: the swirling vortex, Wes’s screams, the blinding pain. I couldn’t process that and Bridge’s story at the same time.
“It’s okay,” Wes reminded us. “We’re okay.”
Were we? Was Wes still Wes? Not even an hour ago, he had a demon squirreling around inside his body, Atlas had been enraged by his brother’s violation, and I’d been overcome by enough divine magic to rip the liminal apart.
“How’d you end up doing it?” Atlas asked, seeming to take the question right out of my head.
“It was when you talked to Tita through the mirror,” Bridge answered. “She said you mentioned Día de Muertos. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t think of it myself. Of course that would be the perfect time. The veil is thin.” Bridge looked over her shoulder at me, casting a raised eyebrow at our joined hands. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner, Marts. I really tried.”
Tita had saved me in the end. With the coven pulling from this side and me pushing from that side, I’d had enough power to complete the spell. I should have been thrilled at the thought of seeing her. Instead, I just felt…numb.
“What happened at the ritual?” I asked, ignoring her apology. “After we fell in, did we just…disappear?”
“Yes,” Leander answered. “Your bodies, along with the demon. You fell into the vortex, and it closed around you, and we were all left standing there with our thumbs up our asses, not sure what to do about it.”
“Lilith was pissed,” Bridge said. “I’d never seen her so angry. It took all of us to get you out tonight, a full coven. The magic was…overwhelming.”
Yeah, I can imagine.
Atlas snorted, evidently having heard that, and Wes sighed, glancing out of the window.
“So what happened on your end?” Bridge asked. “How’d you end up getting out? Is the demon still in the liminal?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know, and I was too exhausted to explain. I gripped Wes’s hand tighter and leaned my head on Atlas’s shoulder to let my eyes close.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Bridge said. “Get some rest.”
I did.
I woke up in a dark room, staring at a ceiling I’d seen a million times before. For a moment, only a heartbeat, I thought it hadn’t worked. I thought I was back in the liminal, that this never-ending nightmare had played the cruelest joke on me by letting me believe we’d broken free, only to swallow us back up the moment we weren’t looking.
But then a throat cleared from the corner of the room, and I came face-to-face with the vice president of the Royal Harlots, Circe. Her dark hair was braided back away from her face, revealing her intense black stare and pointed pursed lips. She had one ankle propped up on the other knee, her leather boot glistening in the low light, and judging by the way she pulled on her cigarette, this wasn’t going to be a happy conversation.
“So,” she said, tapping ash into the tray on the table next to her. “How’s it going?”
I grimaced and tried to push myself into a seated position, only for my tired muscles to give out on me. I flopped back onto the pillows. Then, I realized we were alone. Atlas and Wes weren’t here with me.
“Where are they?” I asked, my tone sounding more demanding than I’d intended. I searched my body for them, sensing our tender thread pulling me down the hallway. Wes was about a hundred yards to the right, Atlas farther on beyond him. The first was still asleep, dreaming about blood rituals and my eyes when I stared up at him from between his legs. I decided not to question how I knew his dreams and focused on Atlas, who was facing his own inquisition from Valkyrie. His annoyance and frustration pooled in my chest, amplifying my own.
“They’re fine,” Circe said. “As I’m sure you know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I hadn’t told them anything about the liminal or what we’d done there. I hadn’t given them very much at all, so unless Atlas was spilling his guts, which I doubted, I didn’t understand how she could have access to that information.
“You know what it means,” Circe said, taking another long draw on her cigarette before pointing it at me. “You’ve been a very naughty witch, haven’t you?”
I took a deep breath and tried to steady it on its way out, every nerve in my body aching for me to find my warriors. We couldn’t be apart. It physically hurt to not be near them, and that, of course, raised a whole host of other concerns. What had we done to get out of there? What had we sacrificed?
