He’s angry.
Twig doesn’t get angry.
But he is now.
My chest tightens. “Please, Twig. I need you to not be upset with me right now.”
He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, muttering something too quiet to catch. Then he groans a loud, frustrated groan. “I wish I could go through the rift with you. We could fight Seraphina together.”
“Fight her how—with our proton pack?”
“Why not?”
“Twig …”
“No, seriously, Selah. Why not?”
“Our proton pack is filled with granola bars and bug spray. Not to mention, your arm is broken.”
“But what if we made a real one? An actual scientific weapon?”
The set of his mouth, the eager tilt of his chin brings me back in time, to the summer before sixth grade, after we watched Ghostbusters 1 and 2 and built our very first ghost trap. A shoebox wrapped in tinfoil with a magnetized coil of copper curled around a pack of D batteries and a candy bar for bait. We planted it right here, in this very cemetery, convinced we were going to catch the Woman of the Woods. The next morning, the lid was off and the candy bar gone. A raccoon, probably. But Twig’s conviction that it had very nearly worked was so unshakable, it made me believe too.
And now, here he is again, that same conviction locked into place as he stands from the headstone. “Something that only requires one arm to wield.”
He begins to pace. I can practically see the gears turning behind his eyes—calculating, sketching mental blueprints. This has become a problem to solve. And Twig Calloway doesn’t fail when it comes to solving problems.
Honestly, it makes me want to cry.
“I can’t go through the rift because I can’t see the rift, but I can be here. The question is—how will I know when you’re here, too?” He stops suddenly, as if asking the question out loud has unlocked an answer. “The tracking app. What if it works through dimensions?”
He’s not asking me.
He’s asking himself.
I’ve seen Twig like this before, muttering his way through a plan. It’s best not to interrupt.
He resumes pacing. “The EMF meter went wild at the Vandenberg estate, which means this dimension must have a magnetic field. And magnetic fields can be destabilized.”
He bites his thumbnail. “I’d need some sort of disruptor coil. A pulse generator. A high-voltage power cell—like a car battery, but way stronger. There’ll be a bunch of people here, just like the masquerade ball, and a fallen angel will literally be rising from the grave. With that much energy, we could tear it down completely. Forget the rift. We could collapse the barrier between dimensions.”
He turns to me with bright eyes. “I could fight with you. We could try to take her out in a way that doesn’t involve the locket.”
“Twig, she’s?—”
“An angel, I know. But she’s fallen, Selah. Which means she’s bound to earth. Bound things have limits. They can break. Iron weakens fae. Silver burns werewolves.”
“Sunlight torches vampires,” I say softly.
“Exactly. So she has to have a weakness, too. Some kind of Achilles’ heel.”
She does.
Me.
I’m her weakness.
But I don’t say it.
