“How do you mean?” he asked.
There was a fae sword strapped to her back, but in her hand, she gripped the staff she’d been favoring during the training. Raising it before us, she looked us over, taking our measure—her dark rebels, her fighters, her friends, her lovers, her hellhounds—and her magic crackled to life, arcing along the wood.
“Let’s show these motherfuckers who’s coming home tonight.”
Twenty-Eight
GRAY
Blackmoon Bay is burning…
Jael’s earlier warnings echoed, but they had not done the situation justice.
As the fae glamour fell away, taking with it the sunshine and the birds and the bright, cloudless sky, my whole body froze in sheer horror as I took in the scene.
Therealscene.
Our home, as we’d known it, was well and truly gone.
Luna’s café had been leveled, leaving no more than a smoking husk in its place. The magical boundary that had protected it had clearly evaporated. I thought of Ella, the cute fox shifter I’d last seen behind the counter, how she’d always saved the last chocolate macadamia cookies for me. I hoped she’d gotten out alive.
The boats that hadn’t been blasted ashore were frozen in the icy bay, smashed and sticking up at odd angles, unmoving. They were so still, it looked like a photograph.
The warehouse around the corner that had served as the base of operations for Waldrich’s Imports, the black-market employer Ronan and I had shared, was little more than a steel frame now. The Waldrich’s van I used to drive—the same one the guys and I had driven to Norah’s house to rescue Asher—was tipped on its side in the middle of the street, all of the windows smashed.
Everywhere we turned, destruction and chaos reigned supreme. Fires were still smoldering. Buildings we’d visited and passed by thousands of times had been reduced to rubble and ash. Stores and homes and restaurants, parks and plazas, trees, all of the places that had made Blackmoon Bay something more than a name on a map…
I swallowed the tightness in my throat. Those places no longer existed.
But the most frightening sight of all wasn’t the burned-out husks of buildings or the rows of decimated houses.
It was the people.
Human and supernatural alike, they walked the streets in the same glassy-eyed daze as Reva had described. The same as when everything had still looked shiny and new, as though the glamour had so thoroughly transfixed them, they’d never again be able to see things as they truly were.
One of them passed by me now, brushing against my arm as if she hadn’t even noticed me—a woman in a bright green sundress, her arms loaded up with flyers, the bare skin of her legs black with frostbite she didn’t seem to feel. I reached out and took her hand, stopping her forward momentum.
At this, she finally turned around, her glassy eyes fixating on me as if she were waiting for me to cue up her lines.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Stupid question with an obvious answer, but in that moment, I couldn’t form a logical thought.
She cocked her head, her smile unbroken. “Would you like to come to our meeting? Please bring a dish to pass.” She handed me a flyer from the stack in her arms, then moseyed along, disappearing around the corner.
I glanced down at the paper, my heart twisting.
Unhappy with your lot in life?
Wishing things could be better?
WITCHES ARE THE PROBLEM.
The good news? Problems can be solved.
But only by taking ACTION.
A better, happier, richer life can be yours.
Find out how!
