Sylvia stumbled out of the clearing, venturing back into the world she had remade.
CHAPTER FORTY
Silas flicked his caster open and closed, open and closed, open and closed. Minutes passed as he echoed the motion, a blister building on his finger from repetition.
The traffic didn’t move a fucking inch.
Whoever built the roads around LAX deserved to burn in the deepest, darkest pits of Hell.
Open and closed. Open and closed.
“Can you stop doing that? It’s creepy.”
Silas turned to Anika, who tapped her fingers on the steering wheel of their rental car. He had wanted to drive, but she insisted that she do it because he had “scary murder eyes” and was “likely to road rage them into a D-list celebrity.”
Open and closed. Open and closed.
“Oh my god, Silas, put that damn thing away before I put you away.”
Closed.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that this whole plan is ridiculous and I was kind of hoping you’d drop the weird revenge mission thing on the plane, except instead you spent six and a half hours staring daggers at the seat in front of you and now you’re doing knife bits in the passenger seat like a freaking psychopath!”
Open. Closed.
“I’m not dropping this, Anika.”
Anika’s fingers stopped tapping, her grip going tight for a minute before relaxing. She sighed. “Revenge isn’t going to bring him back.”
A loud horn split the air. “Line’s moving,” he said.
Anika tutted, but let it drop, focusing on the road ahead as the car inched forward.
Open. Closed.
Revenge isn’t going to bring him back.
It was true.
Nothing was going to bring him back.
But revenge, at least, would be something. Revenge would mean Silas was trying to fix the catastrophic mistake he’d made.
Revenge would mean this wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
Revenge was the only thing he could think of when he was this fucking angry.
It was a pit, the rage, and he didn’t think he could climb out of it, not without a ladder of bones and blood to pull him up. He didn’t justwantSylvia gone—heneededher gone. Anyone with that type of power living in their blood was a ticking time bomb. How those other bombs would be dealt with was something he couldn’t even begin to decide amid the fury that clouded his brain.
All he knew was that no unsettled witch was safe. He wouldn’t think about who that list included.
The car moved forward a whole foot. They were practically flying.
He should just get out. He could run to Aestas faster than this. He reached for the handle, ready to—
The pulse threw him back against the seat. Fire shot up his spine, down his hands. He slammed them so hard against the door that the reverberations went down to his bones. He started hyperventilating, his breath whipping out of his lungs.
