Page 94

The temperature plummeted hard enough that the water in a glass on Danika's desk clouded, a delicate web of ice racing across its surface.

My attention went instinctively to River.

For once, the cold wasn't his.

He had gone rigid near the door, his head angled toward the wall behind Danika's desk. The air immediately around him shimmered, and a thin vibration ran through the room, like a wire pulled so tight it was one breath away from snapping.

"Get out," he said, his gaze never leaving the wall. "Both of you. Now."

Danika's hands were already rising. "I am not going anywhere, Mr. Blackman, you are forgetting this is my coven. Whatever it is, it's between us and the doors."

"I am aware."

The wall came apart before either of us could move.

The black marble didn't crack or explode. Seams appeared across stone that had been solid for longer than I'd been alive, thin lines spreading in an impossible pattern before the sections began folding backward one after another. The entire wall peeled away as smoothly as a page turning.

Behind it was gray.

That was all. An absence so flat my eyes couldn't judge how far it extended, with something approximately nine feet tall standing inside it.

I tried to look at the thing directly, and my gaze slid off it the way it slid off the blurred man in my mother's photograph. I could make out height and shoulders, the suggestion of limbs, pieces of a body that seemed almost normal until I tried to understand how they fit together.

My mind refused to hold the whole of it at once.

Somewhere beneath conscious thought, recognition whispered through me.

Fae.

Danika sucked in a breath beside me.

"Oh."

That single sound frightened me almost as much as the thing in the wall. There was no High Priestess in it. No authority. No woman who had spent sixty years arranging the world so very little could surprise her.

My grandmother was staring at the creature with naked recognition.

"It's you."

I turned toward her so quickly the mismatched heights of my shoes nearly put me on the floor.

Every piece of the last two weeks shifted around that opening. The impossible white flower my father had given my mother. The emissary in the truck stop. Destin's warning. Demons moving through territory they had no business crossing.

She is spoken for.

I looked from the thing to my grandmother. "You know what that is."

Danika didn't take her eyes off it. "I have known it for twenty-six years."

My magic answered before I could.

Gold rushed along my arms, hot enough to hurt, while Danika lifted both hands. The air in the office thickened around us, and blue fire crawled over her fingers before winding around her wrists.

"Hazel, get behind me."

"Not a fucking chance."

Her head turned just enough for me to see the fury gathering in her profile. "This is not the time to argue with me, girl."