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"Good, because I'm not arguing."

"Behind me, girl."

For twenty-six years, some part of me had obeyed that voice before I realized I was doing it. I had spent my childhood moving when Danika told me to move, sitting when she told me to sit, swallowing questions because the High Priestess had decided I didn't need the answers.

That girl had been gone for a while.

I moved beside her instead.

Magic poured over my shoulders until gold swallowed my shadow on the floor. My stance would have been considerably more impressive if I hadn't been wearing one fifteen-year-old's sneaker and one nine-hundred-dollar oxblood boot with my own blood still buried somewhere in the seam, but I planted both feet and stayed exactly where I was.

Danika looked at me in irritation.

I had spent most of my life believing that if the day ever came when my grandmother and I stood on the same side of a fight, one of us would have to be possessed.

Apparently, I'd underestimated us both.

"I'm not eleven anymore," I told her, not taking my eyes away from the thing in the wall. "I'm done standing behind people while they decide what happens to me. If you know this thing and you intend to fight it, then tell me what I need to know and we'll fight it together." Her eyes flashed and I kept going before she could interrupt. "We can argue about the seating arrangements afterward."

The gray shifted.

River came to my other side before I could react. Cold rolled from him, but I could feel the instability underneath it now, the faint strain in something that once would have seemed limitless. He had told me exactly what coming here might cost him.

He had come anyway.

Danika looked at River, then at me.

For a heartbeat, the three of us stood there in the wreckage of a room where my grandmother had just admitted she'd tried to sell my soul and my dead mother had somehow reached across twenty-six years to stop her.

Danika's chin rose. Her eyes were wet, and for once she made no attempt to hide it.

"Very well," said the High Priestess of the Gatekeeper's Coven.

The thing in the gray stepped forward.

Blue fire climbed higher around Danika's hands while gold burned over my skin. Beside me stood a falling angel with less of himself than he'd had six days ago and absolutely no intention of leaving.

Together, we turned to face the hole where the wall used to be.

Chapter Twenty

The thing in the gray did not attack.

I had been prepared for practically anything at that point. My magic was at the ready, gold spilling from my arms and shoulders while every muscle in my body waited for the first sign of movement. I'd braced for teeth, speed, pain, and the particular horror of watching somebody I loved get hurt before I could stop it. Somewhere beneath all that adrenaline, I had at least a hundred terrible plans lined up and was fully prepared to try every single one of them.

Instead, the creature stopped a few feet inside Danika's office. For a moment, it simply stood there, its shape refusing to settle into anything my eyes could properly follow. Then I felt its attention turn toward me, a strange awareness crawling over my skin before coming to rest somewhere near my feet.

"You are wearing one boot."

I glanced down at the oxblood platform beside Stella's battered sneaker. Of all the things I'd expected from a nine-foot Fae power standing in a hole where my grandmother's wall used to be, criticism of my footwear hadn't made the list.

"Yeah, well. It's been a week."

Beside me, Danika made a strangled sound that would have been a laugh coming from almost anyone else. Her blue fire remained wound around her hands as she turned her head just enough to glare at me.

"You spoke to it."

"It spoke to me first. What was I supposed to do, ignore it? That's how you end up cursed."