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“You were naughty,” Katrina said slowly, as if explaining to a child. “So you’ll drink this and be punished.”
Gabi snorted but did not open her mouth.
“You lust after a married man,” Katrina said. “It’s my job to punish you.”
Gabi mashed her lips tighter together. Her hands were sore, her leg muscles straining.
A slick kind of power pressed against her throat, and then her lungs were burning. Her mouth gaped open without her permission, and she choked on the liquid that was shoved down her throat—
Gabi stumbled back, crashing into Gus’s front room, into her own body again, her breathing a torn mess and her eyes watering.
She could still feel her wrists, the chafe of rope around them, and she shuddered even as she tried to lock her body.
Joy shook badly enough that her want shot prisms of light across the floor; Gabi reached for her again and rubbed comforting circles into her back. The touch calmed Gabi too, allowed her to shake off the phantom sense of being Victoriya.
Eilidh and Gus looked equally rattled.
Only Salma seemed calm, though Gabi knew a forced calm when she saw it.
“Wherewasthat? Does anyone recognise it?” Her dark eyes pinned every one of them, searching.
“I do,” Gabi rasped, feeling hollowed out. Raw. “It’s the records room at town hall.”
Salma inhaled sharply, digesting the info.
“Take a moment, and then we’ll make the worst offensive spells we know.”
They wouldn’t just be armed with defence spells but ones to hurt, too?
Gabi needed a whole day to recover, but when Joy turned and pushed to her feet, Gabi realised tears carved shiny paths down her cheeks. A protective rush woke Gabi up and shoved off whatever weakness had gripped her.
She opened her arms and Joy tipped forward into them; within seconds they were hugging tight, Joy’s chest shuddering as she cried.
When Joy finally stilled, Gabi ran a hand down her hair and said, “I need to call someone. I’ll be a minute. Will you be okay?”
She’d been slowly resolving herself to make the call since this morning. She hadn’t spoken to him in years, but for this, for Victoriya, she would.
Assuming his number hadn’t changed.
Joy nodded and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Go, I’ll be fine.”
That was an overstatement, but Gabi took the out she offered and headed for the door, digging her phone from her pocket. Her chest pulled tighter, but her voice was steady when she said, “It’s Gabriella. I need your help.”
“Give me a time and place,” Peregrine Morris replied, not even hesitating.
Gabi crushed down spiky emotions and told him, “One hour. Town Hall.”
She put the phone down before he could say anything else and squeezed her eyes tight against the tears stabbing them. He sounded different, so much older and deeper, but it was stillhisvoice, the voice she had grown up hearing.
Peregrine, who she’d thought was her cousin for so long, her older, serious, grumpy—butalwaysreliable—cousin.
Peregrine, who had kept the secret of being her brother, and broken her heart with the deception.
TWENTY-NINE
JOY
All too soon Joy’s pockets were filled with sachets and crystals, and her coven was moving as one down the stairs of Gus’s apartment building into the cold, pale afternoon outside. The sea hissed over the sounds of traffic on the main road, and a few houses back, kids were running wild, laughing and shouting.
