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“Everyone, inside the circle!” Jax called, wasting not a moment.
I took Mel’s hand, giving her human contact, even if it wasn’t from the person she needed most right now. Nico took one last look around at the vines hovering above us, their ends waving in the air as they futilely tried to reach us.
Our coven crowded around Jax and the spirits ringed us, some of them overlapping one another to make sure they could all fit. I was glad none of the ghosts hovered inside any of the four of us. This was already harrowing enough.
“Ready?” Jax asked.
“Do it,” I said, expecting things to go wrong at any moment.
Ty would appear, or Jax’s circle would fail, or the vines would lengthen and reach us…
But Jax’s circle glowed a brilliant green, enveloping the world around us in light. The world lurched, and even though I couldn’t see it, I felt it shift. The moment felt endless, timeless, and my senses flooded, not just with light, but with everything. I felt completely overwhelmed, violently disconnected from my body.
I floated serenely in some unseen dimension before being rudely brought back to Earth. Everything careened back into place with a sudden stop. The overwhelming noise in my head fell silent, the glow disappeared, and I was momentarily deaf, blind, and dumb.
Touch was the first sense I recovered as someone squeezed my shoulder. I blindly turned toward them, blinking furiously until my vision returned. With it came a headache that had me doubling over in pain. I’d forgotten just how much I hated being teleported.
“I brought us to the safehouse,” Jax said, his words too loud for my sensitive ears.
Then he waved a hand in front of my face, and all my senses dialed down. Thankfully, it was nighttime, but the street light didn’t help my headache. I turned my back on it, my eyes oversensitive even after Jax helped out. Our world felt cold, the air so clear and fresh compared to the infernal realm, and I wondered how far ahead we’d skipped through time.
“Thank you,” I croaked.
Jax grinned. “Turns out, being a sensate comes in handy as a teleporter.”
As my wits returned, my breath froze in my chest, hoping everyone had made it through okay. One person in particular.
I whirled to find Mel standing close to her mother’s spirit just inside the wards. With a sigh of relief, I focused my abused senses on her, noticing out of the corner of my eye that Nico looked like he was handling this just fine. Perhaps as a bodyguard, he’d gotten used to being teleported around with his rich clientele.
“These are your friend’s coven-parents,” Mel’s mother gestured at two ghosts in outdated demon hunter armor not far away. “Of the Flidais coven.”
I’d seen big chunks of metal plating on armor like that in historical documentaries we’d watched in Demon Hunter Academy. Our coven-parents still had an old set of their own, but no one used armor that heavy these days.
Mel grinned at the female ghost. “You must be Nimue’s mother.”
Now that she mentioned it, this ghost had the same long, red braids that Nimue wore, and the same angular cheekbones. Her eyes lit up. “She lives?”
“Yes,” Mel rushed to tell her that Nimue had her own coven now. “Let me get my phone and I’ll—”
“We’ll try to hold on as long as we can,” the other ghost said.
“I’ll get it,” Jax said, rushing toward the house. “You stay with your mom.”
We’d left all our technology inside this time, knowing it wouldn’t serve us in the infernal realm at all and would only get ruined.
Mel tugged me toward her mother’s spirit. “This is Hudson. I met him not long after…”
I’d first met Mel at the academy, and she’d already been traumatized back then by how her mother had died. Now she had a chance to say everything she’d always wanted.
“And it took you this long to join a coven with him?” Mel’s mother scoffed, looking me up and down.
I chuckled in surprise. I’d never expected to meet Mel’s parents, considering she’d never known her father, and her mother had been killed before I met her. I felt truly honored that Mel would spend what might be her last moments with her mother introducing me to her.
I smiled my most winning smile. “Mel wasn’t easy to convince.”
Mel gestured to Nico, who reluctantly came to her side. “This is Nico, our bodyguard turned agent turned coven-mate.”
While they talked, I glanced around, finding a few other ghosts slowly fading into the ether. Outside of Samhain, most spirits couldn’t stay in the realm of the living for long. But then again… it might be closer to Samhain now. Who knew how long we’d been inside the infernal realm this time? Or rather, the infernal periphery… Tempest had explained that we’d never actually set foot in the infernal realm itself. The little hellfox sat at Mel’s heels as she talked to her mother’s spirit.
