A single moment seemed to stretch out for an eternity, and I could hardly breathe.

I had no doubt the woman sitting in front of me was the ruby priestess herself. But how had she gotten here? And what was she planning to do to me?

Again, I reached out for my power, connecting for a brief moment to the life force of a large oak in the backyard, but I wasn’t strong enough to hold onto it. I was powerless. I quickly looked around me to see if there was anything I could use as a weapon, but other than the furniture, the room was bare.

“Calm down, girl,” she said. She shook her head and motioned toward a matching chair next to her. “Come, sit down.”

My heart raced, and my mind struggled to keep up. I had literally just ripped her sister’s heart out less than twenty-four hours ago, yet she seemed completely unconcerned. If anything, she looked amused with her bright blue eyes and light smile.

“I’ll stay right here,” I said. “Say whatever it is you’ve come to say.”

She sighed and clasped her hands in her lap. “I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. Just sit down so we can have a little chat. I have a lot to say, and I don’t have much time. To be honest, neither do you.”

“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t trust you and your promises,” I said.

Amazingly, she laughed.

“I’m simply amazed at your spirit,” she said. “I was there for a good deal of my sister’s experiments when she first brought you here, and I have never seen anyone come through such torture with this kind of determination and spunk.”

Spunk? She was speaking to me as if I were a child who had simply gotten up after scraping my knee.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I’m impressed by you and what you’ve accomplished,” she said. “None of us believed it was possible to kill even one of us with the power we have gathered and consumed over the years, much less two of us. In our centuries of power, we’ve never truly been challenged by anyone, and it amuses me that the source of our destruction was a young girl like you.”

She genuinely did look amused. Almost giddy.

I struggled to make sense of her reaction. Was she just trying to get me to lower my defenses so she could kill me? Maybe she didn’t realize that I currently had no access to my own power.

“I loved my sister, Hazel, dearly. She was by far my favorite sister, but I warned her not to bring you here,” she said with a shrug. “Just like everyone else, she underestimated you. She thought she could control you and turn you into one of her precious daughters, but she didn’t understand just how strong you are.”

The ruby priestess straightened in her chair.

“But like I said, I am not like my sisters,” she said. Her eyes were bright and wide as she stared at me. “I think you are an incredible girl. It’s so romantic how much you love your demon and how much both of you would sacrifice for each other and for your friends. It’s absolutely fascinating to see how much you can accomplish through love and sheer strength of will. These are things my sisters do not understand at all.”

I had no idea why she was telling me these things. She admired me? Somehow, I seriously doubted that. What game was she playing here?

“Don’t look so confused. I’m trying to pay you a compliment, dear.”

“Is that really what you came all this way to tell me?” I asked.

She leaned back in the chair again, pressing her hands together in front of her chest. “You’re right. Of course, what was I thinking? We are on limited time here, but I just wanted you to know that I admire what you’ve been able to do so far,” she said. “I’ve been on the winning side for so long that it’s gotten quite boring. Oh, it was a challenge in the beginning to see what we could get away with, how many witches we could recruit to our covens or how many gates we could open successfully. But for decades now, there’s been no challenge to what we’re doing. Until you came along, of course.”

“So, I’m entertaining?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said with a wide smile, as if pleased I had finally understood what she’d been trying to tell me. “You’ve made things interesting again, and it’s been quite fun. But as soon as I felt my dear sister Hazel’s spirit fade from existence, I knew I would have to find you.”

Chills ran up my arms, and I took a step backward. I wasn’t sure I would survive a fight with this woman right now, and calling out for Brooke would do nothing but get her killed, too. I eyed the door, knowing that if she attacked, my only hope would be to run.

“I don’t want to die. It’s as simple as that,” she said. “I like being on the winning side, and up until a few months ago, I was. Now, I’m not so sure.”

My mouth slid open in shock. Wait a second. Was a priestess of the Order telling me she wanted to switch sides? Had I somehow fallen asleep and slipped into some kind of strange nightmare?

“I need your help, Harper. And, as it turns out, you need me, too. Unless, of course, you want to stay here in 1951. I’m sure you’ve realized your own mistake by now, am I right?”

I leaned against the side of the bed. I hadn’t been mentally prepared for a conversation like this after what I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours.

When I’d realized we were stuck here in the past, I’d been sure that I had just closed off my only chance to get home. But if the portal back home was closed, how was the ruby priestess sitting here in front of me?

In my fear and exhaustion, I hadn’t even realized the significance of her presence.

“There’s a portal home,” I said.

“Yes, indeed there is,” she said. “And of the remaining sisters, I’m the only one who knows it still exists. Hazel didn’t so much care for our other sisters. None of them understood her obsession with having daughters of her own, but I understood her pain. She was simply doing what she felt she needed to do to be happy. Everyone deserves happiness, so I supported her when she founded the Evers Institute.”

It was the second time she’d mentioned something about daughters. What in the world was she talking about?

I shook my head, confused. “Her daughters?” I asked.

The ruby priestess laughed, throwing her head back and clutching a hand to her chest. “You didn’t know?” she asked. “What is it you think she was doing here, exactly? Simply torturing girls for the pleasure of it?”

Her eyes were wide, as if that idea was completely outrageous.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I thought she was doing here,” I said. “That and trying to brainwash us to join her side.”

“Oh, Harper, no,” she said. “My sister Hazel was infertile. It was the greatest sadness of her life. Daughters are such an important part of what the Order of Shadows is all about, and no magic in existence was able to help Hazel have a daughter of her own. After years of deep depression and anger, she finally decided that if she couldn’t have biological daughters, she would simply steal the daughters of other women and make them her own.”

I closed my eyes, understanding now why all of us had been brought to this place.

“Whenever she would see a child or a girl she favored, she would bring them here to her little rehabilitation center. She would wipe their memories and torture them until they were broken little things,” she said. “Once a young witch was broken down completely, my sister found it very easy to replace her memories with new ones, making her believe that she had been born a true daughter of a priestess.”

“And what did she do with the girls she couldn’t break?” I asked, thinking of just how close I had come to having an icepick shoved through my brain.

“She had various uses for the girls she couldn’t turn into daughters,” she said. “Some of them were added to her living doll collection, which you’re no doubt familiar with at this point.”

I cringed, thinking of the time I had stumbled upon that room of horrors.

“This period in our history is particularly well-suited to this type of rehabilitation,” the ruby priestess said. “No one was closely monitoring private mental health facilities the way they are in our current time. And here, if any of her girls escaped, they would have nowhere to go. Of course, Hazel understood better than anyone that it was very dangerous to meddle with the past. Right now, for example, in 1951, all five of us are alive and well. My past self is back home right about now, probably fast asleep in her bed with no idea that I am sitting here with you now.”

She crossed her legs and leaned back.

“If I wasn’t afraid of causing some kind of catastrophic event, I could go to her now and warn her about you,” she said, a secret kind of smile crossing her lips, as if the thought had only just now occurred to her. “I could knock on my own door and say, Magda, in fifty years, go to this small town in Peachville and murder a young girl named Claire before Halloween so she doesn’t have a chance to give birth to the woman who will end us all.”

She laughed, doubling over in her chair, as if the idea was the most hilarious thing she had ever heard.

It terrified me, though, because she was right. What was to keep any of them from going back in time and killing me before I was even born? I shuddered at the thought.

“As fun as that might be,” she said, finally calming enough to speak, “it’s simply a terrible idea. Messing with the past is a very dangerous game. For that reason, Hazel always covered her tracks as best she could.”

I sat down fully on the bed, no longer strong enough to stand. “She burned the institute down,” I said, finally putting the detective words together. “She murdered all the girls she’d been unable to break and burned it to the ground with all of them inside, didn’t she?”

“Which is why it’s so ironic that she herself was killed the same way,” she said. “And yes, she would keep the institute open from 1947 to late 1951, filling it with girls she intended to groom as daughters of her own. When fall of 1951 arrived each time, she would turn some of the girls into hunters. Others she would devour to extend her own life, since she had no true daughters of her own. And when they were all dead, she would burn the institute to the ground. The papers would declare it one of the worst tragedies in the history of the state, and everyone would go about their business. Meanwhile, my sister would destroy her portal and create a new one that led her back to 1947, and she would start all over. Keeping the cycle the same meant very little interference, and since the manipulation of time is such an extremely rare ability, none of us could meddle in her business. Not even our High Priestess.”

“How many times?” I asked in a whisper. “How many times did she go through this cycle?”

“Oh, goodness, I can’t even imagine,” she said. She placed her index finger on her chin and looked up at the ceiling for a minute before finally nodding. “I think this was the tenth.”

My mouth went dry at the thought, and my heart ached for all those girls. Hundreds stolen from their lives and tortured. It made me sick.

“She was simply doing what she could to find her own piece of happiness,” she said, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do.

I scoffed, shaking my head.

“What?” she asked. Then, she nodded. “Oh, you don’t think we deserve happiness? We’re human, too, Harper. Well, as much human as you are.”

“Don’t compare yourself to me,” I said.

She shrugged. “You came to your demon side honestly. I’ll admit that much. But in the end, we are both part demon, part human. I know that you think what we’ve done is horrible, but once upon a time, the five of us were innocent young girls. Just like you,” she said. “We wanted to be happy, and we wanted to learn to use our magic to change the world. To help the world.”

“Help?”

“Once we realized we were in over our heads, of course, there was no way to stop what we had started,” she said. “Not without ending our own lives, and none of us were willing to do that. I know this won’t mean much to you from where you stand, but the five of us were every bit as much victims as the rest of the girls who have been pulled into the Order.”

I wasn’t buying this sob story for one second.

“And the demons you enslave and devour so that you can use their power for your own?” I asked. “What about them?”

“It’s so much more complicated than that,” she said. “You’re so young. You can’t possibly understand what we’ve all been put through over the centuries since we first were thrown into this life. But I’m not here to try to convince you to forgive the Order of Shadows. I know I won’t be able to change your mind about that.”

“No, you won’t,” I said.

“I came here to offer something to you,” she said. “But I wanted you to first understand that I have taken a big risk in coming to you like this. Since I was the only sister who knew the portal was still open and where to find it, I knew that this was my chance to get you alone. If my sisters or the High Priestess knew I was here talking to you right now, they would kill me without a second thought.”

“I doubt that,” I said, shaking my head. “They’d never cripple the ruby gates, no matter how angry you made them.”

She laughed at that, her eyes closing and a hand coming to her throat. Her nails were painted blood-red, and a large glittering ruby ring caught the light.

“You know a lot, but you don’t know everything,” she said. “I can be replaced just as easily as any Prima.”

“That’s what your sister was trying to do with the sapphire gates the night she kidnapped me,” I said. “But she failed.”

“My sister was acting in secret, trying to gain more power for herself,” she said. “Our High Priestess wasn’t exactly happy about that when she found out what my sister was planning to do, I can tell you that. I suspect the High Priestess had her own plans for reopening the sapphire gates until Hazel ruined it all by almost killing the last of Eloisa’s bloodline.”

“Zara,” I whispered.

“She’s still alive, though, I’ve heard,” the ruby priestess said. “But that’s not what I came here to talk about, either.”

“Go on,” I said.

“After Eloisa died, the High Priestess put a failsafe in place. A spell that would allow her to replace any of the rest of us much easier should we die,” she said. “Since Hazel had no true daughters of her own, it was imperative that we come up with another way to anoint a new priestess without having to kill someone of her direct bloodline. Otherwise, when you killed the emerald priestess, you might have simultaneously killed every witch tied to the emerald gates in a single instant.”

The ruby priestess laughed at the thought, but I nearly threw up.

My hand flew to my mouth. Had I really almost killed them all? Eloise and her daughters? The thousands of demons and witches tied to the emerald gates?

“Don’t blame yourself, dear,” she said, waving a hand in the air as if it were no big deal. “If you didn’t know, you didn’t do it on purpose. And besides, your precious friends from Cypress are safe. However, it’s your demon and the rest of them who are in danger now.”

My head snapped up at that.

“Jackson?” I asked, heart racing. “What’s happened to him?”

“He’s fine. For now,” she said. She stood and walked toward me, stopping at the end of the bed and running her hand along the wood of the canopy. “But my sister Hazel knew he was looking for you. He was killing her poor hunters by the dozens. She knew he would eventually stumble on the right information and find this place. Of course, he wouldn’t find you there since in the present day, there’s nothing here anymore but an abandoned house and a condemned old hospital.”

“What did she do to him?” I asked, standing.

“Before she died, she left him a present to find just in case she wasn’t there to intercept him herself,” she said. “Something so enticing, she knew he wouldn’t be able to resist.”

“What?”

The ruby priestess walked around the room, touching the things that had once belonged to her sister. She was taking her time in telling me, holding me there at the edge of the cliff.

“Replicating your handwriting and your way of talking wasn’t difficult for her after all the work she’d done studying your memories,” she said. “It was quite brilliant what she did, actually. Too bad she didn’t live to see her trap work so beautifully.”

“Tell me,” I said through clenched teeth. Perhaps I did still have some power left. I reached for it, finding a spark of energy.

“She made copies of the emerald gate ritual items, put them in a box with a handwritten note from you telling him you were locked in the past, but that you’d managed to kill the emerald priestess and capture her heart,” she said, placing her own hand on her chest. “She told him to set the gates free, and that’s exactly what he plans to do. Only, instead of releasing the gates, using those items will trigger a trap that will allow my sister, the amethyst priestess, to come through and destroy them all. She gave the tasks to Gladys, of course, because she is the deadliest of us all. At least you can rest easy knowing his death will be swift.”

She smiled, and I gathered the rest of the power I had left in my hands. A fiery glow emanated from my hands, but the ruby priestess seemed unconcerned. Her complacence only fueled my anger, and I pushed harder to connect to the tree in the backyard, pulling its power into my body.

“Harper,” she said, shaking her head. “You should know better than to try to start something right now. I know what you’ve been put through. If I wanted to, I could kill you with a glance.”

Her eyes flashed red for an instant, and I stepped back.

“If you really are as smart as I think you are, you’ll drop that power,” she said, the smile gone from her face for the first time since she had appeared. “I have been grateful for the diversion and challenge you’ve provided, and I would rather continue to play this game. Killing you now would be too easy. If I have to face you, someday, I’d rather do it when you had at least a small chance of survival. Let it go, Harper.”

My chest rose and fell with each labored and furious breath. I wished with all my heart that I did have the power to fight her now, but she was right. I was in no shape to start a fight with this woman. Besides, even if I could kill her right now, I’d be giving up my only chance of finding the portal home.

Reluctantly, I let the power drop from my hands and sank down onto the bed.

“Good girl,” she said, her smile and cheery tone instantly returned. “Now, I really am running out of time. But before I go, I want to offer you the opportunity to return home. If we go now, you might even have a chance to warn this Jackson of yours before he attempts to use the fake ritual items.”

“What do you want?” I asked, knowing we had finally reached the real reason for this unexpected visit.

“I want my sister’s heart,” she said. “I’m in trouble with the High Priestess for not telling her about this place. She says I put all of us at risk by keeping it from her, but if I return the master stone to her, I’ll be back in her good graces. If you hand it over to me willingly, I will show you the way home right now.”

I eyed her. “How do I know the portal home isn’t being guarded by your army?” I asked. “I hardly believe you’d just let me go free.”

“Oh, I would,” she said, walking back around the bed to stand in front of me. “I would take the stone and send you on your way. All you would have to do is agree that even if you destroy the rest of my sisters along the way, you will let me live in peace.”

I shook my head. “I don’t trust you,” I said. “Maybe you’re lying about Jackson, too, just to get me to agree to come with you.”

“I can assure you I’m not lying about Jackson,” she said. “He has the ritual items now in the castle of the Southern Kingdom. I imagine they are already making plans to set the first gate free tomorrow. Cypress? Yes, I am sure they would start there. He’s running out of time, and so are you. The portal my sister created will not stay open much longer now that she’s gone. This is your only chance, Harper. I can tell you’re not carrying the stone with you now, or I would simply take it for myself. I don’t have time to search for it, so I’m hoping you’ll hand it over.”

“You know I can’t do that,” I said, a piece of my heart breaking as I said the words.

I wanted to keep Jackson safe, but if I gave that master stone to her, they would simply create a new emerald priestess and the witches and demons tied to all of the emerald gates would remain prisoners. I also had these other girls to think about. I couldn’t just abandon them.

The ruby priestess drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. She shook her head and clasped her hands together.

“I was so hoping you loved your demon enough to agree to my terms,” she said. “But since you do not, I have no choice but to leave you here. Believe me when I say that I will truly miss the challenge you presented to us. Winning this war will be easy now, I’m afraid. Once that portal closes, Harper, there will be no way home for you. Time travel is not something just any witch can do. Are you really sure you want to resign yourself to that fate?”

A tear slid down my cheek, but I brushed it away. I longed for home, but I would not make a deal with the devil herself. I couldn’t.

She shrugged and sighed again.

“Well, sadly, I must go. And since I can’t have you following me back to the portal…”

She swirled her hands in the air, and red smoke poured from her fingertips, forming ropes that looked like snakes.

Before I could move or reach for my power, a blast of red energy pushed me back onto the bed. The red smoke wound around my legs and my torso, binding my arms to my side. I struggled against them, but they were too strong.

“The more you resist them, the tighter they will grow,” she said.

Rope snakes slithered around my throat, red fangs protruding from their gaping mouths.

“As long as you don’t try to break free, they’re practically harmless and will disappear in about an hour,” she said. She leaned closer. “If you do try to get away, though, you’ll be introduced to a very particular form of poison that I’m afraid you would never recover from. You’d be dead in minutes.”

I stopped struggling, but inside, my heart was breaking. Was I doing the right thing by staying here? How could I make any other choice?

“It has truly been a pleasure, my dear,” the ruby priestess said, smiling. She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked my hair, a move that seemed eerily familiar, as if she’d done this once before.

My body shivered at her touch, but I was powerless to move away.

“Before I go, I will make you one last promise,” she said, looking into my eyes. “I highly doubt I’ll ever see you again, but if, somehow, you do manage, despite all the odds stacked against you, to find your way home and save your friends, I will devote my life to you. I do like being on the winning side, after all, and if you can make it back from this, I will give you all the information you need to take down the rest of the Order of Shadows. I give you my word.”

Her snakes were coiled so tightly around my neck, I didn’t dare move to respond.

She stood and smoothed her skirt.

“Goodbye, Harper,” she said, smiling down at me.

She lifted her palms into the air and a shimmer of red dust seemed to fall on her from out of nowhere. Her body disappeared, but the door of the bedroom opened and closed as she left.

If I could just somehow manage to follow her with my astral projection, I could find the portal. If she’d been telling the truth that these snakes would only last an hour, there was some hope that we could still get to that portal before it closed.

But I had to follow her.

I closed my eyes, praying I still had some power left.

I reached deep inside, connecting to the core of my strength. Beneath the snakes coiling around my body, my skin buzzed with energy. I pushed deeper, seeking out any other source of power I could find. The grass, the animals, the trees. I begged for more.

I stilled my racing heart and focused on separating my spirit from my body. I poured all of my will and strength into this one last wish, but just as I felt my spirit begin to detach, a sharp pain shot through my head.

I cried out and felt the snakes coil tighter around my throat.

My spirit fell back into my body, and the last thing I remembered before passing out was the hissing of a snake in my ear.