Emery made it to Reagan at the same time Penny did, so he stepped back, nearly tripping over his own feet in the process. Weariness made weights of his limbs, dragging at him. He could barely keep his spine straight within the bone-weary fatigue.

Penny, not looking nearly as ragged as he felt, knelt next to Reagan and put her hand on the other woman’s back. “Are you okay?”

“Tired,” Reagan said, her head drooping. “Very tired.”

Penny nodded and took a knee, looking out at the deathly still fields around them. It was an eerie comparison to the flurry of activity that had come before.

Emery staggered back another pace and Penny’s gaze fell on him. He could tell she was assessing the damage. How she could still function was beyond him. But then, his brother had always said women were stronger in the field, their strength of will hardier than the roots of an oak, pushing them past their own distress to help those around them.

“That’s why God gave the gift of birth to woman,” his brother always said, “because he could trust in mothers the most.”

“Just…so I’m on the same page,” Penny said, dropping her other knee and sitting on her heels. “You’re the one who created that false reality and those weird elephant creatures, right?”

“Yes,” Reagan said. “Neat, huh?”

“No. It was awful. I hated it.”

“Never go to the underworld.”

“Well, that’s the plan.” Penny bit her lip. “And you did that…why? I mean, because you probably could’ve just fire-bombed the whole place.”

Reagan sucked in a deep breath before twisting around and sitting hard on her butt. Emery joined them and took a knee, still in absolute shock. His brain had yet to process the strange alternate reality. The battle. The hard-won victory.

“I had a few options,” Reagan said, looking out over the field before her gaze landed on the wall of the warehouse, resting haphazardly on the crushed car beneath it. “Darius will never let me near one of his cars again.”

Penny followed her gaze. “But, I mean…that’s fair, I feel like. You ruin every one of them.”

Reagan sighed. “We need to get a cleanup crew out here.”

“Yes. But you were saying, about the mind chaos?” Penny said, her voice carrying an edge.

“Mind fuckery, yeah. Well, I could’ve just stopped at the walls to keep people in, but since they were invisible, people would’ve tried to get out, run into them, and bounced off. Once they realized it was magic holding them in, they’d work to bring it down. Which would drain my energy and steal my focus.”

“Hmm. Mhm.” Penny’s agreement didn’t sound convincing. Emery had a sneaking suspicion she didn’t really want to understand Reagan’s incredible magic, which was so far above and beyond what she was already struggling to understand. Emery honestly didn’t blame her. He was more or less used to what magic could throw at him, and yet…Reagan had created an entire alternate reality. And not just an illusion! Those strange flying creatures had come to life. They’d killed and maimed.

“But, with that wall, I could have just fire-blasted everyone, like you said. See what I’m saying?” Reagan said. Penny shook her head, her eyes glazing over. Reagan ignored it. “So that made the wall an attractive option. But there are dried grasses all around us, and I worried the whole place would catch fire. So then I’d need an additional wall to suck out the flames, right before the solid wall. See?”

Penny didn’t even bother shaking her head this time. She just stared blankly.

“That would all have been doable, but let’s be honest, I know those parts of my magic pretty well. This was a great opportunity to practice my less-used powers. I figured I’d go for it. Fool the brain with the eyes, further confuse the brain with solid walls they could no longer see, trapping them in, then kill them with the fire dragons—”

“Dragons?” Penny asked, finally coming back alive. “Those were supposed to be dragons?”

“Yeah. I missed the mark a bit there.” Reagan climbed to her feet, followed by Penny, ready with a stabilizing hand. “But the rest of it looked pretty cool, didn’t it?”

“The water didn’t make things wet. It didn’t, like, splash.” Penny braced her hands on her hips and half bent, finally showing her fatigue. “It didn’t account for people walking through it. I couldn’t see the ground. No, it wasn’t cool. And people disappearing and reappearing and—”

Emery put his hand on her shoulder to keep her from flying off the handle, trying to keep back chuckles as he did so. A lopsided smile crossed Reagan’s face.

“Definitely don’t go to the underworld, you’d—” Reagan’s head jerked around, her eyes narrowing at Penny. “Did you try and cut out the illusion?”

Penny’s eyes rounded and she put up her hands. “No, I swear. Emery, tell her. I thought about it for only a second. But I didn’t act on it. I still can’t believe you didn’t warn me!”

“Hmm.” Reagan tapped her mouth as she slowly walked to the edge of the warehouse. “I wonder if you could. We’ll have to try.”

“No, thank you,” Penny said quickly.

Reagan sighed and looked around at the gruesome tableau. “My warehouse is gone.” She squinted up at the sky. “Should we check for survivors, or just make sure there aren’t any?” She lowered her eyes to Penny and quirked an eyebrow. “Should we show Emery what the people down under can do?”

“What? Australians?” Penny backed up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t include me in your crazy.”

“Too late. Your mother said I should.” Reagan held out her hands, palms up. Floating fire sprang above them, hovering. No magic connected the flame to her palm. No streams of energy flowed through her fingers or from the elements around them. She’d called it up from nowhere.

“Annnndddd…” The flame disappeared. She moved her hands through the air toward the field. Fire sprang up there, growing when she raised her hands, crawling across the already burned ground and over the bodies.

“No, no, no, no.” Penny slapped one of Reagan’s hands out of the air. That didn’t affect the fire in the least. “No! We need to identify them. Find out if they were Guild, not Guild, where they came from—you can’t just destroy evidence. I swear, Darius must want to throttle you at least ten times a day. You and he are nothing alike.”

Reagan’s smile, which had sprouted when Penny slapped at her hand, grew. “You get me.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do. You get me.”

“I don’t even get what you’re talking about. I just stated facts. And asked questions.”

Without any movement from Reagan, the fire rose off the ground. And so did Penny.

“What the—”

She bumped down a moment later and Reagan shook her head. “I’m too tired. Fine, you win. Let’s get cleanup in here. Or get the shifters to section it off until Darius can send in his guys and look everyone up. I’m tired. I need a bath.”

“Training is going to get a lot worse now that she can show all her powers,” Penny mumbled.

“See?” Reagan took her phone from her back pocket. “This is why I love Penny. I create a huge illusion, with fire-spitting dragons—”

“More like Dumbo’s un-talked-about uncle—” Penny mumbled.

“—move fire through the air, lift her in the air, and all she can think about is how I’ll torment her in training.”

“That’s a strange reason to love someone.” Penny heaved a deep breath. “It’s over, then, right? That wasn’t just wishful thinking on my part? We won.”

Reagan’s laugh was low and humorless, and Emery knew exactly what she was going to say. So he did it for her.

“It’s far from over,” he said, connecting eyes with Penny. “Either we keep running, or we do forcefully what my brother tried to do delicately. Either we spend our life in the wild, or we stand our ground, ask our friends for help, and claim the ultimate vengeance for our loved ones.”

“We tear down the Guild,” Reagan said with fire in her eyes. “Those filthy bastards.”

Penny looked between Emery and Reagan, but her gaze stuck on him. And what she said shocked him.

“It isn’t the ultimate vengeance. It’s doing the right thing. We have to tear it down, yes, but so it can be rebuilt. We have the power to do it, and the scars to make it personal—those things make it our responsibility.” Penny shifted, her stance widening. Magic whispered around them, blending in with the breeze. “This time, they came to us. Next time…”

Reagan smiled.

“We go to them,” Emery finished, feeling Penny’s infectious fire running through him. “We harvest the spells we planted when we were first in the Guild compound.”

That weird brown rock with the stripes of color—Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, Penny had called it—pulsed from the other side of the ruined warehouse.

“Stupid power stone,” Penny muttered.

She was on board. She wasn’t even fully trained, but she was ready to storm the Guild again.

But was he?