“This is the place,” I said, motioning to the burned skeleton of the house we’d all once called home. “We’ll do it here.”

“Are you sure?” Rend asked. “Why here?”

“It just feels right,” I said. “Poetic that this is the place we lure them to. This is where it all began for us, and this is where we’ll make our next move to bring this whole thing to an end. Besides, I know this place like the back of my hand. I lived here for decades. If we run into trouble, I know all the hiding places in the area. It will give us the upper hand if things go south.”

“They won’t,” Rend said, holding up two large vials filled with a thick silver liquid. “I worked on this all night, and I tested it several times with Azure and Franki. There’s no way the Order is going to be able to detect our presence after we take these potions.”

“What if one of the witches with them can see through illusions?” I asked.

He shook his head and smiled. “Not even then,” he said. “If you couldn’t see them earlier when we tested it, no witch will be able to, either. Besides, this isn’t an illusion potion. It’s not even an invisibility potion.”

“Then what is it?” I asked, taking one of the vials in my hands and turning it upside down. The mixture inside was so thick, it moved slowly toward the cork. “How does it work?”

“It’s a complete displacement potion,” he said. “I based it off a transmutation spell I’ve been working on for years. It won’t make us invisible or glamour us in any way. It will literally make us disappear completely. We’ll be here, but we also won’t be here in our current form. A witch could walk straight through us and never feel us or sense our presence.”

I stared at him, mouth open. “I don’t totally understand what you just said about trans-whatever, but if it makes us impossible to detect, I’m glad you’re smart enough to know what it does.”

Rend laughed. “Let’s just say it will rearrange our matter for about an hour,” he said. “Our consciousness will be here, but our bodies will be spread into a billion tiny particles in the air around the area.”

I swallowed and stared at the potion again. “And you’re sure that after the hour is up, we’ll come back to normal, right?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Probably.”

But when I gave him a frightened look, he smiled and shook his head.

“I’m just messing with you, Jackson,” he said. “We tested it on Azure’s cat first. Then both Azure and Franki drank the potion. Everyone, including the cat, came back just fine. But we only have an hour. If, for whatever reason, the encounter with whoever comes out of that portal lasts longer than that, we’re screwed.”

“Can’t we just leave the area?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nope. Once we take the potions, we will basically be frozen in place for that entire hour. I didn’t have enough time to try to think of another solution,” he said. “I’m good at what I do, but I’m not capable of miracles.”

“That’s just going to have to be good enough.”

I glanced around the area. We needed to find the perfect place to be when we took the potions. The portal would most likely open wherever the fake ritual items were triggered, so that meant we would only have a few seconds to start the ritual, get where we wanted to go, and take the potion before a witch stepped through looking for us.

Brighton Manor had been reduced to a pile of ash and rubble. All of the second and third floors were completely gone. All that remained were pieces of the foundation and the skeleton of charred boards on the front porch.

The house that had belonged to Ella Mae, my fake mother during those years when I’d been kept here in Peachville, still stood. So did the shed behind Brighton Manor.

The garden Zara had worked so hard to restore to its former glory was once again nothing more than a tangled mess of dead vines with an empty stone fountain in the center.

I pushed back feelings of regret and worry. After hearing Lea’s voice last night, I missed my family more than ever. I just prayed Andros got to them in time. If I didn’t hear from him soon, we would all go after them ourselves.

“We trigger the items here,” I said, standing in the place beside the rubble where I had stood when I first saw Harper. Her room had been just above here on the second floor, and I’d passed by just as she had stood at the window, staring down. I pointed to Ella Mae’s house. “As soon as we trigger them, we shift and fly to the roof of that house. It’s close enough that we should still be able to hear what they’re saying. But if anything goes wrong, we’ll be close to the woods and have a barrier between us and the witches. They’ll have to run around the house to follow us.”

“Okay, so we start the ritual right at three. As soon as the items are triggered, we fly up to the roof of the house and down the potions,” Rend said. “Then we watch.”

I nodded and glanced around the area one last time. It was almost three, and even though I was ready for the next step, I hoped that whatever we found out here would help me find Harper.

Staring at the remains of Brighton Manor, though, my heart ached for us to all be together again. I had to believe the time would come. Andros was strong, and I knew the warriors of the Resistance Army were capable of getting into the King’s City with the help of their people hiding on the inside.

I just had to believe that he would bring Aerden and Lea home soon. Meanwhile, I had to focus on bringing Harper home. The sooner the better, and if we hadn’t heard word from Andros by then, we’d go to the King’s City together. We were so close now. We just had to keep fighting.

“You ready?” Rend asked. “It’s one minute to three.”

I nodded and set the ritual items on the ground by the burned house. We didn’t need a pentagram or a ritual room to trigger these items. Since they were fake, the Order couldn’t possibly have tied them to any one coven or portal. No, they would have set them to trigger in the most logical way. With spell words.

My heart raced as I knelt by the emerald items. I watched Rend’s face as he watched the time on his watch. After a long moment, his eyes met mine and he nodded.

We each took the corks off our potions. I placed my other hand on the fake ritual items and spoke the first words of the original initiation ritual, only backwards.

“Cognatus ab adnexus.”

A light appeared inside the emerald master stone, and I quickly shifted, flying by Rend’s side until we each took human form there on the roof of the house where I used to live. We lifted the potions to our mouths and drank the thick liquid down.

Our bodies disappeared just as a bright portal opened just above the fake master stone and an army of witches spilled out, hands and weapons raised in attack.