My closest group of friends and allies gathered in the war room of the castle in the Southern Kingdom. In total, there were nine of us here so far.

Mary Anne and Essex sat to my right at the long table. Franki and Rend were beside them. Gregory, the head of the guards here in the domed city, sat directly across from me at the other end of the table.

Angela, Harper’s half-sister and the current ruler of the Southern Kingdom in Harper’s absence, sat beside Gregory. Then, there was Mordecai, one of Lea’s best friends. My sister Illana came next, and beside her, there was an empty chair waiting for Eloise, the Prima of the emerald gate at Cypress.

I set the wooden box on the table in front of me.

Everyone grew quiet, their eyes locked on the box as I withdrew the ritual items Harper had left for us inside.

A dagger. A chalice. A necklace. A ring.

And finally, the large master stone that had once been Priestess Evers’ heart.

No one said a word, but I knew what they were all thinking. How soon could we start?

Closing the sapphire gates after the death of Priestess Winter had taken us months. It was a bloody war, and we’d lost a lot of great humans and demons along the way.

We had an advantage right now since we had a dungeon full of emerald coven Primas, but it was still only a matter of time before the other priestesses of the Order realized what we were planning to do. They would no doubt send their armies of witches to make sure we didn’t close these gates and free the demons bound to them.

We needed to act fast, but something about this still didn’t feel right.

It felt too easy.

“What exactly happened at the emerald priestess’s house?” Angela asked, interrupting the silence. She hadn’t been able to go with us since she’d been acting as queen in the Southern Kingdom ever since Harper had been taken from us. “Where is she?”

“I think we should wait for Eloise to arrive,” I said.

As if on cue, the door to the room burst open and Eloise and her two daughters, Caroline and Meredith, rushed into the room.

“We’re here,” Eloise said, out of breath. “I’m sorry we’re late, but we had trouble getting away from the keepers. They’re watching the house so closely, and they’ve put a block on our demon door. We had to sneak out and travel through a friend’s door.”

“Were you followed?” Gregory asked, his shoulders tensing.

“I don’t think we were followed,” she said, taking the empty seat to my left beside Illana. “We were careful.”

Caroline and Meredith stood behind their mother, and even though I hadn’t expected them to be here, this discussion involved them as much as any of us.

“If everyone is here, let’s get started,” Angela said. “I want to know what happened to Harper. I thought she’d be coming home with you.”

“Yes, this is everyone,” I said, but sadness washed over me as I thought of the people who should have been here for a moment like this.

Harper. Lea. Aerden. Zara. Courtney. They all deserved to be here.

“I’ve sent word to Andros,” I said. “He couldn’t get away on such short notice, but he’s going to meet me here later. He said he had news of his own, so I’ll speak with him when he gets here. For now, though, I’ve called you all here so we can make a decision about what we’re going to do with these items.”

I motioned toward the emerald ritual items on the table.

“The emerald priestess is dead, and Harper is alive,” I said, looking at Angela. “But we didn’t find her. Not exactly.”

I explained what we had found when we’d gone through the door to the emerald priestess’s house. The abandoned mansion. The burned mental hospital. The white rose growing next to the hospital’s entrance.

“I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence that a white rose would just happen to be growing there, so I dug in that location, and I found this box,” I said, tapping my finger on the wood. “It’s from Harper.”

“I don’t understand,” Angela said. “Why wouldn’t she have just given it to you herself?”

“She left it there for us sometime after that building burned down in 1951,” I said. I opened the box and pulled out the newspaper article she had left for me. Illana passed it down to Angela, who stifled a cry. A tear rolled down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away and covered her mouth.

“The reason we were having so much trouble finding Harper is that the emerald priestess had the rare ability of manipulating time,” I said. “That’s how she was able to completely stop time after the attack on this domed city, leaving everyone on earth frozen for such a long time. Somehow, she must have also used her ability to open a portal into the past. Harper wasn’t able to give us all the details in her brief note, but from what I found out when I was searching for her, the emerald priestess was stealing witches from several places, including some of her own emerald gates. Witches she intended to brainwash into believing they were her own daughters.”

Everyone in the room was quiet, trying to make sense of this mess.

“It must have been much easier for her to hide them in plain sight inside a hospital in the 50’s where shock therapy and lobotomies were normal practice,” I said. “I have no idea just how many girls are trapped there, but Harper is one of them. And somehow, she managed to kill Priestess Evers.”

Eloise gathered her daughters in her arms, tears streaming down her face.

“I felt a shift in the power,” she said. “But I didn’t dare hope it could be this.”

“I still don’t understand what we’re waiting for,” Mordecai said, standing. “We need to get out there and start setting these gates free.”

I waited for the excitement in the room to settle down before I continued.

“I agree with you, but I think we need to stop and think about this for a minute,” I said. “I was just as excited as the rest of you at first, but when I started thinking about it, I realized I had more questions. If Harper is truly stuck in 1951, how did she have access to all of these items?”

“Why does it matter how she got them?” Mary Anne asked.

“We know how she got the master stone, but what about the rest of these? The dagger, chalice, and necklace might possibly have been there at the emerald priestess’s house in the past, but that doesn’t explain the ring.”

“What do you mean?” Eloise asked.

“The way the rings work is that they are placed in a secret location of power in the Shadow World. They act as an anchor for the rest of the gates, allowing the Order to open multiple gates all connected to the original gate’s power. When we were able to find the sapphire ring and bring it to the human world, we crippled the sapphire gates. They weren’t closed, but they were unable to pull new demons through.”

I watched as my friends started to understand what I was saying.

“If Harper had gone into the Shadow World herself to retrieve the emerald ring back in 1951, none of the emerald gates would have been working for the past sixty years or so,” I said. “It’s impossible. And if she’d taken any of these items from the emerald priestess back in 1951, the Order of Shadows would have known about it, which means we would have known. No new gates would have been opened. No new demons pulled through.”

“So, where did they come from?” Angela asked.

“That’s exactly the question we have to answer,” I said. “Until we know for sure how she got them and how it has affected the timeline, it could be dangerous to use them.”

“Why couldn’t we test them?” Mordecai asked. “We take them to Cypress, tomorrow at three. We try the reversal ritual and see if they work.”

“We can’t do that,” Rend said. “Jackson’s right. It’s too dangerous. I can’t explain it, but this feels wrong somehow.”

Rend picked up Harper’s note to study it, and then he leaned over and took the newspaper article in his hand. “Evers Institute for Troubled Girls,” he whispered.

He looked as though he’d just seen a ghost.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He closed his eyes and brought a hand to his forehead. “I just got the strangest sensation of déjà vu,” he said. “Like there’s something important I’m supposed to remember about this place. About Harper. But I can’t quite figure it out.”

Franki put her hand on his and whispered something in his ear. Rend shook his head and opened his eyes.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said. “Let’s just keep going.”

“I still say we should at least try it,” Mordecai said. “Yes, it’s a risk, but there are thousands of demons out there right now suffering under the control of their witches. Witches die every day, taking their demon with them. We have to do what we can as quickly as we can. Jackson, what would you do if it was Aerden who was still trapped as a slave to these witches? You would be there already, doing everything you could to set him free, no matter the cost.”

Mordecai’s words hit me hard. He was right.

We had everything we needed right here to free thousands of demons, and each one of them was just as important to someone out there as my brother was to me. How could we sit here and worry about our own lives when we possibly had the ability to set them all free?

I took a deep breath and nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll go to Cypress first thing tomorrow morning and set everything up to perform the ritual right at three. But if we’re going to do this, we need to spend tonight thinking of every possible attack they could send our way once we start the ritual. Come tomorrow, we need to be ready for anything.”

Mordecai drew his hands into fists and slammed them down on the table in celebration. “Hell, yeah, let’s do this,” he said.

Everyone around the table smiled and started talking with excitement, making plans for tomorrow’s ritual, but my eyes drifted to the one person who was not smiling.

Rend stared at the emerald items strewn across the table, his forehead tense with worry.