TENN BURIED HIS second body at nightfall, the only light coming from an orb of magic hovering in the air.
It was far less ceremonial than with Tori. Tenn didn’t even try to be gentle as he pulled the body down into the earth.
There was no point.
They’d never found the other half of the corpse.
“What are we going to do?” Dreya asked.
There weren’t any more bodies. Devon was still in shock, his arms crossed around himself tight. Tenn didn’t blame him. After seeing what had happened in the twins’ past, he knew another dead Witch was hitting far too close to home. Rage burned in his chest even as Earth ate at his insides, his limbs shaking from magic and anger.
Matthias would pay. For all of this, Matthias would pay.
“We follow them,” Tenn said.
“Do you have a plan?” Dreya asked.
“Yeah,” he said. And he did. Mostly. It had been forming ever since he found the empty cabinet that once held the bowl. It was suicide, and it probably wouldn’t work, but it was the only hope they had.
“What is it?”
“Runes,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way.” He looked to Devon. “Do you think he’s well enough to travel?”
She nodded.
“Don’t worry about him. He has been through much worse.”
They all had. Hopefully, after this, Matthias at least would be out of the picture.
* * *
They stopped atop a small hill overlooking a field. Tenn had a feeling the hill hadn’t been there before, considering it was strewn with the rubble of toppled houses, and the base ringed with overturned cars. The necromancers had set up camp below—a few tents, a few campfires. It was, without a doubt, the rest of Matthias’s army. It made Tenn’s blood boil, made him want to burn the whole world down. But he had to stick to the plan. To get the Witches out alive, they had to be tactful.
“I know where they are taking them,” Dreya whispered. Her words were tight. Clipped.
“Where?”
She nodded to the black horizon.
“There is a Farm ahead. A few miles. I can smell it.”
Tenn’s gut twisted. The Witches had been safe until he’d come along. Now, they were set to be food or new recruits to the Dark Lady’s army. Matthias was definitely playing him: What worse fate was there for a bunch of pacifists than to be turned into bloodthirsty monsters, or food for them?
“Then we’ll have to finish this tonight,” he said.
As though there’d been another choice.
They set to work immediately. They gathered a handful of stones, and Tenn slowly carved the tracking rune into each of them. Then he flipped them over and carved in the symbols he’d memorized from the trees, runes of misdirection and hiding. He hoped he’d remembered correctly.
But the runes seemed to whisper in his head as he wrote them. The rest of the world fell away. It was like writing a language he’d always known, a string of runes that spelled a phrase that tingled on the tip of his tongue. It took only a few minutes, but it felt like hours—sweat dripped down his forehead and his thoughts spun in a haze. He felt high. If not for the weight of what he was about to do, he might have drifted off entirely.
Then, using the end of his staff, he traced a large circle in a space cleared of rubble, the line cutting through the frozen dirt. He traced more misdirection runes along the perimeter while the twins waited impatiently inside. When it was done, he stepped back and stared at the runes. They glowed faint and green, just like they had on the trees, the entire circle a dim neon.
Luke had said runes required energy to work. Tenn had assumed the energy from the earth powered the cloaking runes; it looked like he was correct.
“Do you see that?” he asked, his voice quiet with awe and not a small bit of...not pride...humility.
“See what?” Dreya asked.
“The runes,” he said. “They’re glowing.”
Dreya raised an eyebrow but said nothing. It was Devon who spoke.
“They just look like chicken scratch to me,” he said.
“Never mind,” Tenn said. He held out a hand. “Give me your wrist,” he said to Dreya.
She didn’t even pause before holding her arm out. He took it gently, pulling back the layers of her coat and sweater. The skin beneath was pale porcelain, her veins just visible beneath the surface.
“This might sting,” Tenn said. Then he opened to Earth and drew.
It was a cheap trick, one he’d learned early on as an easy way to practice his new Sphere. He changed the pigments in Dreya’s wrist, tracing the tracking rune into her skin. It wasn’t healing and it wasn’t harming, but it still required him to touch her to make it work. It took only a few seconds. The rune stood out delicate and dark on her wrist. Devon was next, and this time Tenn changed the pigment to white, the rune glowing ghostly against Devon’s dark flesh. Finally, he traced it into his own wrist.
“Memorize these,” he said, holding out his wrist. “Once I’m outside of the circle, it’s the only way we’ll have of keeping track of each other.”
Tenn took a deep breath and stared out at the encampment. What he was about to do was suicide, but there was no fear or anticipation. Coldness filled him with a dead resolution. Jarrett’s face came to mind—is this how he had felt before leaping to his death? Is this how it felt to truly sacrifice yourself for something greater: the clarity, the stillness?
The absolute calm.
“Remember the signals?”
“Yes.”
“Then...I guess I’ll see you soon,” he said, the words tasting horribly close to a lie. They nodded solemnly, and Dreya opened to Air.
The gathered stones hovered up and twisted a slow orbit around him. The moment they left the ground, he opened to Earth and siphoned energy into each stone. The runes glowed green with life. He could tell from the sudden glaze in Dreya’s eyes that the runes had worked; he was invisible.
He jumped and dodged side to side, just to make sure, but the stones continued their rotation around him undisturbed. So long as Dreya stayed focused on the tracking runes, she should be able to keep the stones centered on him. So many shoulds, but it was the best he could hope for.
“I’ll miss you guys,” he said.
As expected, neither of the twins heard him.
He stepped out of the circle, and they vanished from sight.
For a moment, he stood there, staring down at the army, Earth fueling his senses as he sought out the huddle of Witches. He could feel them, just barely, congregated near the center of the encampment. He couldn’t tell how many were left, but he had a feeling it was a smaller number than what they’d started with.
He stilled his thoughts, gripped the staff tighter.
Then he ran down into the mouth of hell.