Page 137 of Incoronate
“Then it’s settled.” Dominic reached for his coat from the back of the chair, shrugging it on in one unhurried motion. He adjusted the collar without looking at either of us and then smoothed a hand down the front of it.
“What? We’re doing this now?” asked Trace, already reaching for his jacket.
“The dark tide waits for no one,” said Dominic as he glanced back at me, the look on his face somewhere between amusement and something far less comfortable. “Best not to keep them waiting.”
45. STEALING TIME
It wasn’t very hard to find the Roderick sisters. Then again, people who traded in dark magic for a living always left a way to be found. It took us about fifteen minutes of digging and a phone call before we found their current location—a converted Victorian in Salem, Massachusetts, sitting three blocks from the waterfront.
We’d ported to the closest landmark Trace could identify from memory—a stretch of coastline south of the city and then picked up a rental and driven the rest of the way.
Nobody had said much on the drive. Dominic had one hand on the wheel and his eyes on the dark road ahead, though every few minutes they’d flick to the rearview mirror and find me in the back seat with a look that lingered just long enough to make my pulse trip. Trace stayed mostly quiet, riding with his arm hanging out the passenger window of our SUV and his eyes on the outline of the passing coastline.
I didn’t say much either, choosing instead to sit with the quiet and let myself breathe through it. There was something that almost felt like calm underneath all the grief and fury and exhaustion, a sort of peaceful stillness that came when you’d finally stopped fighting the current and started swimming with it instead.
I finally had a plan, a direction. And for the first time since we’d landed back in a world that had kept moving without us, I felt something that wasn’t despair.
Forty-five minutes later, we arrived.
I climbed out of the SUV and shut the door, tipping my head back to take in the building. A dark, three-story Victorian that loomed beneath the moonlight with whiteshutters and a brass knocker shaped like an inverted cross. Window boxes ran the length of the second floor, planted with something dark and flowering that had no business blooming this late in the year. It somehow managed to look both immaculate and deeply uninviting.
There was an irony there I was sure I was missing.
I pulled my jacket tighter and started up the front path, the dead stalks crunching under my boots as Trace and Dominic fell into step on either side of me.
I hadn’t been surprised to find out the sisters weren’t in Hollow Hills anymore. I imagined they probably took off the second the boundary came down. Probably long before Ares was found and killed. I still didn’t know exactly when the Order had gotten to Tessa and Gabriel and Ares, or how they’d done it. I tried not to think about that. About what my sister must have felt in that moment, or Gabriel. About whether they’d seen it coming or whether it had just...happened.
It wouldn’t matter soon anyway.
I raised my fist to knock on the door, but it swung open before I had the chance.
Annabelle leaned against the frame, one shoulder propped up, her blonde hair falling in a sleek sheet around her face with fringe her slicing clean across her brow. Her gaze moved over the three of us with the slow, unbothered interest of a cat watching something smaller than itself.
“Well, well,” she said, cocking her brow at me. “Look what crawled out of the grave.”
“Try not to look so crushed about it,” I answered pleasantly. “It’s giving you crow’s feet.”
The corner of her mouth pulled. Not quite a smile, but close enough. She stepped back from the door without another word and held it open for us.
We filed in one after the other, Trace at my back, Dominic closing the door behind us.
Inside, the house smelled like burnt cedar and something older underneath it, something that had soaked into the walls over years and never quite left.
The entryway opened into a wide front room with high ceilings and dark wood floors, every surface covered in what I could only describe as organized chaos. Stacks of books in every corner, glass jars of things I wasn’t going to look at too closely, candles burned down to different heights along the windowsills, their wax pooled and hardened into strange shapes below them. A long worktable ran the length of one wall, its surface crowded with tools and materials I didn’t recognize.
Nothing about the room looked casual. Everything had a place, even if I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Annabelle led us through to a second room at the back of the house, and the smell changed the moment we crossed the threshold. It was green and earthy, thick with herbs and something sharper underneath, almost medicinal.
Open wood shelves lined two walls from floor to ceiling, every shelf densely packed with bundles of dried plants, stoppered bottles, and shallow bowls of ingredients I couldn’t name. A long altar table ran down the center of the room, its surface worn smooth with use, ringed with candles and covered in a fine dusting of dried petals and powder.
Arianna was already standing when we walked in, her dark ponytail over one shoulder, her eyes immediately locking on mine, as though she had been waiting in exactly that spot for exactly this moment.
Which knowing her, she probably had been.
A door at the back of the room opened from outside and Anita stepped in, carrying a bundle of freshly cut herbsagainst her chest, her flame-red hair pinned back at the nape of her neck. She glanced at us without breaking stride and set the bundle down on the altar table before turning to face us fully.
Annabelle crossed to stand beside Arianna, the three of them arranging themselves with the ease of people who had spent a whole lot of time occupying the same spaces.
