Page 145 of Incoronate
The burnt cedar smell reached me before we even made it through the door. Annabelle was already holding it open when we came up the front path, which meant either Arianna had seen us coming or they’d simply been expecting us as soon as the sun went down. Knowing the Roderick sisters, it was probably both.
We’d spent the day holed up in the penthouse, doing more of what we’d done the night before. Eating, mostly. Staying close to each other. Because if the spell ended up going sideways and today turned out to be the last day any of us ever spent on this earth, we’d agreed without discussing it that we were going to spend it well.
Annabelle led us into the front room, which was exactly as we’d left it the night before. Books stacked in every corner, candles lit throughout the room, only there was a deep green velvet couch tucked in the far corner that I hadn’t been able to see from the hall yesterday, and the long worktable had been pushed against the wall, clearing a wide stretch of open floor in the center of the room.
A chill ran through me, knowing exactly what that was for, and I pulled my jacket tighter against myself.
Oddly enough, I didn’t feel afraid.
Standing there on the night we were going to permanently rewrite our own timeline, I kept waiting for the fear to surface, kept probing for it the way you tongued a sore tooth, but it just wasn’t there. What I felt instead was resolved. Certain in the bone-deep way that came not from confidence but from knowing, the way you knew your own name, that this wasexactly where I was supposed to be and exactly what I was supposed to do.
Anita filed in from the back carrying an armful of materials, acknowledging us with a single nod before moving to the worktable and setting everything down. Arianna hovered near the archway, watching the room with that distant, unfocused expression she always seemed to wear post-incident. The incident being the time I killed her.
I supposed dying and then coming back to life via your sister’s dark magic probably had a few lingering effects on you.
“I don’t suppose there’s anything to drink in this place?” asked Dominic, glancing around the room, as though he were already bored of it.
“There’s a bottle of Whiskey in the bottom cabinet behind you,” answered Anita, without looking at him.
She didn’t have to tell him twice.
Trace pressed his lips to the top of my head before drifting over toward Anita, watching her work as Annabelle closed the distance between us and started circling me like she was deciding whether or not to poke.
“I’m surprised you actually came back,” she said, barely able to contain her smirk.
“Why wouldn’t we?” I asked, tracking her as she circled me.
“I thought you might sleep on it and come to your senses.” She lifted one shoulder. “Guess not.”
“And miss the chance to spend another evening with you?” I pressed a hand to my chest. “Never.”
The corner of her mouth twitched despite herself.
Anita finally straightened from the table and glanced over at the three of us in turn. Her expression was flat, almost bored, as though this were a regular Tuesday night for her,like she’d already made peace with the strangeness of her profession a very long time ago.
She picked up a glass dish from the worktable and strolled over to where I was standing with Annabelle, her eyes locked onto mine like a snare.
“Are you absolutely certain this is what you want to do?” she asked, stopped at the other end of the small, round table between us.
I blinked at her. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
Her eyeline held on mine.
“And you understand the door only opens once, and the moment the Binding takes hold, it will close behind you,” she stated grimly as she set the dish down on the table. “For good.”
“We know how it works and what’s at stake,” said Trace, coming back to stand beside me, though Anita didn’t take her eyes off me. “We’re doing it anyway.”
She held my gaze a moment longer and then nodded curtly before tapping the edge of the glass dish. Curious, I leaned forward to look at what was inside.
Three strange objects sat at the center, each no bigger than a pinky nail. Flat, dark, roughly oval, polished smooth on one side and raw on the other. They caught the candlelight in a way that didn’t quite make sense, a faint iridescence that appeared and disappeared depending on the angle, there one second and gone the next.
Trace’s brow lifted slowly. He looked at me, then back at the dish, then at Anita, but it was Dominic who asked the question we were obviously all thinking.
“What pray tell are those supposed to be?” he asked, eyebrow raised.
“Your Talismans,” answered Anita as Arianna appeared from behind the curtain at the far wall, wheeling a narrowsurgical tray into the room and toward us. “I need to put them inside you.”
“I beg your pardon?” he returned, his tone clipped.
