Page 147 of Incoronate
“You mind trying that again in English?” I asked, wholly and completely confused about what in the world she was talking about.
“The power is yours to wield and it will rise to meet you. All you have to do is surrender to it,” she continued, her voice dropping lower, taking on a cadence that raised the hair on my arms. “The moment you make the choice to incoronate, all of it will be yours. The throne, the power, and the boundless legions that serve it.” She paused. “Per sanguinem patris mei, thronum vindico.”
“I already told you, I’m not—”
“Remember the words, Jemma,” she said and then shoved forward into my personal space, close enough that I expected to feel the warmth of her breath against my ear, but there was none.
‘You’ll need them.’
I pulled back to look at her face and felt the hair on my arms stand straight up. Her lips hadn’t moved.
Not even slightly.
“What does that mean?” I asked, my back going ramrod straight.
She rose from the couch and turned to go rejoin her sisters without a backward glance in my direction.
“Arianna—!”
“We’re ready.” Anita’s voice cut across the room. “Girls, take your point,” she ordered her sisters as Annabelle finished drawing the last symbol inside the chalk circle she’d laid out.
Blowing out a breath, I pushed off the couch and crossed over to where Trace and Dominic stood waiting in the middle of the circle. Without discussion or needing to be told, I stepped between them, already knowing where my place was. Where it always was.
Trace’s hand found my left as Dominic’s closed around my right.
“Remember your fixed point,” said Anita, her eyes moving across all three of us. “Hold it in your mind until your feet touch solid ground again. And the moment you see your Alt, you make physical contact. That initiates the swap.” Her gaze steadied on mine. “The spell will do the rest.”
I closed my eyes and pictured the fixed point we’d agreed on: Uncle Karl’s study at the Blackburn Estate, during Ben’s visit. The one room in the house where we could arrive unseen and get our bearings before anyone knew we were there. Holding the room steady in my mind, I layered it with detail,imagining the heavy wooden desk, the smell of old books, the cold air pushing in under the door and slowly formed a complete picture in my mind.
The sisters began to chant.
Three voices braided together into a frequency that bypassed the ears entirely and went somewhere deeper. The air thickened almost immediately, closing in on us from all sides, charged and close and tasting faintly of copper and something else beneath it. Something older that I had no name for. Every candle flame in the room bent inward toward the circle as one.
Dark magic crept up my legs like cold water rising, moving through my skin rather than over it, threading into muscle and bone. It wasn’t painful. It was vast, the way standing at the ocean’s edge at night was vast, the awareness of something incomprehensibly larger pressing right up against you, reminding you exactly how small you were.
The talisman at the back of my neck began to pulse.
I gripped Trace’s hand tighter. His fingers pressed back immediately. On my other side, Dominic’s thumb moved across my knuckles as the chanting climbed higher.
The air split open and I braced for the feeling that always came with porting. Except this time, it wasn’t there. There was no cold, no clean displacement, no sense of the world simply stepping aside to let me through. Instead something seized me from the inside, a tremendous, lurching force that felt like being grabbed by the chest and wrenched free of the ground entirely, and the room vanished, and the sisters vanished, and Trace and Dominic vanished, and there was nothing but darkness and velocity and the sickening, vertiginous sensation of being turned end over end through something that had no floor and no ceiling and no walls.
I couldn’t find up.
I couldn’t find my own hands.
The only thing I could feel was the talisman burning at my neck, bright and constant against the bone, the single fixed point in all of it, the one thing tethering me to anything at all.
And then, I couldn’t feel that either.
48. BODY SWAP
The lurch came again without warning. One moment there was nothing, no ground, no air, no sense of having a body at all, and then something grabbed hold of me from the inside and pulled hard, the darkness suddenly cracking wide open and spitting me out the other side.
My feet hit solid floor. Solid, uncharred, intact floor, and for a second that alone was enough to make my eyes sting with relief.
I staggered back, still gripping Trace’s hand on my left and Dominic’s on my right, and stood there blinking as the room assembled itself around us, materializing in pieces, the edges bleeding in first before the center finally filled. The heavy mahogany desk. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining every wall, their spines dark and uniform in the low light. The leather desk chair, cold and empty. The curtains drawn against the night.
Uncle Karl’s study.
