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Ruby pushes the door open without knocking and calls inside.
“Thalia? It’s Ruby. The fourth star touched popped by for a visit last night, and I thought you’d want to meet her.”
Footsteps sound from a back room, and a woman with wavy brown hair and warm eyes appears, carrying a stack of books against her chest. She has the distracted expression of someone whose brain was three paragraphs deep into a text when we interrupted her.
My stomach drops, because the expression reminds me so much of Evie that my electricity flickers.
Don’t think about Evie right now, I tell myself, but the pit in my stomach is already there, and it’s apparently choosing to stay.
Thalia sets the books down and gives me a thorough once-over, and my first instinct is to trust her. Which immediately makes me suspicious, because my track record with trusting people has been spectacular lately.
Exhibit A is standing next to me, black flames ready to whisk us into the past if Thalia senses who he is despite his ankar token.
Thalia simply glances at him, then turns her attention to me.
“We’ve been hoping you’d find your way here,” she finally says.
“I’m getting that a lot,” I tell her. “Ruby’s been waiting, Connor’s been waiting, and the divine wards put on a lightning show when I walked up last night. I feel like I’m the last person to show up to a party I didn’t know I was invited to.”
She smiles, and it’s the real kind. Then her gaze shifts past me to Logan, and her fingers go to the silver ring on her right hand—a flame pendant that catches the light as she turns it once on her finger.
It’s the same way Logan reaches for his necklace.
Is Thalia’s ring an ankar token? Is she a Revenant, too? It seems crazy that a Revenant could hide in Pine Valley for gods know how long while posing as their leader, but no one ever suspects Logan, so maybe it isn’t that crazy, and maybe—
“You’re Logan Ashford,” Thalia says, interrupting my train of thought. “Blaze Academy’s star student. The Council was positioning you for one of the top seats by the end of your first year.”
“That was the plan,” Logan says. “Then I fell in love with a star touched while training her to hide her forbidden magic, stole a ship from school grounds so we could escape after she revealed said magic in a dramatic display against hellhounds that attacked during an unsanctioned underground party, and showed up at a shifter sanctuary in the middle of the night. So, I’d say the Council’s five-year plan for me is looking rather optimistic at this point.”
Thalia turns her ring again, and her gaze moves between Logan’s hand on my back and my bracelet twisting under my fingers.
I drop the bracelet immediately.
What if she thinks it’s an ankar token? I wear so much jewelry that any of them could be suspected as ankar tokens. But I’m rather fond of my jewelry, given that I make it myself, so hopefully the whole being a star touched thing keeps suspicion away from me.
Just like how the whole being in love with a star touched thing will hopefully keep suspicion away from Logan.
The room suddenly feels smaller than it did before, and I take a few deep breaths in a half-successful attempt to center myself.
Thalia gestures toward a table buried under open texts and loose pages. “Come sit,” she says. “The two of you clearly have a lot to catch me up on.”
We do, and together, we get her caught up on our training sessions, seafaring adventure, and how Tempest owes me a divine weapon that I learned about less than twenty-four hours ago.
Thalia listens without interrupting, her fingers resting on her ring but no longer turning it. When I finish, she’s quiet for long enough that I twist my bracelet twice and consider filling the silence with a joke about being cosmically ghosted.
“I believe I have what you need,” she says with another warm smile, before I can make said terrible joke. “The Scrolls of Hecate.”
Ruby’s eyes light up. “The scrolls!” she says with a burst of excitement that nearly makes me fall off my chair. “I saw them in the fae realm while searching for the Key of Hades. Well… I didn’t actually see them, since they turned out to be an illusion, but I know they’re full of lost spells.”
Logan goes still beside me and focuses on Ruby. “The Scrolls of Hecate were destroyed centuries ago. Every source at Blaze confirms their loss.”
Thalia shakes her head and rises from her chair. “The Council verifies a lot of things that turn out to be false,” she says, moving toward a door at the back of the room. “The scrolls have been in this coven’s library for over three hundred years. I’ve read them cover to cover, multiple times. They contain a ritual for opening a crossroads into the divine realm.”
“Wait.” My electricity crackles against the table’s edge. “Circe said goddesses can’t be summoned.”
“Circe was correct,” Thalia confirms. “The cosmic goddesses exist on a plane that no mortal ritual can reach. They come when they choose.”
“Then what are we talking about?”
