Helena had spent the last two hours flipping through Corina’s grimoires, hoping for some spark of inspiration and finding nothing. But now, for the first time, she was alone in the living room—Aleksi was outside in the conduit, and Dominic and Corina were working on the wards in Corina’s bedroom. Immediately, she darted over to Corina’s laptop and pulled up her email. Juniper had responded.
What the fuck? Where are you? Mom and Dad are going crazy.
Helena’s chest tightened—when was the last time her parents worried about her? When she was attacked by that demon?
And here she was, performing Infernal magic and making out with a demon king.
She forced herself to scan the rest of the email—there was nothing more about her parents. Just Juniper demanding to know why Helena was keeping her location a secret.
It’s not safe for you! Helena wrote back, fingers flying over the keyboard. She kept one eye on the door, certain that Dominic was going to come barreling in and demand to see the screen. She wrote as much as she could, about Gavin and the Children of Adrasteia. IT’S NOT SAFE!!!! she wrote at the end.
She did not say anything about Aleksi, about Byleth. It was just too complicated.
She sent off the message and logged out of her email. Then she looked over at the stack of grimoires sitting precariously on the couch. Two hours had gotten her nowhere.
And of course it would. Corina’s grimoires were all conjure, magic Helena knew nothing about. But Aleksi had said he wanted a combination of approaches—including Lineage magic.
Helena took a deep breath. She’d forgotten all the spells she had to memorize as a girl, but the Lineage used to have an online hub.
She hunched over the laptop and typed in the address for the hub—and found it still existed, in all its mid—’90s HTML glory. Eleven years and they still hadn’t even bothered with a redesign.
Helena typed out her old username and then the password she’d used through most of her teenage years, a reference to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which she’d been obsessed with as a kid—much to her parents’ annoyance. She held her breath, watching the timer swirl on the screen.
The hub blinked into existence. This was just the hub’s entrance, of course—to get to the actual library of digitized spells, rituals, and incantations, she was going to have to provide some kind of proof of identity to the enchantment protecting them. But if she could still log in, then her parents had never updated the site admins about her leaving the Lineage, so that shouldn’t be an issue.
Helena felt her breath catch, and she wondered if her parents really were freaking out about her current disappearance the way Juniper claimed they were. They should have let the admins know; she should be barred. But she wasn’t even important enough for that.
She clicked over to the library entrance. The site hadn’t changed at all since the last time she was there, and when she caught the whiff of the wards drifting out from the laptop’s speakers, all those afternoons she spent studying came flooding suddenly back to her.
“A strand of hair, please,” said the digitized voice that she and Juniper used to mock when they were kids, practicing their own warding spells.
Helena plucked a strand of hair and laid it across the keyboard.
A hum on the air: magic coursing through the Wi-Fi. Everything prickled. From somewhere in the living room, Dominic shouted, “What the fuck happened to the Internet?”
Helena froze, her finger poised over the keys. If Dominic knew she was logging into the Lineage hub, he’d flip his shit. Even if she was trying to help them.
“Why are you on the Internet?” Corina called back. “I thought you were working on a banishing spell.”
The hair smoked and vanished in a line of red light. Helena took a deep breath.
“Thank you, Helena Desiree Muir,” chirped the library’s voice, and the screen dissolved with a tacky ‘90s hacker movie effect into the actual database. Someone in the Lineage had created the hub with the idea of allowing all the disparate Lineage families to share their knowledge, and now Helena had access to whatever those families saw fit to upload. She knew her family had contributed; she’d been the one doing the uploading. That spell was one of the few she hadn’t struggled with.
A computer spell would be orderly, wouldn’t it? Maybe that was why she had taken to it so easily.
Helena settled back with the laptop and searched through the spells, looking for binding and banishments. But even reading the directions made her head hurt. None of it made any sense. She understood the magic in theory—the rituals acted as a conduit, like the one Aleksi had created outside the trailer. But temporary conduits, ones that could be controlled by the caster. The problem for Helena, though, was always that she would say the words and throw the herbs and do whatever dramatic nonsense was asked of her, but the pieces just never fit. It was like shoving round pegs into square holes. Much like how Helena felt within her own family.
Footsteps against the floor; Helena glanced up and found Aleksi gazing down at her from the doorway.
“Shit!” Helena cried, logging out of the database before the ward sensed a demon was in the room with her. She snapped the laptop shut and tossed it across the couch.
“What was that about?” Aleksi’s expression darkened, and he lifted an eyebrow. “Were you telling the Lineage something you shouldn’t?”
“No!” Helena shook her head. Why did she not want him to think that of her? “But I was looking at the Lineage database online. I didn’t want it to pick up on—” She gestured at him.
“A Lineage database?” Aleksi laughed.
“Yeah. It’s—got spells and things. I still had access, and I thought it might give me some ideas for—what we need to do.”
“And you tell us you aren’t Lineage.” He smiled, and Helena felt herself relax. But of course Aleksi never really cared about the Lineage.
He tilted his head, taking her in. “I don’t think I told you that I like that shirt on you.” His eyes glittered. “It’s an old design. Always one of my favorites.”
Helena pulled the shirt out, looking at the upside-down sigil emblazoned across the black fabric. She’d almost forgotten she was wearing one of Black Moon’s shirts.
“What does it mean?” she asked. “I saw the same design on one of your album covers, but I didn’t recognize it.” She looked up at him, smiled. “I thought it was nonsense, to be honest.”
“Oh, it is nonsense.” Aleksi sat beside her on the couch, springs creaking beneath his weight. His thigh pressed up against hers. “I put all the magic in the actual music. That’s always been my forte.” He glanced at her. “But you gotta have a cool logo.”
“Of course.” Helena smoothed down the shirt and leaned back against the wall. After a few seconds’ pause, she laid her hand on Aleksi’s knee. He scooped up her fingers, squeezed them gently.
“How’s it coming along?” he said, nodding at the laptop.
“Not great.” Helena sighed. “I thought looking at the old database would jog my memory somehow, but it’s just—everything is so jumbled, you know? I read through the directions and I can’t picture it.”
“You aren’t supposed to picture it,” Aleksi said. “It’s chaos, like I told you. You’re supposed to just—” He lifted his hands. “Feel it.”
“Useful.”
“Yeah, well, I’m with you. That’s why I did everything through music. It might sound chaotic, feel chaotic—”
“But it’s ordered,” Helena said. “I had the same thought, the first time I heard Black Moon.”
She stopped, heat creeping up her cheeks. Aleksi peered down at her, an amused glint in his expression.
And then he brushed his lips against hers.
Helena blinked, startled and—though she knew it was wrong—a little pleased. She leaned into the kiss, her eyes fluttering closed. She knew she should not be so pleased at kissing him.
Aleksi cupped her face with a startling tenderness. “No human ever gets that,” he murmured.
“Gets what?” Helena pulled away, dizzy from the kiss.
“About music being ordered, even when it sounds chaotic.” Aleksi’s eyes bored deeply into hers. “I’ve never met another human who thinks about it that way.”
Helena’s guilt subsided, replaced with a pleased swell of warmth. “Not even Dominic?”
“No. He does what I tell him, but he doesn’t truly understand it. I told you, human magic is just—it’s not meant for order.”
“Well, that doesn’t help me much, does it?” Helena sighed and looked down at the closed laptop. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to really do much with this. I keep looking at those spells—”
“Remember what I told you.” Aleksi leaned in close to her, his hand resting on her thigh. “It all comes from the same place. From the Black Emperor. It is order, it is chaos. And even the most chaotic of magic has order somewhere.”
“I doubt it,” Helena muttered.
Aleksi wrapped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her in close to him. Helena leaned against his strong chest, her eyes closed. It was so easy to forget everything going on around them when she was like this, able to hear the slightly frantic rhythm of his heart beneath his sternum. She could almost pretend this was just—how things were supposed to be. That she wasn’t surrounded by a crazed cult, getting butterflies in her stomach over a demon king.
“We’re going to need all of our strengths,” Aleksi said, “if we’re going to break through the barricade they’re setting up. Take a second look. See if you can refract the chaos.” He stroked her hair. “Find some other way of understanding.”
Helena was aware of the laptop sitting a foot away from her, still shut tight, locking her out of the Lineage hub.
“After what you’ve done to me,” Aleksi said softly into her ear, “I know you can do anything.”
Three hours later, Helena had a notebook full of scribbled notes and no headway on potential spells.
The trailer had been quiet since her conversation with Aleksi; he was out on the conduit, streams of purplish light falling through the blinds in her bedroom window. Corina had vanished into the front yard to do another ward reinforcement. Dominic was—somewhere. Not in the living room or the kitchen, which Helena had a clear view of anytime she went to the bathroom. A good thing, too. Aleksi didn’t mind her reading through the Lineage hub, and Corina probably wouldn’t, either. But Dominic would object.
And maybe he should. She wondered what exactly the Lineage had done to him.
She shut the laptop with a sigh and looked over her notes. She had started by writing down spells she half remembered from her studies, even if they didn’t seem like they were the right kind of magic. Then she had read through the instructions on the hub, looking for the order between the lines. If she thought she saw a glimmer of something, she circled the spell in her notes and jotted down her thoughts.
She still felt like she hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Order, Aleksi had told her. Look for the order.
She picked up her notebook, went over to the window and peered out the blinds. A pillar of blue light, the same painful color as the fire that Gavin had used to burn her skin, surged upward. Aleksi was nothing more than a dark blur in the center.
Her eyes watered; she let out a sniffle. Infernal magic prickled along her skin like goose bumps.
She dropped the blinds shut and sat down on the floor in the wash of blue light. The Infernal magic Aleksi had used when they were rescuing Corina hadn’t affected her—it must have been interacting with her own magic somehow. Maybe that could be a clue in her search for a useful spell.
Or maybe not. Eighteen years of study and she still didn’t really know how Lineage magic worked. She didn’t buy Aleksi’s claims about the Black Emperor being the source of all magic—if that was the case, why did only Infernal magic make her sick?—but at least his explanation offered something more than handwaving about theoretical physics.
As much as she didn’t want to admit it.
She flipped idly through her notes, rubbing at her itchy eyes. A Radnor banishing. Valeria’s Frostfire. The Subita Incrementum—she could picture that last one clearly. She and Juniper had called it the Sleeping Beauty spell because it reminded them of the roses that grew up around Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and they had cast it in the backyard of their childhood home, drawing new growth out of the soil as they chanted. It had always stood out to her because the mechanics of it were logical—it wasn’t creating something from nothing, but working with the seeds and detritus already in the soil. It was, in the end, an exponent. Plants to the millionth power.
Her allergies cleared away.
Helena froze, and in her stillness she felt magical energy curling up inside her. The movement was small, as small as a heartbeat, but if she concentrated, she could feel it.
She grabbed the notebook and jogged out to the front porch, the screen door slamming behind her. The air was hot and muggy and blurry with insects. She jumped off the porch, barefoot into the damp grass, and walked up to the weed-choked waterline.
Work with what’s already there.
She stared past the marshy spot, out at the trees, the underbrush, the thick tangle of vines. She had been focused on banishings—they all had. But they didn’t need to banish right now. They just needed to get through.
Helena thought back to the times she and Juniper had cast the Sleeping Beauty spell. No, one time in particular. It had been the middle of winter and Juniper had coaxed the morning glories out from their dormant seeds beneath the earth. The vines slid like snakes over the cobblestones and wound around Helena’s foot, startling her out of her concentration. She had screamed, tried to rip them away.
It wasn’t until Juniper giggled, breaking the chant, that Helena had been able to disentangle herself.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, scanning over the instructions. A simple chant, meant to be powered by the user’s personal store of magic. But add in a blood sacrifice and the power would double, maybe triple. And who knew what Infernal magic could do?
“I’ve found something,” she said, feeling slightly stunned. Then, louder: “I found something! I’ve got an idea!”
She ran back toward the trailer, clutching the notebook to her chest. “Aleksi!” she shouted just as she rounded the corner, remembering suddenly that he was in some kind of Infernal trance and probably shouldn’t be interrupted.
But the pillar of light was gone, and Aleksi knelt in the black circle, his hair hanging over his face. Helena skidded to a stop. “Sorry,” she said.
He lifted his gaze to her. “Are you hurt?”
“No. I just—I think I found something.”
He was pale and weak looking, but when she said this he broke into a smile and sat back on his heels. “I knew you could do it.”
A flush of pride rose up in Helena’s chest. No one had ever said that to her about magic. Ever.
“It’s not a banishing,” she said. “It’s—we used to call it a Sleeping Beauty spell, my sister and I. And because we’re in a swamp, I think it could work really well, once we add in blood magic and—” She nodded at the black circle.
“Go inside, round up the others,” he said. “I’ll be in there in a minute.”
Helena moved toward the back entrance. She glanced over her shoulder and Aleksi was curled up in the black circle, his back a sharp arc, his spine jutting up through his thin T-shirt. She wanted to go over there and put her hand on him. Ask him if he was okay even though it was clear that he wasn’t.
But the thick miasma of Infernal magic lingered around him, and she didn’t think she could bring herself to step willingly into it.
She went inside, shouted into the quiet trailer, “I think I’ve found something!”
Almost instantly, Corina’s head popped out from her bedroom. “Thank God for that,” she said. “I’m at a loss.”
Helena frowned. “I thought you were out in the swamp.”
“I was. Got back an hour ago. While I was out there, I scoped out Gavin and the rest of his merry band of bastards. They are—preparing, let’s just say that.”
Helena twisted the notebook, crinkling the paper. Suddenly the Sleeping Beauty spell seemed absurd.
“What’s this? You found something?” Dominic followed Corina out of the bedroom. “From the fucking Lineage? Really?”
“It’s just—I think it’s adaptable.” Helena walked over to the dining table and smoothed her notes down on the surface. The back door slammed; Aleksi appeared a few seconds later, his steps shuffling. At least some color had returned to his cheeks.
He slumped down at the table, nodded at Helena. “So what have you got?”
Helena took a deep breath. Aleksi stared at her intensely, and she felt a surge of courage.
“The C.O.A. are going to be expecting a binding or a banishing,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Corina said. “They’re setting up all kinds of wards as we speak.”
Helena looked down at the scribble of her handwriting. “So we should do something they won’t expect, right? And I was thinking—our goal right now is just to get past them. For supplies and so I can get home.” She stopped. Home seemed so far away now.
“So what’s your idea?” Dominic said impatiently.
Helena forced herself back into the present. “The Subita Incrementum. We used to do it all the time.”
“We?” Dominic raised an eyebrow.
“My sister and I.” Helena shot him a dark look. “It’s extremely simple but would be incredibly effective out here in the swamp because it works with plant matter that’s already in the ground.”
“Plant matter?” Corina grinned. “So you’re not talking about putting them to sleep.”
“No. We use the spell to draw up as much of the vines and plants as we can and sort of—cocoon them in place. At least one of us will have to stay behind to hold the spell, maybe more. But it would let us get past to do what we need. Then we can focus on banishing Gavin.”
Helena looked up at the others, her heart hammering. Corina grinned. Aleksi leaned back in his chair, looking contemplative. Dominic was, of course, scowling.
“So this doesn’t get rid of them,” he said.
“Who cares?” Corina smacked him on the shoulder. “Helena’s right. If we can hold them in place, we can get all the supplies we need for the mother of all Infernal banishings. I might remind you we don’t have a lot out here right now.”
“I agree,” Aleksi said.
Helena couldn’t help herself—she beamed at him.
“We’re only an hour out of New Orleans,” he said. “We can get anything we need in a day. Come back here, cast the banishing. If we get Gavin banished and bound, like before, the two of us could take on the rest of the cult, no trouble.” He gestured at Dominic.
“Okay, man, but if we’re going to banish Gavin and then take on the rest of the C.O.A., you got to give me a few days to rest up.”
Aleksi groaned and rolled his eyes back.
“He’s right,” Corina said. “We’ll need to recover. My wards will hold, especially if we do some steady reinforcements.”
“Fine,” Aleksi said.
Dominic nodded, looking satisfied, but Helena was still reeling slightly. “You and Dominic are going to take on the entire C.O.A.?” she gasped.
Dominic snickered softly.
“Yeah, with Black Moon.” Aleksi smiled at her. “It’s something to see. Maybe you’ll stick around.”
She felt a strange squeeze in her chest.
“Could we focus, please?” Dominic slid into a chair across from Helena and dragged her notes over to him. “There’s no way a Lineage spell is going to be strong enough—”
“We’re going to have to reinforce it,” Helena said quickly. “It’s simple, though. It’ll be nothing to strengthen it with blood magic.”
Dominic glanced at her. To her surprise, he actually looked interested.
“And, Corina, you’re tied to the swamp, right? Since you’re a conjurer?”
“Sure am.” Corina’s grin was wide and bright. She leaned up against the wall, one hip cocked out sideways. “I know exactly what to say to those plants to get them coaxed out.”
“Perfect. And, Aleksi.” Helena turned to him. “There’s a conduit here. I don’t know enough about Infernal magic, but—”
“I can act as an amplifier for the blood magic.” He nodded at Dominic. “We’ll use my blood in the spell, just like we did for the Black Moon ward.”
Dominic rubbed at his chin. “This might work.”
Helena smiled, relief rushing out of her. Of course, she was still going to have to cast the spell. All the demon blood amplifiers in the multiverse wouldn’t mean anything if she couldn’t get the plants out of the earth in the first place.
But Dominic had twisted around in his chair, showing the notes to Corina, and she was nodding wildly. Aleksi leaned across the table and put his hand on Helena’s thigh. Energy sparked through her at his touch.
“Your plan is brilliant,” he whispered.
Helena smiled at him, and he looked back at her in a way that made the entire world go still.