Chapter 11

11

CAROLINA

H is death plays on repeat in my head.

Declan walking into an alley. The lampposts are flickering and a pungent smell fills my nose like I’m really there even though it hasn’t happened yet. A figure moves in the darker part of the alley, and Declan’s head whips in its direction. He’s shouting at someone…something. Declan’s hand goes to his gun, holstered on his right hip. Before he can draw it, it’s over. Blue light illuminates the alley, and he’s gone.

I don’t see him fall to the ground; the light is blinding, but I feel it. I feel an emptiness spread throughout my body, and I just know.

He’s going to die.

While he worked at the table in the corner, I tried to pinpoint when and where it would happen. I tried to look for any indication of which back alley it could be as I scrubbed the counters with far too much vigor.

I needed more information, needed to examine his future more closely, so I brought him a pastry to try to touch him again. That’s when I saw the map.

The pentagram.

For centuries, Grove Meadow only had one supernatural family to worry about, and now someone was using pentagrams to summon…something.

What the fuck was happening in this town?

None of it made sense. Who would be using dark magic? How did Camila and I miss someone with powers? And what exactly were they trying to summon to the Mortal World?

Millennia ago, witches were cursed to the Mortal World by some greater beings. The stories are never consistent; sometimes, it was the Fates who wanted to punish witches for trying to change the fabric of time and other times, it was the Gods who were worried our kind was becoming too powerful. No matter who you blamed, it was always the same. Witches were to walk the Mortal World undetected, separate from the rest of the supernatural world.

Sometime after the banishment, a collective of witches and warlocks came together to try and return to their world. They tried to unite their powers and summon a being so powerful that they could overthrow the Gods. But they failed, and the Gods punished them by creating a world meant to imprison them for good.

Over time, the Underworld has become home to dark witches and warlocks that we call demons because they sold their souls to dark magic for more power. A power that exceeds that of common witches and warlocks.

Personally, I thought shoving all the powerful dark magic in one place seemed like a very bad idea, but that opinion was well above my pay grade.

So if the figure I saw in Declan’s future was a demon, then someone had opened a portal to the Underworld, and that would be…well…very bad.

Anxiety surges through me the moment Declan leaves the shop, and I’m inundated with the panicked thought that I have just sent him to his death .

But the map gave me a better idea of where it might happen. The center of the star is the alley behind the church. It’s an estimate, but my intuition tells me I’m right and so I trust it.

Declan going to confirm the last location would buy me some time, but not much. It was night in the premonition, but I had no idea what it was that attacked him and thus I had no idea how to save him without getting myself killed in the process.

“Luna!” I shout, coming into the magic room as soon as Declan drives away. “Luna!” I shout again when she doesn’t respond.

I try to convince myself that it’s the terror of the Underworld being open that’s affecting me so much and not that Declan might die. I need to remind myself that Declan O’Reilly is just another mortal. He’s just another mortal, and over the years, I’ve learned to let lives run their course.

But this was different. A door to the Underworld might be open, and Declan might die because of it. Because I sent him there. If I hadn’t said anything, Camila and I could have gone on our own to figure out what was going on, but it just slipped out.

Like I’d fallen into a trance, the words fell from my lips without much control. Fulfilling a prophecy by telling Declan about the pattern.

Luna slithers out from under the couch, one of her usual napping spots.

“What happened now?” she asks grumpily.

“I think someone’s opened a portal to the Underworld, and I’m pretty sure I just sent Declan to the demon who’s going to kill him,” I tell her rapidly, opening the trunk with my family’s grimoire.

All witches have a grimoire. Ours is a large leatherbound book with our family crest embossed on the cover. Spells, charms, and anything magical we’d need to know are in this book. Passed down from generation to generation, this book is not just magic—it’s history. History has a way of repeating itself, and the best thing a witch can do is write it all down and save the next generation from making the same mistakes in an endless cycle.

When Luna doesn’t say anything, I look at her after closing the trunk. If snakes could blink, I was sure she’d be doing that.

“Declan?” she asks finally.

“The detective,” I clarify as I set the book on the table and begin searching for anything that might help me save him and stop these disappearances. Any record of a demon that can summon blue light. Any potion or spell that might kill one of them. Anything.

“Carolina, you know better than to interfere in mortal deaths.” Her quiet scolding irks me, and I can feel the sands of time ticking down on Declan’s life.

I shake my head. “ Something kills him, Luna. That something is not mortal, and it was my big mouth that sent him to it. Also, did you miss the part when I said someone’s opened a portal to the Underworld?”

“I didn’t, but I’m ignoring it because that’s not possible. The younger generations always catastrophize things. You and Camila in high school for example. How many times did you claim the world was ending when, in fact, you both seem to be very much alive? Oh no, Steve from the debate team didn’t call me back after I accidentally turned him invisible ,” Luna mocks. “As if a little memory spell wouldn’t right things.”

I roll my eyes and get back to searching. “I am not being dramatic, and this is more than just Camila’s idiot high school boyfriend, Luna. I saw it. I touched him, and I saw his future. ”

I send her the vision in my mind using the mental link between a witch and her familiar.

“See?” I say when it’s over, like I really am in high school again and want to prove her wrong.

Camila comes into the room with Silas on her shoulder. “Lina, you left the shop completely empty…what’s happening?” she asks, looking between Luna and me.

“We don’t know for sure that it’s a demon, Caro. Just that something kills him.”

“Kills who?” Camila asks, setting Silas down on the ground.

I scoff. “I’ve never seen an active witch or warlock with the power to produce a ball of blue light with their hand and throw it at someone, Luna.”

“Kills who?” Camila asks again, coming to sit beside me.

“Declan.” Luna and I both snap.

“The detective?” Silas asks, and I break my staring competition with Luna to glare at him, but then he offers actual insight. “Blue lights are energy demons. They basically gather energy from light sources and channel it into a semi-permeable form.”

I narrow my gaze at him. “How do you know about demon abilities?”

“Just because the Gods don’t want witches learning about demons doesn’t mean there’s no way to get to the Underworld. Someone has to keep an eye on them.”

Silas has never explicitly said what it was he did that earned him his life sentence as a familiar, but I’m pretty sure the word “classified” barely scraped the surface.

“And no, I won’t be elaborating.”

Right .

Camila grabs the book off my lap. “Okay, then either demons have figured out how to get to the Mortal World, or someone has summoned one or more of them here to Grove Meadow. And it can’t just be a mortal messing around with some charms or potions. If someone did summon them, it had to be by someone with a Wiccan line. Right? That’s what abuela said.” Silas nods his head at her. “But either way, this is somehow related to the disappearances.”

I pull the book back petulantly, earning an annoyed tongue click from Camila, and continue searching for anything that could help us. “I think so.”

“It would explain some things,” Silas adds. “Like, who could get past the wards to get Camila’s necklace.”

But why would a demon break into our apartment and just steal a necklace? Why not attack us when we’re least expecting it?

That’s the question, indeed, Luna says in my mind.

The necklace had to be a diversion. Whoever was behind this wanted Camila and me distracted long enough that they could finish the summoning.

“Wait, if a demon kills Declan, where is he?” Camila asks, bringing me back to the immediate problem.

“Checking out the last disappearance location. If I’m right about the hunch that I had the locations form a summoning pentagram, then we’ll be able to triangulate the center of it. That’s where the demon will be. I think we have until after sunset tonight, but it could be another night. I’m not sure.”

Camila nods as she processes the new information, but wisely decides that now is not the time to ask about the minute details.

We comb through the grimoire, and Silas continues to tell us what he knows about energy demons, which isn’t much. If we wanted something to…exterminate our demon problem, we’d have to start from scratch, and unfortunately, we didn’t have much time for that .

Camila’s leafing through another spell book that abuela kept in the trunk when she pauses and suddenly looks up at her familiar.

“Silas, what do you know about trapping demons?” Camila asks, looking intently at her familiar and I just know whatever we’re about to do won’t be good.