The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Witchy Woman, pt. 2

PORTED BACK IN EVERETT'S WING OF THE WINTERS' CANADIAN HOME. OUT-side, snow was melting, and my favorite time of year — the time when Everett stopped being a jackass and switched to thoughts of me without my clothes on — was about to begin.

His wing had become our command post. There were maps and white boards with photos and bios and information posted everywhere. Squarely where I could see it from the middle of the couch, there was a poster-size copy of Lizzie's cipher.

"There you are," he said when I appeared. "Quite the day to go MIA."

"It's only MIA if you aren't where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be," I said. And then I kissed him on the lips.

I still had not told him about my hallucinations, dreams, visits, or otherwise with Alexander Raven. I had not told a soul. Whose business was it that I was really going textbook mental?

Ginny opted out of Canada this particular winter and had set up a European headquarters, we could call it, in the Winters' house in France. She, Ben, and Noah had made that their home for the last six months. And though I missed her like crazy — and hadn't worked up the nerve to wear my sleeveless wardrobe because staring still bothered me — I was grateful for a reprieve from having someone inside my head at all times.

But today we'd all meet in Chihuahua, Mexico, on a rocky desert hillside, where we would gather to invade one of the largest of Raven's strongholds. Three hundred people lived in the primitive tent-town here, and as best I could tell from a distance, only half of them were supernaturals.

So today meant something. Today, we would either take a step toward Raven or — like so many days before — take no step at all. Time melted into itself these days. That's why I'd stopped counting and couldn't remember — deliberately — just how long ago we'd inserted a foreign body into Sam's inner thigh. Counting didn't help. The war we thought would be over by now still loomed in the distance. An ominous and yet undetermined distance. It could happen now. It could happen never.

We all got there by our various methods of transportation, but I got there first to make sure everything was in place. I arrived under a camouflaged tarp, between rocks, with a sniper rifle in my hand. I alerted Kutoyis to tell him that we were ready for arrivals, and then Everett started porting people into their respective nests.

A few moments later, Mark, Everett, Madeline, Ginny, Patrick, Kutoyis, Noah, and Ben were all in similar spots within a half-mile radius.

I couldn't shake remembering where we had been not that long ago. Specifically, I couldn't help but remember where I had been. When we saw a victory — however small — in our sights, then my brain somehow led me back to weaker moments that were now irrelevant. When Mark had conned Sam and we began what would be this journey to demolish Raven's strongholds, I was someone else entirely. Powerless and fragile, at least by comparison to the person I am now, I used to spend my life on airplanes with actual luggage and an array of self-hatred skills. But now I was confident that I was going after the most powerful being in the world and I had a fighting chance of defeating him. I even looked more focused: I wore my hair slicked back in a ponytail, and the same black jeans and black tunic almost every day, the colors of which I could change at will thanks to a little witch magic I'd picked up along the way. (The ability to be a chameleon: perfect for sniper nests.) I still wore the Dior boots, though. I was different, and yet somehow the same.

You see the leader? Patrick asked me in his mind. He had long since learned how to communicate with me this way. They all had. Just not quite like Kutoyis, who could hear me five hundred miles away while hallucinating, dreaming, or otherwise.