It was a woman, possibly fifty years old, long and lean. She was wearing odd clothing—a toga-like gray dress. Silver fog clung to her bare ankles. Her dark hair was pinned up and dusted with gray at the crown. She had intelligent eyes, cheekbones that could cut diamond, and a full, sensual mouth. French, through and through. She crossed her elegant arms with an air of superiority and smiled at me like she’d just won the lottery.

When I realized who she was, I screamed bloody murder.

Complete shock severed my connection to the moon magick, and the woman disappeared in a flash. Newly reanimated, Lon faceplanted into the sand just as the ocean roared back to life, echoing Merrimoth’s angry shouting somewhere above us.

My heart raced around my chest like a fox outrunning a hunter. A terrible feeling of hopelessness took root.

Enola Duval. Never in a million years did I think I’d see her again. Gifted student of the occult and author of multiple books on magick. Infamous former member of the highly esteemed Ekklesia Eleusia esoteric society, or E∴E∴, as it’s known in occult circles. One of the Black Lodge Slayers. Number 37 in a set of American Serial Killer trading cards. On the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Mom.

My mother had been gone for months, claimed by a primordial albino demon named Nivella the White and taken into the Æthyr with my father as payment for crimes they committed. Nasty crimes. Unpardonable crimes. Long before her stint as a serial killer, my mother conceived me during an arcane ceremony that invoked something big and secret and unknowable from the Æthyr inside my cells—all so that she and my father could steal its essence through good, old-fashioned ritual sacrifice.

Mom was evil. She was crazy. And she could not be alive—Nivella wanted my parents dead, and had every reason to kill them as soon as they crossed into the Æthyr.

What I saw just now was only . . . a hallucination, or something. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be my mother. Period.

Lon’s muffled swearing wrenched me away from my panicked thoughts. As he pushed himself to his feet, I bent to help him and brushed sand from his jacket.

“You did that?” he rasped. “Stopped my fall?”

“I’m as surprised as you are.”

His eyes quickly narrowed in concern. “What—”

“Don’t read my thoughts right now, okay? Later.”

He nodded, and with his typical economical way of compartmentalizing emotional situations, promptly tabled his curiosity and focused his attention toward the underside of the house, listening for Merrimoth. “Can you bind him from here?”

“Is he coming? Can you read him? Where is he?”

As if in answer, the sound of the crashing waves suddenly stopped. The nearby surf was white. Not foamy white—snowy white. Not my magick this time. Lon and I cautiously glanced around the stilts.

Merrimoth had created a sludgy, half-frozen iceberg on the ocean’s surface. If he had been aiming for us and just missed, I didn’t want to risk him trying again and succeeding.

Time to get this over with.

I zeroed in on his voice and called up the moon power again. How could I have had so much trouble reaching it earlier? It came so naturally now. Power hummed inside me, ready to be wielded, as I warily scanned my surroundings for my mother. Not there. Good. Whatever had caused her image to appear earlier, it must’ve been a product of my mind—some sort of witchy glitch. At least that’s what I told myself.

The blue dot of light that marked my starting point appeared in my line of vision. I expanded it, molding the light into a standard binding triangle with all the proper seals and symbols. Then I shut my eyes, concentrated, and projected it upward through the house, searching for Merrimoth.

I lassoed him, but something felt wrong. He should be trapped, unable to do anything but pace and moan inside my binding, but he was moving. Lon shouted something incoherent. My eyes snapped open. I saw the blue light of my binding nose-diving through the night sky, spinning in circles around Merrimoth. I tried to yank the binding toward me like a leash. Tried to will him to stop—to slow time again. It was too late.

Two terrible realizations twined inside my head. Merrimoth had already jumped from the balcony when my binding trapped him—he’d constructed the snowy iceberg as a landing pad to soften his fall. Whatever he’d done to amp up his knack’s once meager power, he now believed himself to be infallible. Godlike.

And by yanking on my binding—even though I’d been trying to save him—I’d pulled him off course. His grotesque scream was abruptly aborted when a sickening crack! pierced the air.

Like an afterthought, the iceberg melted all at once into the sea and the renewed surf pounded against Merrimoth’s torso, impaled on a jagged point of rock.

I’d just killed someone. Again.

• • •

Shock silenced us for several heartbeats as we stood in the rain. Lon finally prodded me away from the shore and we retreated beneath the cover of the stilted house.

I felt a tickle in the back of my nose, then a familiar drowning warmth. Nosebleed. I lifted my hand to catch the first drop, then untucked the hem of my T-shirt and used it to pinch my nose. Cool night air drafted across my bared stomach.

“Oh, Cady. Not again.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said, my voice muffled inside my shirt. My eyes brimmed with prickly tears.

Lon offered me a waded up paper napkin from his coat pocket. “I meant the nosebleeds. Of course you didn’t mean to—”