This was so stupid. I was a good person. Shaking, my hand went back to my phone and pulled it out. I wasn’t sure what to think of Nick right now. What was going to follow next was his idea. Did he stick around to help me? “Mind if I make my call now rather than later?” I asked, and the heavy man with the amulet paled. “You get a lot of bars out here, right?”

“Sweet Jesus, she has a phone!” he shouted.

Yes, I had a phone, something demons didn’t. I wasn’t a demon, and to treat me as such was going to be their undoing. Pulse racing and angry with all of them, I hit Ivy’s number.

“Rachel?” Ivy immediately answered, and a knot of worry eased. Finally something was going my way. She was alive and sounded fine.

“Strengthen the circle!” the older man shouted, and they all moved, scrambling to get back to their spots. But it was too late. I had a real, irrefutable connection with someone past the bubble, and the damage had been done.

“Ivy, listen,” I said, pressing my hand against the bubble to feel my skin warm but not burn. It was a very good sign. “Are you okay? Is Jenks?”

“Yes.” Her voice came back, tiny and small. “He’s pissed. Where are you?”

“I’m on the West Coast. Keep the line open, all right?”

As Ivy exclaimed her disbelief, I shoved the open phone in my back pocket. My two palms went to the bubble, and I pushed. I’d once taken a circle. I’d thought it had been an act of serendipitous timing, but now I wondered if it had been because I could hold the stuff of demons.

This circle is mine, I thought, filling my mind with the scintillating, broken energy, filling my chi and spindling the excess in my thoughts to dilute the entirety so the weak spots would show. Before me, I fixed on Brooke’s eyes, smiling when the energy spilling into me scraped along my thoughts, the shattered West Coast line filling me as it burned through existing channels to my mind. The weak spot in the bubble glowed, and with a surge of hope, I concentrated, pulling more until I could see the lines of energy I was drawing off the bubble.

I squinted at my success, and Brooke’s expression became worried. I widened the imperfection. The more I took, the bigger the instability got. It was working!

My thoughts burned, and I began to sweat. The five witches tried to shore up the barrier, but with a ping, the circle became mine. I gasped as the entire line suddenly spilled into me. A lesser witch would have fried her chi, but the jangling discordance flowed to my mind where I spindled it like mad until I managed to break from the ley line. God, how could they stand manipulating this day after day?

I fell forward, landing half out of the circle on my hands and knees. “Ow,” I gasped, not from the bump, but from the force in my head. The circle had fallen, and I stared at Brooke, nothing between us but air.