Rolling my eyes, I followed Talia to an ornate floor-length mirror hanging on one of the walls, clearly not part of her chosen decor. The glass was so heavily foxed it looked hazed with smoke, and two needle-tipped spires rose up on either side of the gold frame. The rest of it was worked into a flower-and-ivy trellis, wolves’ faces and coiling snakes peering from behind dainty lilies and leaves.

“The Avramov scrying mirror,” she said, a hint of pride in her voice. “All of us get to use it, but as the scion, it’s my heirloom to keep. It’s been in the family for almost five hundred years.”

“Holy shit,” I marveled, shaking my head. “Half a millennium. I don’t think the Harlow family tree even goes that far back.”

We sank down in front of the mirror to sit with crossed legs, me following Talia’s lead. There was a makeshift altar set up at the mirrors’ base, a heavy wooden serving tray holding an assortment of curiosities. Seven red candles and a scattering of crystals: blue lace agate, white quartz, and amethyst. A tarnished silver samovar, and two teacups of china so thin they looked like they might snap if you breathed on them wrong. A slice of black forest cake topped with cherries and chocolate shavings, next to a bowl of fresh-cut hellebore heads.

“I don’t see any scarab blood,” I said as I cataloged the items, remembering what Elena Avramov had said to Igraine after the first challenge.

Talia snorted. “That was just Elena being a dick. A summoning actually requires talismans of invitation, things Margarita liked when she was alive. And amplifiers, to cast the summoning net wide beyond the veil.”

“Cool,” I breathed, my pulse picking up. This was exactly the type of witchcraft I’d longed to do when I was younger, the elaborate kind a Harlow had no hope in seven hells of pulling off. And I was about to see it up close and personal.

“Anything else I should know before we start?” I asked. “Any matters of protocol?”

Talia flashed me a brief smile, her face already sharpening with concentration. “It’s more of an organic flow, you’ll see. Just let me do most of the talking for us, and we should be all set.”

Then she snapped her fingers, and the seven candles flared to life.

I held my breath as she chanted in a low whisper, her hands moving in front of her in that deft way I’d seen in the Witch Woods—like she was weaving some invisible cat’s cradle almost faster than I could follow. Her eyes were spectral in the candlelight, their slate gray cool and fathomless. The candlelight limned the line of her profile as if it’d been drawn in one long swoop, and I couldn’t have dreamed of looking away from her.

Then she picked up a fork from the tray, slicing off a bite of the cake to feed me, then one for herself. Talia had probably baked it from scratch; magic was always much stronger when you made its component parts by hand. If she had, she was an even better pastry chef than she’d let on. I closed my eyes as the chocolate, sour cherry, and sweet cream melted on my tongue, wishing the spell called for more than just one bite.