—and now, her bonded ally.

You summon me again, he said inside her mind. Possessing no earthly body, he could not speak any other way. It’s been a long time. Aren’t you an infant yet?

“I did not summon you for conversation.” Elizabeth took a deep gulp of water. Already, her fast-regenerating body was healing the cuts on her fingers, leaving only faint pink lines behind to show where she’d shed the blood for the elaborate pattern in front of her. “I have need of you, Asa.”

You taunt me. So, so close to saying my name, and yet you never will. But you could, you could—

“The One Beneath himself is releasing me from his service!” Elizabeth snapped. “I serve him now for loyalty, not as a mere slave. So remember your place.”

I am his slave, not yours. I will work with you, not for you. There is a difference, Goodwife Pike. Remember it well.

Elizabeth did not need a demon underling to tell her the finer divisions of power among the servants of the One Beneath. She knew her place with him. He treasured her beyond all his others, was freeing her in resignation and understanding. Her last act for him would be her greatest. They would be united again when at last, at long last, her work here was complete.

“You know what I am trying to do,” she said. “You know how close I am to success.”

On Samhain the end comes.

“Yet there is a strange energy at work here. Another witch—more powerful than she should be. A shift in the balances.”

One you don’t understand. Asa sounded positively delighted. And the other witch is only a girl.

“She has changed the structure beneath Captive’s Sound!” Elizabeth snapped. “Nadia Caldani knows something of what I am, but that alone would not give her such power.”

She possesses two things you do not.

Elizabeth refused to ask. If the demon was fool enough to tell her that Nadia possessed faith or hope or love, any such token from a children’s story, she’d beg the One Beneath to send him to the deepest torments, and it would be done for her. As a gift. As a blessing.

But in the past century, she’d forgotten how useful Asa could be. Nadia possesses Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows.

How? How had she found it? Elizabeth herself had no need of it—formidable witch though Prudence Hale had been, her knowledge counted as nothing compared to Elizabeth’s own. But the book was so old, so powerful that it had served as a kind of anchor of the magical energies in this town. No wonder the balances had been thrown off. Nadia had not only moved it, she had taken possession of it—begun to learn from it.

Then Asa said, And Nadia possesses a Steadfast.

Elizabeth frowned. “Who?”

You know a Steadfast is shielded from the eyes of a demon. I cannot see her face. But I sense the presence and the power of a Steadfast behind Nadia’s witchcraft.