When he’s only fifteen feet from landing right on top of me, however, the air wobbles suddenly … and he slams, hard, against an unseen barrier. Stunned and flung off-course, Rasputin crashes to the floor and tumbles away, while the shadows behind me swim and unfold—to reveal Ket. Her hand outstretched, the alchemical symbol for air is chalked beneath her feet.

“You are unwelcome here, Grigori Rasputin,” she states without any particular emotion.

The Mad Monk glares up at her as he pushes into a crouch, his face twisted with rage. Over his shoulder, he barks an order to his disciples. “Kill her!”

They both charge at once, snarling, but Ket doesn’t even flinch. Her hand twists, flicking one direction and then the other, waves of visible distortion hurtling outward and knocking both vampires off their feet.

The one to my left rockets backward, and when he crashes to the floor, the gloom where he lands unstitches to reveal Lydia Fitzroy—the metal sorceress—standing over him. She claps her hands together, sparks dancing to life between her fingers, building into a furious storm of snapping electricity that she flings downward. It surges through the vampire’s body, his frame convulsing and smoking … until he bursts into flame.

Simultaneously, when the minion on my right hits the ground and rolls to a stop, the emptiness beside him swirls and fills with the figure of Ximena Rosales. I didn’t come prepared to give a demonstration, she’d said the morning I met the coven, but earth witches possess great strength. I see what she meant at last when she squeezes one bejeweled hand into a fist, sucks in a breath, and then brings it down on the vampire’s head with so much force his skull literally explodes. The floor trembles, bone fragments and brain matter scattering everywhere like the contents of a revolting piñata.

Adriana’s grandmother, a woman who doesn’t even like to step on bugs, rises back to her feet, flicking clumps of undead gore off her fingers. “I really hate doing that.”

My ankle is healed now—and I only know it because my leg twists suddenly, and I barely catch myself before I’m sent face-first to the floor when my body weight shifts on its own. Pressure builds in my head, my clothes stuck to me with sweat, and I struggle to make my vocal cords move. “It’s … happening! You n-need to … hurry!”