“Your uncle is seriously thinking about becoming a vampire?”

“I collapsed before we could complete the ritual, which means the Corrupter is still out there,” Hope reminds me, her expression turning somber. “Best-case scenario is he’ll be back in a hundred years—and so on and so on, until he finds another body that can withstand an Ascension. Uncle Marcus thinks he has a responsibility to protect the world, and stuff.” With a miserable hitch of her shoulders, she adds, “Out of the original six, only three sorceresses lived long enough to face Azazel a second time—and even though they were joined by the strongest mortal magic-workers they could find, everything still went wrong. He says he won’t do it until after I graduate, but … he’s taking it really seriously.”

Hope still doesn’t know what happened after the building came down—how Ket and Sulis managed to evacuate her, themselves, and all the other witches out of the ruined factory in the blink of an eye. All she knows is that she woke up in her own bed a few hours later, with a splitting headache and a royally pissed-off uncle.

“Am I the only one who doesn’t ever want to face Azazel again?” I squirm inside my skin. We’re right at the bend in the hall where I made William go kablooey.

Adriana grunts. “Actually … my abuela was thinking about it, too.” I snap an incredulous look her way, and she puts her hands up. “Hey, I told her she could do it over my dead fucking body, and I got a whole lecture about duty and ‘don’t use that language with me, young lady,’ and … blah blah blah, I don’t know, I yelled too loud to hear the rest.” Tugging at the ends of her hair, she won’t look at either of us. “She finally told me she won’t do it, but … if she changes her mind, it’s not like I can stop her.”

After the factory collapsed, Adriana drove my parents to her grandmother’s house—our predetermined rendezvous point—fueled by panic. I got there only a few minutes after she did, and we all sat up for hours until Ximena walked in the door. She wouldn’t tell us where she’d been, or what the coven had talked about in the aftermath of the ritual, but she wasn’t much happier about Adriana’s participation in my scheme than Marcus Cheng was.