Forgive us. Burn this out of us turn us pure again. Get him out get us back to how we used to be

The sky simmers and thrums. The answers heave under a thin skin of cloud.

Something is required.

Whatever you want. You want blood I’ll cut myself open

The light dims, rejecting. Not that.

Becca thinks of poured wine, clay figurines, flash of a knife and scatter of feathers. She has no clue where she would get a bird, or wine actually, but if—

What tell me what

With a vast silent roar the sky bursts open, the clouds explode to fragments that dissolve before they hit the ground. Out of the white and enormous blaze it drops into her open palms:

Him.

She was thinking like a stupid little kid. Booze nicked from Mum’s wine rack, chicken blood; baby stuff, for eyelinered idiots playing witch games they don’t understand.

In old times, there were punishments for forcing a girl who had made a vow. Becca’s read about them: buried alive, flayed, clubbed to death—

Him. No other sacrifice could ever be enough, not to purify this.

Becca almost gets up and runs, back to the common room and French homework. She knows she could, if she wanted. Nothing would stop her.

Selena staring into her palmful of hair, the hunch of Julia’s shoulders when she came back in from the seething dark, the fast desperate beat of Holly’s voice. The moments, over the last few weeks, when Becca’s hated all three of them. Any day now it’ll be too late for them to find their way back, ever again.

Yes. Yes I’ll do it. Yes I’ll find a way.

The ferocity of celebration that rises to meet that, outside her and inside, almost throws her across the room. The dots across her belly drum wild rhythms.

But I don’t know who I need to

Not Chris Harper. Chris didn’t need to be kind to Becca, he didn’t do it to get something – Becca knows perfectly well that a guy like Chris isn’t after someone like her – and free kindness doesn’t go with evil. But that leaves Finn Andrew Seamus François everyone, how can she—

It comes to her like the curve of a great smile: she doesn’t have to know who. All she has to know is where and when. And she can choose those for herself, because she’s a girl, and girls have the power to call guys running any time they want.

Becca knows how to be super-careful. Nothing is going to crack open her secret.

All the sky streams with white, great joyous cool sheets of it pouring down over her hands and her upturned face and her whole body, filling her open mouth.