“She found you,” he rasped, and both Trent and Al spun to him.

“You’re awake!” Trent called in shock before he looked back at me. “Did it work?”

“Ah, guys?” Jenks squeaked in distress as he hovered, spilling a hot dust. “I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think I’m going to explode here!”

Trent’s expression flashed to fear. He looked at his hands, hazed with gold as his aura resonated from the building energy. His eyes met mine, panicked.

“Mother pus bucket ... ,” Al whispered, and then he lunged at me. “Rachel!”

But it was too late, and I cowered as a flash of brilliant light lit the church, burning with an icy intensity. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see! Falling back, I squinted, picking out a darker shadow standing in the middle of the church, swarmed by glowing mystics.

“You!” a voice exclaimed, the hatred echoing in my head as if she’d spoken in my mind. “Your singular thoughts will be ended!”

It was the Goddess. She’d found me. “No, wait!” I cried, one hand propped up on the cold wooden floor as I slid between her and Ivy—and then I screamed as a white-hot knife of anger dove in my thoughts, driving to my core to rip out my soul.

“I will not become!” the figure shouted as I writhed, struggling to escape. “I will not be ended!”

But I couldn’t even breathe without taking in her mystics—and I floundered, burning from the inside out. Ivy. Ivy was beside me—unconscious.

“Rachel!” Trent cried, and then I heard a sodden thump.

Fear galvanized me, and I pulled my head up. Trent was picking himself up off the floor beside my desk, a spot of cool darkness in the fiery glow. Mystics were everywhere. I got a breath in, then another as my mystics coated me in a protective haze, buffering me and Ivy both. But it wasn’t Ivy the Goddess wanted to destroy.

Struggling to sit up, I blinked, trying to find the Goddess in the glow. Mystics coated her so heavily that the body she was in was slowly charring, sending the rank smell of burnt amber to coat my lungs.

“There will not even be a memory of you!” she howled, and I screamed as she flung out a flaming hand. A stream of living magic hit me and I fell, sliding across the smooth oak floor and hitting the wall. My head felt as if it was going to explode from her hatred as the Goddess’s strength wiggled deeper.

“Oh God, stop!” I pleaded, shaking as I collapsed. But I was only a singular thought that held many—not many thoughts making one, and she had me outnumbered. The mystics in me were trying, but it was all they could do to keep my lungs clear and my mind my own.