When I woke, I was somewhere soft.

The soft and warm feeling was all I could register at first. Opening my eyes felt like lifting weights, my eyelids stuck together with sleep crust that did not want to let go. I rubbed at my face and groaned, blinking until the room around me came into focus.

On the upside, the first person I saw was Dante.

"Welcome back," he said softly. My heart gave a little lurch at the tiny quirk of the corner of his lips.

"Dante?" I croaked. "Where...?"

I was in a clean room with white walls. The furniture was simple but elegant, with a dresser, an armchair, a bedside table, and a very soft bed. I was tucked in under a deep blue duvet on that bed, half reclined on a mound of fluffy pillows.

"You're in a guest room at the Sylvan Court. You should really thank her for the rescue, though, not me," Dante said, gesturing to the opposite corner of the room.

A familiar woman with long, blonde hair tied up in a messy bun sat in a blue armchair, waving at me cheerfully.

"I like him better than Calen already, for the record," she said, nodding at Dante.

Callie.

Callie got out.

"You saved me," I whispered, tears in my eyes. I tried to move to get up, but stopped when a sharp pain flared in my chest.

It was right where the cord to Calen used to connect.

Callie and Dante both surged into action to check on me, Callie on her feet in a moment and Dante with a comforting hand on my shoulder, encouraging me to breathe slowly until the aching subsided. It didn't take long to ebb away, but it was like nothing I'd ever felt before.

"I got you," Callie said, a watery smile on her lips. "Always."

Callie reached out for my hand and squeezed. I let the tears run down my face, shaking a little as cathartic, hiccupping sobs ripped through me. There were too many things for me to cry about to pick only one. More than anything, I was overwhelmed, and it all needed to go somewhere.

"Dante helped me, too," Callie said, holding up her arm with a proud smile. "He took off my tracking sigil."

"That was all you," Dante said, shaking his head. "I just did the dirty work."

I frowned, squinting through tears at Callie's arm. Where the living ink sigil was once tattooed into her skin, there was now a pinkish scar, ever so slightly patchy, ever so slightly a different texture than the rest of her arm.

My eyes went wide as I realized what they'd done.

"You cut it off," I whispered. Callie winced, but she nodded.

"It sucked, but I'm free now. So... definitely worth it." 

"You are such a fucking badass," I said, a watery, amazed laugh sneaking out. She'd always been the one willing to go the distance to get what she wanted, more determined to make things work than I ever was.

"She's a trooper, that's what she is," Dante said approvingly.

"Always has been." I smiled despite myself. "Um... How did you know where to find me, though? How did you leave the hotel?"

It was possible she'd found a way to get Dante into the hotel, but I wasn't really sure what that would have been. I never left Callie a way to contact him, and I wasn't sure how she knew who to talk to in the first place. 

"After we talked, I started snooping," she said, shrugging. "I've been around long enough that they didn't question it much when I wondered where you'd been, and someone said you'd be back soon. So... I started looking for ways to wiggle out of the building."

"And?" I motioned for her to go on, and Callie flashed a Cheshire Cat smile.

"I triggered the fire alarm," she said proudly. "I packed a backpack, and then I broke into one of the rooms on the second floor and started blasting. I would have just pulled the switch, but... Well, let's just say that's been tried before."

"... Blasting?" I squinted, shaking my head.

Callie reached over and tore off a small piece of paper from a random document on them table. Then she turned her hand over, palm up, and a ball of fire appeared. She did it as easily as breathing, and then closed her fist to snuff it out. When she opened her hand once more, there was a collection of ash in her palm, and she carefully brushed it off into a small trash bin.

"Fire is easiest for me to work with. It's how the... problem started in the first place," she said carefully. "Apparently, it's pretty easy for an angry witch to accidentally set a lot of things on fire... and that's very bad when you're in a space with highly combustible materials."

That made sense. Most witches who were good with elemental magic were best with fire, though any witch who was good with elemental magic was decently rare. It took a lot of power to work with the raw elements, and most witches simply didn't have the juice for it. With magic like that, it was no wonder that Calen scouted her for his proto-cult.

Fire was, of course, the most straightforward. Witches were energy manipulators, and if you move energy to make something hot enough, it'll combust. Air was the next easiest, as witches could move energy to change temperature and pressure, thus causing air to flow how you wanted it without much fuss. It was a more delicate process than fire, but it also didn't require any fuel, which was helpful in a pinch.

Water and earth were a pain and a half to work with as raw elements. You needed water to work with water. No with on earth had enough magic to isolate hydrogen and oxygen particles and then subsequently shove them together to make water. Dividing molecules magically was just not possible without a long, arduous process that typically wasn't worth it in the end. 

Instead, witches just started with water on hand. Water was also a bitch to work with because of its high specific heat. It took a much higher degree of energy to influence the flow of water, and let's not even talk about how difficult it is to make it float in the air in a bubble. Sylvans could do that, sure, but I'd only heard of one living witch who could manage it.

See? Magic and science do go together.

Earth was by far the hardest element to work with on its own, though. Earth was life and death, earth was the balance between life and death. It was creation, destruction, and the cycle of all things wrapped into one. It wasn't one energy so much as a product of the others that became its own, and that was tricky to balance for anyone. A witch had to use a particularly delicate touch to work with earth as a raw element, and even then, it could get dicey. Since earth was part life, some plants were simply more ornery about listening than others. Worse, still, were the ones that were so finicky that it was easier to kill them with magic than help them grow.

All that was what made Sylvan elementals so special. They were in tune with the raw elements to a degree that they didn't need to worry as much about the rules that witches did, or even other Sylvans. For most people, fire needed a fuel source. Water couldn't be made from scratch. The earth didn't spontaneously grow things without a seed.

For a powerful elemental, though, all of those things went out the window. Elementals were in tune with the elements to a point that they could draw on their energy from anywhere in the world— my personal guess was anywhere in the universe, but that couldn't be proven. It was something I could maybe ask Ray in time, though, once we were out of this. There were many more things to accomplish before we could rest long enough to have a good magic lesson.

At least I could check off one thing from my list: Callie was out of Calen's cult.

"I went straight to the crossing point after the alarm," Callie continued, absently rubbing the newly healed skin on her arm. "It was pretty crazy with everyone running out of the building, so I slipped away while everyone was panicking. Not sure if they ever even checked if everyone was out."

That was disturbing in itself. There was an entire hotel full of people that could have been hurt, and no one bothered to check if everyone made it out of the blaze?

"I'm hoping some of the others got away, too," Callie said, sighing. "I tried to warn a few of the ones I knew wanted out."

Bless her. It was like Callie to at least try to take care of her friends. I didn't think she'd want to hurt anyone on purpose, though setting a fire was certainly dangerous... but it was one of the few options that got her and others out of the building. Calen couldn't risk too many deaths, or he'd draw the wrong attention.

Plus, if I was right and he was building an army, he needed the bodies, as terrible as that sounded.

"Any chance you have a touch of green magic in your veins hiding behind all those Threads?" Dante asked. "You literally cloaked yourself in brambles. It was difficult to find you at all, and we had to cut you out of the plants."

I didn't remember that at all. In fact, I was pretty bad with complex magic, and earth magic was some of the most complex. It could have been instinctive protection magic, which did happen sometimes with both witches and Sylvans, but it was unusual that it took a form I wasn't particularly good with.

"Was I on this side of the Veil?" I asked, confused.

Callie frowned and shook her head. "Nah. I found you slumped inside the guard tower, and there were these thorns growing around it like Sleeping Beauty. The crossing guards were freaking out!"

Dammit.

My improvised teleportation spell hadn't worked, then. Or, alternatively, it took more than that to get me across the Veil. The second option was more likely, considering the Veil was supposed to separate Sylvans and humans. Note to self: my Threads could mimic basic spells, but high level magic required more preparation than trying to use my body as a battering ram on the Veil itself.

"I got a call saying an unconscious witch with purple hair and a woman demanding sanctuary were at the crossing point, so I made the trip as quickly as I could," Dante said, shrugging. "I'm not complaining that you're here, trust me, but I do wish it had been a less eventful trip. What happened back there?"

"Calen tried to stop me when I got to the park," I said simply. There was a lot more to it than that, but that was the most I could muster at the moment. "I don't know how he found me, but I tried to improvise a teleportation spell. Clearly, it wasn't enough to get me across the Veil, so it dropped me at the thinnest point nearby."

Magic was funny like that, in a half-sentient kind of way. If it couldn't do exactly what you wanted, it tried its best to get close.

"What did he say?" Callie asked, brow furrowed. "How did he even know you'd be there?"

"He said scouts reported Dante, and he thought I might follow... probably because he assumed Dante would tell me about the attempt on his life," I said softly. "I don't think he knows it was me that took the grimoire, though. He didn't say anything about that."

That, at the very least, was a point in all our favor. The longer we got away with that stunt without Calen rewinding time to find it, the higher the chance he wouldn't risk the trip. If it was too far back, he'd risk changing more than just the theft of the grimoire, and it might not go the way he wanted again.

I also wasn't sure how his magic really worked now, though. He hadn't mentioned too much about it, and I barely had an idea of how long he could rewind time at all—

I forced myself to breathe slowly. I couldn't do anything about it now. Control what you can, Sunday.

"He definitely doesn't know about the book," Callie said. "He was all in a huff about it and searching rooms, asking everyone. He didn't figure out it was gone until about three days after you took it."

"How did you get around telling him it was me?" I blinked, confused. Calen could have used her tattoo to force a truthful answer.

"He just asked if I took it, not if I knew who," she said, shrugging. "His mistake."

I chuckled. Calen was getting cocky if he hadn't thought about his phrasing enough to get past that loophole. He must have assumed it was someone in the building, or maybe it had happened before. It was his own hubris that got him into trouble that time, and with luck he'd assume it burned in the fire.

And then it struck me that it was odd that Calen hadn't rewound to before the fire.

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait. Three days after I'd seen Callie? It had taken him three whole days to find that his grimoire was missing?

It had been two days since I took the grimoire when I went to the park. Callie made it sound as though it had been quite a bit longer than three days since I last saw her, though.

"How long have I been out?" I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.

"A few days."

I tried to call up the Threads around me, to check if anything still connected Callie to Calen. If he was in her future, that energy would cling on like a stubborn stain. It might still cling to me, too, but hopefully in a more incidental way than a soul mate bond.

However, as hard as I tried, I only gave myself a headache. There was nothing floating around me, no second sight allowing me to see the glowing overlay of fate upon everything and everyone. It was like the magic wouldn't respond to me, like I'd been entirely drained of my ability—

I couldn't see the Threads.

Fuck.