The rain over Salem’s End had a memory. It remembered the fires, the stones, the whispered names. Tonight, it fell in sheets, drumming a frantic rhythm against the stained glass of the Ivory Tower—the last covenstead in the Northeast.

Graves swallowed. Sweat beaded on his upper lip. “And if we refuse?”

The younger man, mouth still sealed, made a muffled, desperate sound.

Inside, Seraphina Blackwood, the High Witch of the Eastern Circle, adjusted the obsidian choker at her throat. It pulsed with a low, amber light. Power. Authority. The kind that bent the knee of governors and made senators forget their own names.

“Let them wait,” Seraphina said, not turning. She watched her reflection in the rain-smeared glass. At forty-seven, she looked thirty. Magic was a magnificent cosmetician. “Fear is the only currency they understand.”

The age of dominance had only just begun.

“Then I let the droughts continue,” she said softly. “I let the hurricanes spiral. I let the fires dance another season. And you, Mr. Graves, will watch your cities burn while my sisters and I sip tea in this tower, warm and dry and patient .”