He smiled, just a little. “Hot.”
A rustling above them broke the moment.
The mimic pulled itself from the treetops, no longer bothering with faces. It had become a full-body distortion. A walking contradiction. Long and short, wide and narrow. Limbsfolding wrong. Light ripples around it like heat haze. And it was heading straight for them.
Rayna stood on unsteady feet. “You are seriously pissing me off now!”
Payne started to rise too, but she pressed him back down with one firm hand. “No. I’ve got this.”
“Rayna—”
“Ioweyou. And I’m not letting you get maimed twice in one war.”
She turned toward the mimic; every spell she’d ever half-mastered flickering through her brain like a slot machine gone rogue. One of them had to hit.
Behind her, the others regrouped. Brianna was limping. Sahara had a nosebleed. Victoria looked like she’d aged a decade.
Rayna whispered to them without looking back: “Time for the finale. Light it up, witches!”
They did. With everything they had.
The mimic was unraveling. Its limbs moved like rope underwater, twitching at wrong angles, fracturing into shapes it hadn’t earned the right to wear. Bits of Sahara’s face. Katie’s freckles. A chunk of Victoria’s long neck. It wastryingto be them all at once… andfailing.
Rayna raised a shaking arm, glyphs glowing hot, but before she could throw the final strike, Joell stepped forward.
“No!” Brianna grabbed her arm, but Joell pulled free, walking calmly toward the center of the battlefield, barefoot and silent.
“She’s not casting,” Victoria said. “She’s opening a channel.”
Rayna felt it too. It was like a door being unlocked in a room she didn’t know was there. Joell’s power didn’t shout like the others. It hummed, steady and low, like a deep heartbeat under stone and earth.
The mimic paused. It faced Joell, not mimicking, not attacking. Just watching.
Joell knelt in the scorched grass, palms open, voice quiet. “I see you,” she whispered. “Come in.”
Rayna staggered forward. “Joell, what the hell are you doing?”
Joell didn’t answer with words. Her eyes went wide and silver. Her head snapped back, and then shespoke, but not in her voice.
“We are memory,” the mimic said through her. “We are echo. We were once many. Now only I remain.”
The witches froze. Katie gripped her goldfish’s bubble tighter. Even the fish stopped spinning.
Joell’s body vibrated with alien power, skin flickering like concentric circles of water in sunlight. The mimic stayed still. If it had eyes, it would be staring at her.
“Your world hummed,” it said. “So loud. So messy. So full. We fed on patterns. Then the patterns broke. Then we drifted. We took shape to survive. We remember what we were through you. But one by one, we were rejected and fell apart.”
Sahara whispered, “It’s not a monster.”
“It’s arefugee,” Victoria said grimly.
“We did not mean harm,” Joell continued, her voice layered now. Not only hers, but also others, and something ancient. “Your power calls us. Wecannot notcome. We are hunger, yes, but also fear and history. And…” Her hands began to tremble.
Rayna dropped to her knees beside her. “Can you break the connection?”
Joell’s eyes flicked toward her, and for a second, she looked like herself again. “I can end it.”
“But?”