They were all there. All her childhood friends. And they still trusted her.
They wouldn’t, if they knew the aching, yearning cold inside her. How even now—despite everything—a tiny, traitorous voice still whispered:
Burn.
Rory held out a hand to her. “We need you. So will you join us?”
She crushed that unwanted presence back into the deepest, darkest depths of her mind. She imagined ice freezing around her soul, locking her animal away in an impenetrable glacier.
She took Rory’s hand.
“Yes,” said Blaise, the Black Phoenix.