Page 118 of Salem’s Rise

I think of my mother. Not the version of her I carried through childhood—the tired woman behind a locked bedroom door, the woman who forgot school meetings and fell asleep at the kitchen table with unopened bills spread beneath her arms. But the woman who loved someone with all her heart, lost him, and still got out of bed every morning because two children needed a parent. She kept loving us after life had already taken almost everything from her.

Love didn’t make my mother weak. It gave her something to keep living for.

And relying on Silas didn’t make me weak either.

It saved me.

My gaze moves across the clearing again. Water. Air. Earth. Fire. Everyone else has something I don’t.

Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the Fourth House was never meant to stand alone. Maybe its power only exists in connection to others.

I close my eyes and reach around me. At first, there is only heat and smoke and the frantic hammering of my heart. Then something shifts beneath the noise. A current brushes against my awareness, cool and fluid.

Water.

Another presses against my skin like a restless breath.

Air.

Then the ground hums beneath my boots, deep and patient.

Earth.

And finally, heat burns bright enough to feel almost alive.

Fire.

A rush of hope nearly knocks the breath from me.

I can do this. I can save Silas.

For one agonizing second, I think of Josh. Of the boon. Of everything I came here hoping to undo. Tears blur my vision.

I’m sorry, Josh.

“I’m not letting you die, Blackhollow,” I say to Silas, my voice hoarse but firm. Then I reach for him—not with my hands, but with whatever part of me has been asleep my entire life and is just starting to awaken.

Water answers first, surging out of the air in a violent wave, crashing over Silas’s stake and extinguishing the flames in an explosion of steam. His chains spring open.

“Jack?”

Dark eyes snap toward mine, shock moving across his face as he collapses forward. I catch him before he hits the ground, his weight nearly driving us both into the snow.

I feel the other elements pulling at me now, not resisting but converging. Air feeds water. Earth redirects fire. One force balancing another, each incomplete without the rest.

The Fourth House does not wield one element. It draws from and controls them all.

I reach for the flames still burning around Wren and force them back. Then I lift one hand, pulling the air away until the remaining fire gutters, and drive a wall of earth through the last of it. Her chains release, and Lena reaches her before she falls.

Every element is still vibrating through my body like a second pulse as I kneel in the wet snow with Silas pressed against me. The others stare at me in shock, all except for Lucien. He looks awed—almost proud—and maybe just a tiny bit afraid.

Silas takes in a shaky breath against me, his face burned, exhausted… and impossibly alive.

Morning comes quietly beneath Strega’s Hollow.

There are no windows in the ceremonial chamber, no pale winter light stretching across the floor to prove the longest night of the year has finally ended. Time exists here only in the soreness behind my eyes and the exhaustion of my bones.