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Jessie quickly hurried out of the way. She wasn’t there , not really, but she didn’t know what would happen if one of them ran through her presence. Would their seal warn them?
    She couldn’t see the tattoo through the long-sleeve thermal and scuffed jeans the hunter wore, but she knew Naomi’s was scandalously low on her abdomen. They could choose to put the seal anywhere, and there was no guarantee this witch’s seal wouldn’t flare up with the so-called holy protection the Mission wove into the ink. Better not find out.
    The Church thought she was dead. She needed to keep it that way.
    She made short work of the cells, peering through every one. Her heart twisted as she saw two were occupied, one of them by a listless girl no older than fourteen, but neither was Lillian.
    Damn the Mission. Damn the Church that continued to hold a net of fear over humanity.
    Over her. Witches like her.
    Dimly, she was aware of discussion around her, but it wasn’t here in the Mission jail. They were talking around her body. Matilda and Silas and Joel. About what?
    â€œNever seen anything like—”
    The white walls dimmed, and she jerked her focus back to her sight. She could only see one thing at a time.
    Lillian. Where was she? Where would they keep her?
    With a thought, she moved away from the headquarters, rose through the city. Suddenly, her mental eyes flared as daylight shattered through the lower level darkness she’d gotten used to.
    Jessie reeled for a moment, blinking hard, and found herself not in the topside Mission headquarters but above them.
    New Seattle stretched out beneath her. Like a mountain of glass and metal, of smog and cloudy wisps entangled in the streets, it went on and on. Hundreds of feet. Thousands of feet. Miles. Only the top third was visible from where she hovered, just above the Cathedral of St. Dominic’s highest spire.
    It was crowned with a cross. She’d never seen it before. Hell, she’d never been outside the lower streets before, and even when she saw , she’d never been this high.
    It was beautiful.
    Even if it housed the organization that wanted her dead.
    The scene frayed at the edges. Unraveled, like a loose thread pulled along the sides.
    She glanced down, saw the four sides of the city’s most central structure. As if the founders had taken four skyscrapers and combined them with a courtyard, four walls of metal and glass stretched to the sky. This was the heart of New Seattle. The place where the Holy Order of St. Dominic was most concentrated.
    This was where the main headquarters of the Mission shared space with the Holy Order’s vast library. Where the Cathedral held Mass every week, where the Magdalene Asylum shared ground with the hospital. This was where the city government worked and debated and screwed over people like her.
    Witches were burned here.
    Jessie had never been inside. Had never wanted to. But if Lillian was there, she had to find her.
    Focusing intently, she gathered herself. Sharpened her sense of place and being and stepped into the Mission side of the quad.
    And rebounded so hard, she felt it jar all the way to her bones.
    Jessie gasped.
    Fingers grabbed her shoulder, words echoed distantly around her, but she stared down at the quad she couldn’t get through and reeled as it pushed back .
    The sky darkened. Magic crawled into the air around her, ghosted across her skin—her senses. It didn’t feel like anything she’d ever come across before. She flung out her hands, found them suddenly entangled in threads of no real color, each shot through with light. They came from nowhere, wrapped around her wrists and ankles. Her waist. Feeling, prodding through her formless body. Searching for cracks, for weaknesses.
    For her location.
    Adrenaline spiked in her head, her heart, followed quickly by panic as her limbs were wrenched back.
    The scene shuddered, shimmered in and out of focus, but the