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for the door, plans I’d designed to escape the Ministry returning to me, the desire to get to Jocelyn overpowering. But as I stepped in front of it, a movement on the opposite side brought me to a halt. Ironically, I processed the shape of the person coming through the door at exactly the same time as he did with me.
    There was no hesitation from either of us.
    Our fists crossed in the air, making contact with each other’s jaws. Our heads simultaneously whipped to the side. Just as I was pushed back into the room, I hurled him to the side, against the wall to the left. From there, the struggle to gain ground over the other sent us over chairs, to the ground, and finally slamming into the wall opposite the door.
    Our fists pulled back with equal speed, aiming at the other’s face. And that was when we came to a stop.
    “Eran Talor?” I muttered, sucking in a deep breath, refilling my lungs.
    He blinked, seeming to be just as surprised as me. “Jameson?” He said this in an accent, which I always assumed to be English.
    “What are you doing here?” I asked in a rush.
    Laughing through a scoff, as if we hadn’t been about to inflict serious bodily damage on each other, he said casually, “I was going to ask you the same thing.” We released our grips and stepped back, each of us taking a quick glance at the door to ensure no one else was coming through. “I came for Magdalene. The damn…” His face hardened, and I sensed the frustration he was going through. “They’ve got her pretty well hidden.”
    “Yeah, they have a talent for that…,” I mentioned, noting that we’d come to the mutual conclusion without much data that ‘they’ were The Sevens. “What kind of business do they have with Maggie?”
    He ran his fingers through his hair, a clear sign of agitation. “She can harm them, and they know it.”
    I interpreted that to mean…“So they want her dead.”
    “They want her out of the way,” he clarified.
    “In order to do what?” While I had my own beliefs about their end goal, I wanted to hear his version. Right now, there was overwhelming evidence that he knew more about them than I initially thought.
    He stared back at me, unflinching, as he answered. “The Sevens aren’t who they seem to be. They aren’t like one of us.” Pausing, he reconsidered that concept and corrected himself. “They aren’t like one of you.”
    My eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “You know about our world?”
    He stared at me, inquiring, and again I got the feeling he knew more than he was letting on. “Your world?”
    I admitted to myself that it was an odd way for me to put it, and then shoved the thought aside. A strong part of me wanted to tell him. While knowing the jeopardy of admitting the truth, I reasoned that Eran was locked inside the headquarters of our world’s most vicious enemy. He had a right to know what he was up against. “The witch world,” I added, leaving him to figure it out from there.
    “Right…,” he muttered. “That’s what you call yourselves.”
    “Yes.” To be clear, I said, “We don’t advertise it.”
    “No, I haven’t seen anyone wearing pointy, black hats or carrying wands.”
    This time I did laugh, at the irony.
    The fury beneath his expression remained unchanged. “Regardless, I haven’t been fooled into thinking those in your world aren’t lethal.”
    “We can be,” I said, and immediately became reserved. “How do you know so much about us, Eran?”
    Diverting his attention briefly to the ceiling where footsteps loosened pebbles of rock down over us, he hesitated. When they faded, he confessed, “Magdalene and I are well aware of what you all are capable of. We studied your Vires, this place you call the Ministry, those who you call The Sevens. And what I said still stands. The Sevens aren’t one of you.”
    “Yeah,” I replied, my voice thick with sarcasm, “that I know. What I can’t figure out…is who you are. Why are you stalking The