Chapter Nineteen
The cottage could be as cozy as it wanted. My stomach still felt like it had been wrung out.
Keegan shut the door behind us, and the sound of the latch sliding home should have been reassuring. It should have meant: We’re inside. We’re safe. We’re protected.
Instead, it sounded like punctuation at the end of a sentence I didn’t understand.
Caleb and my father stepped in next, shedding cold morning air and moonlight. Twobble trailed after them, and he was still unusually quiet, his small shoulders hunched as if he was trying to make himself smaller than his usual goblin-sized self.
Grandma Elira paced slowly near the fireplace, her hands clasped behind her back. Her face had that steady, thoughtful look she got when she was working something out in her mind. She looked calm, but I knew better. Elira only paced when the stakes were high.
Miora stood near the kitchen doorway, watching all of us. Her hands kept flexing at her sides, like she wanted to fix something. She was used to mending the cottage after a fight—patching beams, resetting wards, stitching things back together. But this wasn’t the cottage.
This was us.
No one seemed quite sure where to settle. We moved around the room quietly, like guests in our own cottage.
I crossed to the couch and sat down. The cushions sank under me, soft and familiar. For a second, I almost convinced myself this was an ordinary morning.
Keegan crouched by the hearth and stirred the embers until the fire caught again. The light brightened across the room.
My father settled into the armchair and rested his hands on his knees. He looked calm, the way he always did when things went wrong—steady voice, steady eyes, holding everything together so no one else had to.
Except I wasn’t a kid anymore.
I’d been divorced. I’d raised Celeste. I’d stepped into an Academy that breathed and whispered and chose its own rules.
And still, my father looked at me like he wanted to wrap me in his arms and carry me somewhere the Priestess couldn’t reach.
Twobble perched on the edge of the coffee table, hands clasped in his lap as if he were attending a funeral. It was so unlike him that it made my chest tighten all over again.
Caleb lingered near the window, glancing out through the curtains, watching the line of wolves.
“Twobble, I hope after hearing what Gideon said, you truly understand that you couldn’t have stopped my mom.” I rubbed his little knee and smiled. “She is as stubborn as they come, and I know if I had found her, she still would have gone. She just might have been tricker.”
His eyes met mine, and a touch of a smile moved to his lips. “You mean it?”
“Without a shadow of doubt. I grew up with her, and the stubbornness was always off the charts. You’d ask her not to do something, and she’d specifically do it to show you she knew better or could handle it.”
Twobble smiled and nodded. “How did that work for her?”
“Generally, not well.” I chuckled softly.
My dad laughed, and Twobble glanced at him. “I’m sorry, Frank.”
“No need to be sorry, dear friend. Maeve is telling the truth. She’s as bullheaded as they come.”
“Okay, so I think we should talk about what just happened with Gideon. Has anyone heard of a shadow stone before?”
“I’ve heard whispers of things the shadows cling to for power, knowledge, and expansion, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a specific type of stone,” Caleb said, glancing at me. “Doesn’t mean it’s not true though.”
Keegan nodded in agreement. “I’m surprised he’s willing to hold onto it if the Priestess is hunting him for it. He always struck me as the type of guy who’d toss it to the next poor soul.”
I laughed softly, thinking back to all the times I’d dealt with Gideon in my mind or in person, and all the times that his actions surprised me.
“Well, I do think he’s itching to do that. He just wanted us to prepare for it. I’m just not sure what that would entail, though.”
“Put it deep in the Academy where nobody knows about?” Twobble offered, winking at me. “There’s got to be some hidden room or something.”
“I don’t know that I want to put the Academy in danger like that, but it might be our best option.” I nodded.
“Or here at the cottage,” Miora offered.
“Well, he wasn’t trying to bargain with it. Not the way he usually bargains, and that alone was surprising.” Keegan folded his hands together and sat in a chair.
And that was the thing.
Gideon always made everything feel like a deal. Talking to him always felt as if you said the wrong word, you’d end up owing him something you didn’t even realize you had.
But tonight, it didn’t feel like that. There was an urgency behind his words and a real lack of manipulation, and it scared me more than his usual games.
“He looked like he was holding back,” I said quietly. “It felt as if something was stopping him.”
“It did,” Keegan agreed, glancing at my dad, who also nodded.
“Gideon stopped himself. He held back from his usual antics. That can’t be denied.”
My eyes flicked to him. “I wonder why.”
My dad rubbed one palm over the other, a habit he had when he was thinking and didn’t want anyone to notice he was thinking hard. I thought back to his paws and realized he must forget sometimes that he wasn’t still a bulldog twenty-four hours a day.
“I need to go check on Cindy,” Twobble said, and I nodded. I noticed the mischief had returned to his eyes, and a bit of relief spread through me. I would take that as a win.
“He said the Priestess is after him. I think we can all agree that’s true, and he doesn’t seem to think it’s to punish him, but because he has the stone.”
Keegan nodded. “But he also said he didn’t want to endanger the cottage or you.”
“Either way,” I said, forcing my thoughts back onto the track, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to have that stone.”
Silence.
Then my father’s voice, soft but steady. “In time, it might be the best idea or the only idea.”
I turned fully toward him. “Dad.”
He met my gaze without flinching. “Maeve… the odds aren’t in Gideon’s favor right now, and if it's as powerful as he implied, we certainly don’t want it in the hands of the Priestess.
The words made my stomach flip again.
“He’s running,” my father continued, the tone of someone saying something he hated but wouldn’t sugarcoat.
“He’s hiding. He’s slipping around at the edge of your Ward and the Stone Ward like a man who knows he’s being hunted.
He only happened to see your mom and the Priestess because he was already here, trying to figure out how best to approach you without getting caught or bringing danger to your doorstep. ”
Twobble returned with Cindy on his shoulder. “That doesn’t sound like the Gideon we all know and love.”
Grandma Elira chuckled, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“So, one step at a time, and I’ll add finding a hiding place for a magical stone to my to-do list as Headmistress.” I let out a heavy sigh as the sun started to spray golden stretches across the room.
“Best away under the circumstances,” my dad said, nodding. But I saw something flash through his gaze. Worry. I stood, made my way to him, and hugged him.
“How are you holding up?” I asked into his shoulder.
I expected him to lie, but he didn’t.
“Not well,” he said quietly, his voice rougher than it had been outside. “Not well at all.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me. His eyes were tired…more tired than I’d seen them in a long time.
“But I felt she was up to something,” he continued. “I just never guessed that… would be it.”
That would be it.
Oh, yes. The little something of my mother finishing a cup of tea and walking into the Wilds like she’d done it a hundred times, only this time she had a destination.
And how did she know the Priestess would be waiting for her? Or had she planned to walk all the way to her compound?
My throat tightened. “We have to get Mom back.”
The words came out sharper than I meant them to, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be calm about this. I didn’t want to be strategic. I wanted to go to the Priestess’s compound and tear the doors off the hinges with my bare hands.
My father’s arms loosened, but his hands stayed on my shoulders, gentle and firm.
“Maeve,” he said, and my name sounded like an anchor. “Even if your mom thinks she can handle this, or who knows what she thinks, the Priestess will use this to her advantage.”
I nodded.
“If you try to do a Hail Mary to get your mom,” my father continued, “it won’t end well.”
The phrase Hail Mary, in the mouth of my father, who’d been cursed into a bulldog, who had spent years pretending to be normal, who had survived all of this by sheer stubbornness, made it feel both absurd and horrifyingly real.
“I can’t let her just sit at the compound. Or—” My voice broke on the edge of the sentence. “Or something worse.”
Grandma Elira stopped pacing and turned. “Your mother did this for a reason, and we just need to figure out how to use this to our advantage, no matter her outcome.”
I wanted to disagree, but I couldn’t because Elira’s voice held something I couldn’t ignore: a thread of recognition.
As if she understood my mother’s choice in a way I didn’t yet, and since they’d both grown up in places of secrets with magic at their fingertips, I couldn’t argue.
“Whether she thinks she can beat the Priestess at her own game,” Elira continued, “or whether there is something else, some bargain or some leverage, she feels she can use for Stonewick, we cannot rush in.”
“We have to trust,” Miora said softly.
And knowing how seldom my mom and Miora agreed on anything, I took note.
There were many times when I thought Miora might gladly hand my mother over herself.
The smile touched my lips as I thought about all the bickering those two had done since they’d rekindled their… friendship? That might be too kind.
Elira’s gaze pinned me. “I’m not saying we don’t try to rescue her. I’m saying this isn’t something we just… do willy-nilly.”
Twobble’s head snapped up. “When have we ever done anything willy-nilly?” he demanded.
The sound, so Twobble, so perfectly offended on principle, made something in my chest release.
But before I could respond, the front door creaked, and Karvey’s heavy scrape of feet announced him before he was fully in the room.
“Should I answer that?” Karvey asked, voice dry as old mortar.
“What?” Twobble asked.
“You know about the willy-nilly thing?”
Twobble scowled while Keegan’s mouth twitched, and we all chuckled.
It felt good to hear the laughter, but the relief didn’t last because my mind kept returning to Gideon, my mother, and the Priestess.
“I think he had something more to say,” I murmured, mostly to myself.
Keegan’s head angled toward me. “You think?”
“Well, he probably didn’t expect an entire battalion behind me.” I smiled.
Caleb’s eyes flicked toward the window again. “He probably expected you alone.”
I pressed my palms together, trying to make sense of it all.
My mother gone—by choice, apparently.
The Priestess with a new advantage.
Gideon at the edge of my Ward with a stone he wanted to give me but not until we made a nice place for it to stay.
And a mirror in the cellar that showed me walking confidently into the Priestess’s compound in some possible future.
All topped off with the reality of my mother’s note, her words sitting like a stone in my chest.
Magic means something different to everyone. To me, it means saving my family. But what did it truly mean to me?