Chapter Twenty-Eight
My broom leaned against the Ward’s front steps where I’d abandoned it in a hurry. For half a heartbeat, I didn’t think. I just grabbed it.
The wood vibrated under my palm like it had been waiting for this exact moment. I swung one leg over—
—and the broom jerked.
Not forward like I intended. Not even upward in a controlled rise.
It scooped me.
One second I was braced to launch, and the next the broom shot up with the enthusiasm of a puppy that had spotted a squirrel. My stomach heaved, my grip tightened, and the night wind slapped my cheeks hard enough to make my eyes water.
“Okay,” I gasped, clinging as the broom leveled out. “Okay, I get it. You’re excited. But we don’t have time to die dramatically tonight.”
Somewhere below, I heard an audible oh!—a student’s delighted, scandalized sound, like I’d just performed a trick in a circus rather than barely survived a magical piece of wood with an attitude.
The broom didn’t care about my dignity.
It surged forward, and Stonewick rushed beneath me in a blur of rooftops like dark waves, chimneys exhaling thin smoke, sunlight pooling on the street in warm circles.
And then the crowd came into full view.
It wasn’t just Stonewick residents. It was taller silhouettes with broad shoulders and watchful stances, and at least a few figures whose posture screamed pack even before I caught the flicker of a canine profile in the light.
Orcs, shifters, goblins too.
And right in the middle, I spotted a confrontation boiling over. A Stonewick man I recognized with rolled-up sleeves and a red face jabbed a finger toward a shifter like he was pointing at a stain.
“Where were you when we needed you?” he shouted.
A woman beside him, gray hair in a braid, apron still tied around her waist like she’d run straight out of her kitchen, lifted her chin, eyes bright with fury.
“You turned your back on us decades ago,” she snapped, voice tight with something old and bruised. “Why should we help you now?”
The shifter she was shouting at didn’t move closer. That was the thing. He didn’t advance or puff up or bare teeth.
He just stood there, shoulders locked, hands open at his sides, the morning sunlight catching the curve of his jaw and the tense line of his shoulders.
He was holding himself back on purpose because he knew exactly how easily a single motion could prove their worst assumptions right.
The orcs weren’t helping. Two of them were arguing back, voices rising.
Another shifter popped up.
“We didn’t turn our backs.”
“What would you call it then?” someone yelled back.
More voices rose above the noise, and the crowd pressed forward like a tide pushing against the shore.
As I watched, the memory from the blue flame surfaced again in my mind, so clear it felt like someone had traced the words along the inside of my skull.
The boy.
Shadowick.
He keeps trying to come into Stonewick.
My stomach tightened.
Stonewick had always been good at telling itself the kind of stories that kept its conscience spotless. We welcome everyone. We’re quaint. We’re safe. We’re cursed, maybe, but still cozy. We endure.
And sometimes those stories were just another way of pretending we hadn’t closed the gate on someone standing right outside it.
But under the fall sky, with voices spitting old grievances like they’d been waiting decades for permission, the story frayed.
I tipped the broom downward and scanned for somewhere to land that wouldn’t involve dropping straight into the crowd. The broom slowed on its own, hovering just above the edge of the courtyard.
That’s when I spotted him.
Keegan came jogging out of the narrow alley that led from the Butterfly Ward. He began pushing through the edge of the crowd. His hair was rumpled at the temples, and his eyes moved quickly over the sidewalk, taking everything in.
When his gaze finally lifted to the sky and found me, the tight knot in my chest eased a little, as though someone had stepped in behind me and steadied my spine.
But relief and dread spread at once.
Because if Keegan was running like that, it meant this wasn’t a small argument. It was probably going on longer than I’d realized.
Behind him, it was as if the entire Academy had emptied to come see what was going on in the village. I spotted my dad and the Silver Wolf coming up behind the crowd.
The midlife witches had poured into the street in hurried waves of voices.
Twobble was somehow in the center of it all, moving through the crowd like a very small general who had misplaced his army but intended to organize it anyway.
I caught a flash of candy wrappers in his pockets and the worried look he was trying, and failing, to hide.
Skonk came barreling along nearby, half running and half bouncing the way he always did, though even his usual chaos had sharpened into something more focused tonight.
Bella moved faster than the rest. Even in human form there was no missing the fox in her—quick, light on her feet, eyes narrowed as she scanned the street.
Ardetia followed close behind, though running wasn’t quite the word for it.
She moved through the crowd with that effortless glide she had, her bright hair catching the lantern light while her expression stayed cool and composed, as if she’d already decided exactly what she was willing to tolerate and what she wasn’t.
And above all of them—
my broom decided it was time to make an entrance.
It dipped suddenly toward the crowd like it wanted a better view of the chaos below. I made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh if my stomach hadn’t been trying to climb into my throat.
“Not now,” I muttered, hauling back on the handle the way you might pull a stubborn dog off a scent.
“This is not the moment for flair,” Twobble called out.
The broom ignored Twobble and me, dipped once more, low enough that people looked up, and then, with the same enthusiastic jerk it had given me at the Academy steps, it popped me upward again.
I heard someone gasp, then a scattered ripple of startled awe.
A few students even cheered. Actually cheered.
Bless them. Truly.
Keegan reached the edge of the crowd and stopped. His gaze moved quickly—from me, to the shifters, to the orcs—and his jaw set.
I could almost see the thoughts running behind his eyes. He was weighing how to step in without turning the whole mess into something worse, how to shield people without lighting another spark in a crowd that was already too tense.
I pushed the broom down again, this time putting enough stubborn pressure into it that it had no choice but to listen. It resisted for a second, then dipped lower.
My boots hit the cobblestones.
The broom hovered beside me, vibrating with unresolved excitement.
“Stay,” I muttered.
It did not. It zipped over to Stella’s tea shop and plunked down near a pile of pumpkins.
I stepped forward into the shifting edge of the crowd, voice steadying as I drew in a breath.
“Enough! Please, enough.” It wasn’t a shout, but my voice carried well enough.
The pushing stalled, and I moved forward until I stood between the Stonewick residents, the orcs, and the shifters, as Twobble and Skonk scanned a few of the goblins who were in the mix.
Keegan came to my side as Bella and Ardetia fanned out slightly behind us, a subtle line of defense.
“Maeve, you need to tell them—” The woman in the apron looked at me. “You need to tell them that.”
“I’m going to tell everyone something,” I said, keeping my tone even, though my blood still rang from the flight and the sight of old hate resurfacing.
A man near the front of the crowd scoffed. “What, you think we’re supposed to welcome them back with casseroles? Just because we’re in the Midwest doesn’t mean casseroles fix everything.”
“They fix a lot,” Twobble muttered somewhere behind me.
A few people chuckled, the sound quick but enough to ease the tightness in the air for a moment.
The laughter faded almost as quickly as it started, and the air tightened again.
I raised a hand, palm out, just asking for a moment.
“I’m not asking anyone to pretend the past didn’t happen,” I said. “And I’m not asking you to swallow years of hurt overnight because it would make things easier.”
A murmur passed through the crowd as I willed myself forward. I thought we’d moved on from this when we’d made a deal with the goblins, but when I looked at everyone standing in the crowd, I saw the pain ran deep. The history was hard to forget.
“I’m asking you to consider whether someone might be using our past against us.” I drew a breath.
Keegan’s focus sharpened as he watched the crowd, and Ardetia glanced at me, one brow lifting slightly, as if trying to see where I was about to take this.
The woman in the apron frowned. “What does that even mean?”
“I’m saying…” I started to answer, but the birthmark at my hip flared, a sharp flash of heat that made my breath hitch, and I stilled.
The crowd kept talking around me, voices overlapping, boots shifting on the cobblestones, but my attention narrowed until the rest of it felt distant.
Something brushed the edge of my thoughts, and I knew what was coming.
Look at them, Maeve. Look how easy they are to turn…
The whisper in my mind was soft, but it carried the kind of precision that made it impossible to ignore.