Chapter Thirty-Nine
The ache in my shoulder had been sitting there quietly for the last few minutes, the way a bad thought does when it knows it can wait you out.
I’d been pretending it wasn’t there because there were too many people at the table, too many things still hanging in the air, and because once you admit pain has teeth, it usually bites harder.
But the burn sharpened anyway.
I shifted the compress and changed the angle of my arm, trying to do it without drawing attention to myself. It didn’t work. The movement tugged at the mark, and heat slid down into my shoulder blade hard enough to make me inhale through my nose.
Across the table, Gideon noticed.
Of course he did.
His gaze dropped to my shoulder and stayed there for half a beat too long.
I looked away before anyone else could follow my gaze and gave myself a moment to actually see the room again.
Keegan held my hand under the table, which helped.
One of the vampire ladies moved between tables carrying a fresh pot of tea, pouring with the calm authority of someone who knew very well that nobody in Stonewick should be making decisions in their current state without at least two cups of something hot first.
Twobble had somehow acquired another pastry.
I hadn’t seen him leave his chair. I hadn’t even seen him lean into an arm’s length of anything.
But there it was.
He was halfway through it already.
Keegan sat beside me, quiet and solid. From across the room, he probably looked perfectly calm. The sort of steady presence people leaned on when things went sideways.
Up close, though, I could feel the tension in him. It was there in the way his shoulders held still a fraction too long. Carefully, he watched everything in the room without turning his head.
Calm, maybe.
But not relaxed.
Not even close.
Nova had gone quiet in that particular way of hers that never meant peace.
Ardetia sat with her hands folded, looking composed enough to fool a stranger.
Bella had one boot hooked around the rung of her chair and the alert expression of someone who was listening to four conversations, two heartbeats, and whatever magic had decided to do under the floorboards tonight.
Nobody at the table was relaxed.
Least of all, Gideon.
He looked worn down around the edges now that the immediate danger had passed. He didn’t look weaker, just more human, which somehow made him harder to read. His cup sat untouched in front of him, the steam long gone. His hands were folded loosely, but there was nothing loose about him.
I set the compress down in my lap.
“If you aren’t going to tell us where it is,” I said, “then at least tell us what it does.”
The table went quieter than it already was.
Twobble stopped chewing.
That was how I knew the question mattered.
Gideon didn’t answer right away. He leaned back a fraction, not enough to look casual, more like he was buying himself a little room to think. His eyes lifted to mine, then slid—again, briefly—to the mark on my shoulder before returning to my face.
It was the first real hesitation I’d seen in him all night.
Which meant the answer was bad.
Keegan shifted beside me. Just enough that his knee brushed mine under the table. Not accidental. Not possessive. A reminder that I wasn’t sitting here alone.
Gideon noticed that too.
He let out a breath and rubbed his thumb against the side of his cup, though he still didn’t pick it up.
“The stone,” he said at last, “is older than the stories people usually tell about it.”
“That sounds like a preamble,” Twobble muttered.
“It is,” Nova said without looking at him.
Twobble sat back with a deeply offended expression that lasted all of two seconds before he leaned forward again.
Gideon kept talking.
“Most people who know the name think of it as a relic. A source of stored shadow magic. A thing with power and a cost. There were many throughout the years, but this is the only one that remains.”
“And?” I asked.
“And most of that’s true,” he said. “It’s just not complete information.”
My shoulder burned again. Not as sharply this time, but enough to make me want to stand up and pace. I didn’t. I stayed where I was and looked at him across the table.
“What is it really?”
He went quiet again.
Stella, who had been carrying a tray past our table, paused just long enough to set another cup near my elbow. I hadn’t asked for it. She hadn’t asked whether I wanted it. She simply placed it there with the certainty of someone who had outlived entire eras and had no time to negotiate over tea.
“Drink that before you fall over,” she said softly, and sat down behind us.
The cup smelled like chamomile and clove and something deeper I didn’t have the energy to identify.
“Some say the shadow stone is what helped preserve the Priestess,” he said.
“Preserve?” Bella repeated. “That’s a pleasant word for whatever horrifying thing you mean.”
Gideon didn’t smile.
“It helped sustain her,” he said instead. “Or at least that’s the way the oldest accounts describe it. Longevity. Continuance. The ability to remain… more than mortal, but not quite immortal.”
A little chill moved through the table.
Even Twobble didn’t jump in right away.
I stared at Gideon. “You’re saying that stone is why she’s still alive.”
“I’m saying it’s part of why.” He glanced toward Nova, then back to me. “But it isn’t as simple as holding it in your hand and becoming immortal. If it were, half the monsters in our history would have torn the world apart trying to own it.”
“That is not a comforting image,” Twobble said.
“No,” Stella called from across the room, “but it is likely an accurate one.”
“What do you mean it isn’t that simple?”
Gideon’s gaze dropped once more to my shoulder.
The mark burned as if it knew it had become part of the conversation before any of us had agreed to that.
His expression changed, almost like he was trying to decide whether telling me the truth would help or hurt more.
“The stone on its own doesn’t do enough,” he said. “It needs a living line to answer to.”
I frowned. “A living line?”
He nodded once.
“Blood.” His eyes stayed on me. “This stone has been in your grandmother’s line for a long time.”
The word sat there between us.
No one reached for it.
No one pretended not to understand.
My hand tightened around the handle of the teacup Stella had left for me.
Gideon held my gaze.
“Why?”
“Her family came across it centuries ago. If the legends are true, that shadow stone is useless in most other people’s hands.”
For a second, the whole room seemed to tilt, not literally, just enough that I had to set the cup back down before I spilled it.
Keegan’s jaw hardened.
Bella swore under her breath.
Ardetia didn’t move, but the fingers folded on the table in front of her tightened one over the other.
I shook my head once. “No.”
Gideon didn’t look away.
“The shadow stone can be dormant for years,” he said. “Sometimes longer. It can be hidden. Guarded. Passed down. Forgotten on purpose. But when the time comes to wake it fully, to give it back what it needs to sustain that kind of power…” He paused. “It responds best to kin.”
The mark on my shoulder pulsed so hard I felt it in my teeth.
I didn’t like that at all.
I pushed the compress back into place and forced my voice to stay steady. “That still isn’t enough of an answer.”
He said nothing.
I leaned forward.
“What does that actually mean?”
This time, when he hesitated, it wasn’t subtle.
He looked at the table instead of at me, and for a man who had walked into Stella’s tea shop carrying secrets like they were spare change in his pocket, that tiny avoidance meant more than a speech would have.
“Gideon,” Nova said quietly.
His eyes remained hardened. “I know.”
He did know.
And he still looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
I felt my patience fray.
“What does it mean?” I asked again, more sharply this time. “Because if you’re about to tell me that my family is somehow part of whatever keeps that woman alive, then you need to stop circling it and say it.”
The room stayed still around us.
Gideon lifted his eyes.
“In addition to the stone,” he said, and even now his voice was careful, “she needs tears of kin to reignite its ability. Fresh tears. It’s why she’s aged in recent years.”
I stared at him.
The words reached me one by one instead of all at once.
Stone.
Kin.
Tears.
Reignite.
Bella sat up straighter. “What?”
Keegan’s hand closed over the edge of the table. His grip wasn’t hard enough to splinter wood, but hard enough that I noticed.
Twobble looked appalled in a way that stripped all comedy out of him.
“That is,” he said faintly, “an absolutely unhinged sentence.”
No one contradicted him.
I kept looking at Gideon, because if I looked anywhere else, I thought I might lose the thread of myself entirely.
“Tears,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“Actual tears.” I shook my head, thinking about my mother.
“Yes.”
“From family.” I was repeating more to myself than for confirmation.
His voice lowered. “Yes.”
I sat back slowly.
Something old and half-buried shifted in my memory then, not because I wanted it to, but because the words he’d said had reached down and tugged on something that had already been there.
A room.
A drawer.
My grandmother.
The image came back with sickening clarity.
I had only caught a glimpse of it at the time. She hadn’t known I was looking. She had moved too quickly when she realized she might be seen through a vision, shoving something into the drawer with a sharpness that had stuck with me even after the rest of the moment blurred.
At the time, it had only felt strange.
Now—
Now it didn’t feel strange at all.
It felt important.
And suddenly I was no longer hearing the clink of cups in Stella’s tea shop or the murmur of conversations starting up again at the back of the room.
I was seeing my grandmother’s hand move, quick and tense.
I was seeing the drawer slide shut. I was feeling that old instinct rise in me, the one that had whispered even then that I had just missed something I should have caught.
I’d assumed it was a tincture or a treasure…
My throat tightened.
Gideon was still speaking, but the words had gone muffled at the edges.
“…ritual use in some accounts, symbolic in others, but always blood-bound…”
I blinked hard and forced myself back to the table.
Nova was watching me now, and so was Keegan.
I could feel it without turning my head.
“Maeve,” Ardetia said softly.
I didn’t answer, not because I didn’t hear her, but because, all at once, I could see my grandmother’s face in that memory, too. Not clearly, not enough to name the expression, but enough to know she had looked afraid of being caught.
Not guilty.
Afraid.
My stomach dropped.
“What is it?” Keegan asked quietly.
I looked at the table, at the tea I hadn’t touched, at Gideon’s hands, at the grain of old wood beneath all of it.
And in my mind, over and over, the drawer kept closing.
I sat forward a little, resting my forearms on the table as Gideon stood and walked a few feet away, one hand loosely hooked on the back of an empty chair.
I lifted my chin and met his eyes.
“One question,” I said.
He waited.
“How did you get it?”
He didn’t answer immediately. But something almost boyish lit in his expression, like he’d been waiting for someone to ask.
“Well,” Gideon said, spreading his hands slightly, “when she kidnapped me, I had a bit of time to think.”
Twobble stopped chewing.
Nova didn’t move.
Gideon continued casually, like he was describing a mildly inconvenient afternoon.
“She locked me in a cell.”
I raised a brow, remembering it well.
“It looked more like a dungeon,” I muttered.
“True. Dungeon is probably more accurate.”
Gideon sat back down.
“Anyway,” he went on, “the Priestess has a terrible habit of assuming people will behave exactly the way she expects them to.”
His mouth curved faintly.
“I rarely do.”
“So you escaped,” Nova said.
“Eventually.”
He glanced down at the table for a moment, as if replaying the memory.
“The lock wasn’t particularly magical,” he said. “More intimidation than craftsmanship. Took some patience, but I got out.”
Bella shifted slightly but didn’t interrupt.
Gideon continued.
“Once I was free, I didn’t waste time wandering the halls. I went straight to her office.”
I nodded, willing him to go on as Nova’s eyes narrowed.
“You knew where it was?” she asked.
“I had a good idea,” Gideon said. “But I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for.”
He looked back at me.
“I figured if the Priestess had something powerful enough to keep Shadowick under her thumb, it wouldn’t be lying around in a broom closet. Plus, I’d heard about the stone.”
“Reasonable,” Twobble muttered.
“So I searched,” Gideon said. “Drawers. Shelves. Cabinets. Every ridiculous locked box she had scattered around that room.”
“And then?” I asked.
“And then,” he said quietly, “I found it.”
The room seemed to tighten.
“In a drawer,” Gideon said. “Nothing special about it and not particularly well hidden, but she had it in a drawer.”
His gaze flicked briefly to Keegan before settling back on me.
“So I took it.”
“That easy?” Skonk asked skeptically.
“No,” Gideon said.
He ran a hand through his hair.
“About thirty seconds after I pocketed the stone, one of her guards walked in.”
Bella exhaled slowly.
“Let me guess,” Twobble said.
“Yes,” Gideon replied dryly.
“He threw me back into the dungeon.”
I blinked. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
He gave a small shrug.
“I still had the stone hidden when they dragged me back down there.”
Nova folded her arms slowly. “And then Maeve arrived.”
Gideon’s eyes returned to me. “Yes, and then you saved me.”
The words hung in the air between us.
Nobody spoke as the revelation settled between us all, and I was left thinking about my mother.
Something shifted in Gideon’s expression, almost thoughtful, possibly darker.
He looked around the table, at Keegan, Nova, Bella, and the rest of us, and his voice lowered slightly.
“There’s just one problem.”