Chapter Eighteen
My legs felt like overcooked noodles. The kind Twobble insisted were perfectly al dente while they slid off the spoon like exhausted worms. Every breath scraped my ribs, every blink brought a little flash of fractured mirror light.
Whatever the priestess had done…the push, the pull, the ripping magic, it clung to me like cold fingers in my lungs.
“Easy,” Keegan murmured, keeping a steadying arm around my waist as we crossed the Academy’s threshold. “One step at a time.”
“I am taking one step at a time,” I said weakly. “They’re just not… cooperating with each other.”
We made it across the courtyard with only one near-collapse and two moments where Keegan simply lifted me over uneven cobblestones like I weighed nothing but an opinion.
The Butterfly Ward shimmered above us, the butterflies hugging the path with a strange, worried hush I’d never felt from them before.
Something about that quiet made my skin crawl.
I squeezed my eyes shut. The mirror corridor kept replaying, shards of memory in shards of glass: Elira’s hand pressing against the other side of the mirror. The priestess’s face fracturing into a hundred watching eyes. The sigil that didn’t belong to either of them pulsing like a heartbeat.
“You’re shaking,” Keegan said.
I hadn’t noticed, but I was. My teeth clicked gently.
“Just cold,” I lied.
He didn’t call me on it. He tightened his hold and walked faster.
By the time we reached the cottage path, the late afternoon sun had already dipped behind the ridge, painting the stones in long shadows. The cottage roofline peeked between the birches like it always did, comforting, familiar, home.
Home.
I needed home.
I needed blankets and garlic-scented air and the creak of the old rafters and Miora’s disapproving fussing and Twobble stealing snacks from the bread bin.
Mostly, I needed the quiet.
“Almost there,” Keegan murmured, his warmth at my side grounding me as we approached the porch. “You’re doing fine.”
“I don’t feel fine.”
“I know.”
The porch steps creaked under our combined weight. The cottage door had already unlatched itself, sensing our arrival with an anxious flutter of magic from Miora’s watchful eyes.
Keegan pushed it open with his free hand, guiding me through as if I were made of fragile glass.
And then—
I froze.
Keegan stopped beside me.
We stared.
The room was not empty.
The fire was lit, crackling gently in the hearth. Candles flickered across every flat surface, mantle, shelves, table, and not with their usual lazy sway. Their flames danced sharply, almost too bright.
The air smelled like rosemary, smoke, and something electric.
But it was the figure standing in front of the hearth that stole my breath.
Tall.
Still.
Wrapped in a long cloak of deep silver that shimmered like moonlit frost.
Her hair, long, loose, rippling like dark water, fell over her shoulders. Her hands were folded calmly at her waist.
Her back was turned to us.
But even before she spoke, even before she moved, I felt it.
That same terrible, familiar pressure from the mirror corridor, like the world tilting toward a colder center.
I dug my fingers into Keegan’s arm.
He stiffened, one hand instinctively shifting toward the shape of a claw.
The figure turned slowly.
Her face came into view.
And all the breath left my lungs.
“Maeve,” she said softly.
Not Elira.
Not the priestess.
Someone I had not seen in this form since childhood, and a version I had never expected to see inside the walls of my home.
My mother.
Her eyes were glowing with a magic I did not recognize.
For a heartbeat, I was four again.
Standing in the doorway, arms full of too many emotions and not enough language, watching my mother be… other.
The glow in her eyes wasn’t just candlelight. It was real, steady, wrong, and right all at once.
“Mom?” I croaked.
She didn’t answer right away. Her gaze was fixed on something I couldn’t see, some point over my shoulder or beyond the cottage walls. Her irises glowed a strange, luminous silver-green, like moonlight caught in a bottle of lake water. Magic rolled off her in waves, prickling my skin.
The air in the cottage felt charged. The hairs on my arms lifted. The birch sprig in the blue bottle on the mantle shimmered, leaves vibrating like they were humming along with some silent note.
My butterfly mark burned.
Keegan shifted almost imperceptibly closer in front of me, a barrier made of broad shoulders and stubbornness.
“Maeve,” he said quietly, never taking his eyes off my mother. “Stay behind me.”
“That’s my mother,” I whispered, but I didn’t argue. Not when the magic in the room felt like it might choose sides.
My mom tilted her head, finally focusing on us. For one terrifying second, there was nothing human in her eyes at all, just that eerie, shimmering weight.
Then she winced.
The glow flickered, dimming, like someone had turned a knob. She sucked in a breath and fumbled back a step, one hand flying up to her temple.
“Oh,” she said, voice rough and wrong. “That was… that was a lot.”
Keegan’s stance eased by a fraction, but he stayed between us.
“What happened?” he asked, tone gentle but firm. “Who are you talking to?”
“I—” Mom blinked hard, like she was trying to clear water from her vision. “The mirrors—” Her gaze snapped to me. “Maeve, what did you do?”
“I didn’t start it,” I said automatically, which was technically true. “The mirrors pulled me in. Elira was there. And the priestess. And then everything started cracking and…wait.” Suspicion slid cold under my ribs. “How do you know about the mirrors?”
A guilty flush crept up her neck. “I might have been… checking in.”
“Checking in how?” I demanded. “From my cottage? Through my pedestal? You can do that?”
Keegan’s hand brushed lightly against my arm—easy—but my heart was already hammering.
Mom grimaced. “You aren’t the only one who can improvise with reflective surfaces,” she said. “Stonewick taught me some things before I left.”
I stared. My mother, who’d claimed her magic was “rusty” and “nothing like Elira’s” and “only good for warming tea”? My mother, who had spent years pretending we lived in a world where Wards didn’t exist, and curses were things you only joked about?
My mother, with glowing eyes and the air of someone who had just hosted a magical hurricane.
The room vibrated again. The birch leaves rattled. My butterfly mark pulsed once more, hard, like a warning.
“Okay,” Keegan said softly. “Everyone breathe. Including the cottage.”
As if on cue, the rafters gave a reluctant creak.
My mom took in a shaky breath and exhaled slowly. The glow in her eyes dimmed another notch, resolving back toward their usual softness.
Her shoulders slumped. For a moment, she looked bone-tired, like Miora had lately, the weight of too much remembered in too small a body.
“I’m fine,” she said, which was the universal phrase for I am absolutely not fine and please don’t look too closely.
“You’re not fine,” I said. “You’re… lit up. What happened?”
Before she could answer, the back door banged.
Footsteps thumped down the hallway, too fast, too heavy to be anything but a man who still thought like a dog.
My dad barreled into the room, half-shirted, half-worried, wholly my father. His hair stuck up in a dozen directions. His eyes were dark and wide, nostrils flaring as he scented the air.
“What did I miss?” he demanded, taking in the scene in a sweep—the glow around my mom, the way I was clutching Keegan’s arm, the charged air, the way the ivy along the window had curled its leaves as if ducking.
“Magic,” Twobble would’ve said, if he’d been here.
“Too much,” I said instead.
My dad’s gaze snapped to my mother.
“Nadia,” he said sharply. Not Mom. Not honey. Her name, like a command and a plea. But not the name that I grew up knowing.
Her chin lifted, defensive on reflex. “I have every right to be doing magic in my own daughter’s house, Frank.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t,” he replied, voice softer now. He took a step closer, hands slightly raised—not in defense but like he might try to catch something invisible. “I’m saying you’re doing it like someone who hasn’t stretched in twenty years and then decided to run a marathon.”
“That’s oddly specific,” I muttered.
He shot me a brief look that said not now, then tuned back in to my mom. His nostrils flared again. “You smell like Shadowick.”
Every muscle in my body went tight. “Excuse me?”
Mom flinched, just a little. “I do not.”
“You do,” Frank insisted. “Under the rosemary and the lemon oil and whatever Stella put in that candle. Ice. Old stone. Bad manners.”
“Very rude,” My mom muttered.
“Accurate,” he said. “What did you link to?”
She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “I didn’t link to anything. I just— The mirrors were buzzing. I felt it through the Wards. Through Maeve’s mark.”
My hand flew to my hip. “You can feel that?”
“Of course I can feel that,” she snapped. “I carried you, Maeve. Your magic and mine share a wall. When someone pounds on yours, mine rattles.”
Something in my chest went very, very quiet at that.
She went on, words spilling faster. “There was this pressure, like… like someone trying to pry a door open with a blade. And I…” She swallowed. “I pushed back.”
“With what?” my dad asked.
She hesitated, then looked away. “With everything I had.”
Silence fell over the room like a blanket. The fire crackled nervously. The kettle in the corner gave a small, anxious hiss.
I looked around properly then, through the leftover adrenaline and confusion.
The cottage had changed, but not in big, obvious ways.