Chapter Twenty-Six #2
My heart had slowly, steadily sunk from my chest to somewhere near my toes.
The Wilds’ edge seemed to lean closer, listening. The Wards hum shifted in my bones. My butterfly mark pulsed a quiet, uneasy rhythm.
He would come.
He had to.
He’d said…
Time slid by in increments with the length of a breath, the tapping of Stella’s fingernail against the parasol handle, the scritch-scratch of Skonk’s quill as he kept recording, even now.
“Maybe he took a wrong turn,” Bella said, more to herself than anyone. “The Wilds aren’t exactly well signposted.”
“He lived in Shadowick for years,” I said. “If he can navigate that place, he can find the Wilds.”
Keegan shifted beside me, shadows stirring under his skin. “Unless he doesn’t want to,” he said.
The sentence hung in the air like smoke.
Stella uncrossed and re-crossed her legs, eyeing the empty west point. “I have to say,” she drawled, “if our entire plan to save the world hinges on the punctuality of a broody boy with a martyr complex, perhaps we should revisit our priorities.”
“He’s older than us,” I said automatically.
“So am I,” she replied. “Everyone’s a boy when you pass a century. Especially the dramatic ones.”
The Silver Wolf chuffed, which I chose to believe was lupine agreement.
Twobble hopped off his rock and began to pace in a tiny, nervous circuit. “Not to backseat-ritual this, but do we have a contingency plan labeled ‘Gideon is a no-show’?” he asked.
“Yes,” Nova said. “Unfortunately, it’s labeled Don’t do the ritual.”
“So no,” Twobble translated.
The clock in my head ticked louder.
He wouldn’t just… not come.
Would he?
Gideon wanted to live. He wanted to be free of my grandmother’s grip. He wanted power, yes, but not chains. The circle was one of the few ways to cut the Hunger Path. He’d said yes. He’d looked almost relieved when he said it.
Unless that had been another performance.
“Maybe he’s testing us,” Opal said lightly, though her face had gone pale. “Seeing how much we’ll wait.”
“If he is,” my dad said, voice low, “it’s a bad test.”
“And what about you, Maeve?” Stella asked, eyes sharp on my face. “What do you think he’s doing?”
I stared at the empty quarter, the spot where Gideon was supposed to stand, where the circle’s mark seemed a shade duller, as if refusing to fully wake without him.
My mouth felt dry.
“I think he likes control,” I said slowly.
“I think he’s scared of my grandmother, and of what the circle might take from him.
I think he’s been pulled between their side and ours for so long he doesn’t know where his feet are supposed to land.
” I swallowed. “And I think, if there’s even a sliver of a chance that this spites her and saves him, he’ll take it. ”
“A sliver,” Keegan echoed. Not mocking. Just there.
Stella’s gaze softened a fraction. “Oftentimes, when you offer lost boys a way home, they wander in circles around the door before stepping through,” she said. “Sometimes they never do. But sometimes they surprise you.”
“Are we still talking about Gideon,” I asked, “or someone you drank in 1890?”
“Both,” she said.
We waited.
Nova shifted her staff, eyes narrowing. “The pattern will only hold at this readiness for another fifteen minutes,” she said quietly. “After that, the threads will slip back. We’d need to reset.”
“How long would that take?” Lady Limora asked.
“Days,” Nova replied. “Maybe weeks. The Hollows does not like being called twice in quick succession for the same task. It would… sulk.”
“Excellent,” Twobble muttered. “We’d have a sulking cosmic tapestry and a smug priestess.”
Marla, who’d been silent until now, tilted her head slightly. “Are we sure he doesn’t have eyes in this circle already?” she asked. “He’s slippery. He could be watching.”
“If he’s invisible somewhere near me,” the Silver Wolf growled, “he’ll regret it.”
Ardetia’s eyes flicked to the tree line. “No one is cloaked at the edge,” she said. “I would feel the ripple. He is either still on his way, or he is not coming.”
Not coming.
The words landed like stones in my stomach.
The Wilds seemed to lean back, as if withdrawing its own tentative welcome.
For a long, taut moment, no one spoke.
My heart, which had been trying to be reasonable and hopeful and strategic all at once, finally admitted the thing it hadn’t wanted to say even to itself:
Gideon, true to form, might just not come.
Not because he was dead. Not because he was captured. Not because he’d failed.
Because he’d chosen not to.
Because when faced with the chance to stand with us, to risk being bound into something bigger than his own orbit, he might have decided he’d rather take his chances alone, with the hunger path still open and my grandmother still holding one end of the leash.
Fear slid through me, laced with something sharper and pettier—hurt.
“We trusted him,” I heard myself say, voice steadier than I felt. “We built this whole thing around his word.”
Keegan’s hand brushed mine, not quite taking it, just there.
“That was always the risk,” Nova said softly.
The west quarter of the circle stayed empty.
And for the first time since he’d said yes in that frozen neutral ground, I had to look at that emptiness and whisper, deep in my chest where no one else could hear:
What if he never meant it?