Chapter Thirty-Three
If the priestess had been angry before, now she was something worse.
Focused.
The shadows poised above us with thousands of black spears hanging in the air, trembling with the urge to fall. The lattice dome overhead had stopped flickering and gone solid, like a night sky someone had painted too dark.
Every instinct I had screamed to make myself very small.
Instead, I straightened.
She’d said I had no idea what I’d just done.
She was only half right.
I didn’t know the details. I didn’t know exactly how Gideon had cracked her hold or what that meant for the hunger path in the long term.
But I knew this much.
She wasn’t untouchable anymore.
She could be shaken.
“A bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Stella called, teeth very much out. “Making the sky into your own personal cutlery drawer?”
“Stella,” Nova said warningly.
“What? Someone has to heckle her. It’s practically a magical law.”
The priestess ignored her. Her eyes, those pale, cold eyes, never left my face.
“It would be so simple,” she said, voice deceptively soft. “One moment of yielding. One flicker of understanding. You kneel, you open, and all of this stops. The path stabilizes. The Wards cease their whining. Gideon lives.”
Her gaze sharpened, the last words a needle.
My stomach clenched.
She didn’t say and you live.
Noted.
Around us, the square seethed.
Small battles had broken out in messy, erratic clusters.
At the far end, Lady Limora and her witches formed a tight, glowing knot, their joined magic holding a wedge of shadow at bay.
The Silver Wolf and my dad fought side by side in their half-shifted states with fur and claws and human curses mingling as they tore at any tendrils that slithered too close to fleeing villagers.
Some people had managed to run, ducking down side streets, vanishing into doorways the shadows hadn’t reached yet, but more were huddled in their houses, shutters closed. I could feel them through the Wards: pulses of fear, small candle-flames of life in the dark.
Bella darted between fights, her fox form streaking in and out of danger, nipping at shadows, trying to snake around people’s ankles.
Ardetia moved with eerie grace, her frost-laced hands touching walls and paving stones, laying down thin sheets of ice that made the shadows slip and lose purchase.
Twobble and Skonk had turned the area in front of the tea shop into a goblin-engineered gauntlet. They’d dragged out sacks of salt, jars of fizz, a bucket of what looked suspiciously like glitter, and were hurling them with wild accuracy.
Every time a tendril of darkness tried to get too close to the door, it found itself smacked with dawn fizz, sprayed with salt, and then sparkled into humiliation.
“You shall not pass!” Twobble yelled, throwing an entire baguette at one persistent strip of shadow. “This pastry is charmed!”
“It’s not,” Skonk muttered, but the bread did hit the shadow squarely, so I supposed that counted for something.
Keegan stayed close, his wolf body pressed against my legs, hackles raised. Every time he lunged at a shadow, I felt the pull on his curse, like something had its claws in his spine. He never should have shifted.
“Don’t you dare go for her,” I whispered to him through our strange, interlaced bond. “I mean it. If she grabs you, I will burn down an entire realm, and we don’t have time for that today.”
His golden eyes flashed—fierce, agonized, stubborn. He stayed.
For now.
The priestess lifted one hand.
Above us, the hanging spears of shadow rearranged.
They pulled inward, merging into larger, thicker spikes with less glitter and more precision. The lattice dome condensed, lines tightening, symbols brightening with a vicious clarity. In the center of it all, directly over the square, the shadows twisted into a single, massive bolt.
My mark flared hard enough that my vision stuttered.
“Might want to move!” I called.
People ducked, scattered, instinctively pulling away from the center.
The massive shadow bolt dropped.
Not toward them.
Toward me.
Keegan slammed into my side, shoving me out of the way with a growl that shook his whole body. The bolt hit the cobbles where I’d been standing and exploded.
I flew sideways, hit the ground hard, and rolled.
For a second, everything was noise and white static.
When it cleared, my ears rang.
There was a crater in the square where the bolt had struck, and stone had cracked, frost riming the edges. Shadows seeped from it like smoke from a deep pit.
“Maeve!” My mom’s voice cut through the noise. “Are you all right?”
“I’m great,” I croaked, pushing myself up on shaky arms. “Ten out of ten.”
Keegan loomed over me, fur bristling, teeth bared at the priestess. A thin line of blood dripped from his shoulder where a fragment of shadow had nicked him.
I reached up and pressed my hand there.
Warm. Wet. Too red.
“You’re hurt,” I whispered.
He huffed, as if to say later.
The priestess smiled.
“You’re quick,” she said. “Good. I’d hate for this to be dull.”
“Excuse me,” Twobble yelled from somewhere behind a barricade of overturned chairs, “but if you want non-dull, try fighting literally anyone else. Maeve is very busy. She’s got circles to close, book sprites to babysit, existential crises—”
“Twobble,” I snapped.
“What? I’m building your mystique,” he said.
The priestess’s gaze slid to him, cold and assessing.
Shadows slithered closer to his position.
He froze, ears flattening.
Skonk stepped in front of him, surprisingly fierce, clutching a jar of salt in both hands like it was a grenade.
“Back off,” he squeaked. “He’s… under contract.”
Shadows snapped at them, only to be intercepted by Stella, who blurred forward faster than my eyes could track. One moment she was by the door, the next she was in front of the goblins, hand outstretched.
Her nails lengthened, black and sharp.
She slashed downward.
The shadows she hit sliced apart with a scream like wind through broken glass.
“Don’t touch my goblins,” she said.
For one surreal second, I wanted to cry.
All of this, vampires defending goblins, wolves defending witches, fae icing over shadow, my mother standing in the open square with her hands raised, and it still might not be enough.
Because even shaken, even briefly staggered, the priestess’s power was… monstrous.
Every time we pushed her back, she reformed. Every time we blocked a tendril, three more slipped around, probing for weakness. The shadow chord, though cracked, still thrummed faintly overhead like a half-severed vein.
We needed Gideon, not as a person, and not as whatever complicated knot of feelings he was, but as a piece. A part in the pattern. Without him, the circle wouldn’t close properly. Without the circle, the Hunger Path would just keep reshaping itself, feeding on every battle, every fear.
If the priestess finished anchoring it here, she could keep rewriting the rules until she got exactly what she wanted.
“Maeve,” Nova called, her voice strained. “The path is unstable. Gideon’s fighting her in the threads. If we don’t reach him, she’ll either snap his piece off entirely or fold it completely into hers.”
“Both sound bad,” I shouted back. “Which one is less bad?”
“Snapping,” she said grimly. “At least then he won’t be a conduit. But he’ll…” She didn’t finish.
I knew.
He’d burn out.
We were running out of time.
Another bolt of shadow slammed down not far from where I knelt, sending up a spray of ice-shards and black mist.
The priestess’s attention shifted, narrowed.
The smaller battles around the edges of the square blurred into background noise. It was like she’d flipped a switch.
Everything she had?
Came for me.
Shadows struck in rapid succession, like a storm of spears.
I dodged one but felt the cold kiss my cheek as it grazed by. I threw up a hedged shield against another, picturing a woven wall of thorns. It hit, sizzled, and tried to push through.
“Not today,” I hissed, shoving back.
A third bolt aimed for my legs.
Keegan lunged, taking it in his flank.
He yelped.
Pain tore through our bond, sharp and electric. I almost dropped my shield.
“Keegan!” I cried.
He staggered, but stayed on his feet, snapping at the dissipating tail of shadow, tearing it apart with his teeth.
“Maeve, move!” my dad bellowed, half-shifted now, one hand clawed, the other still human as he slammed a tendril out of the way.
I tried.
The ground felt sticky under me, every step dragging, like the shadows were thickening the air around my ankles.
The priestess’s magic wove around my hedge lines, probing and pressing. She didn’t need to hit me directly. She just had to wear me down, creep through the cracks, and then my own magic would become her door.
“I see you,” she murmured, voice somehow right against my ear even though she stood twenty feet away. “You’re a little loom yourself, aren’t you? Threads everywhere. So many connections. So much leverage.”
I pictured shears.
Big, funny, cartoonishly oversized hedge shears, snapping at any mental image of her hands pawing at my magic.
Stay out.
Not yours.
I wasn’t sure if it helped, but imagining it made me feel better.
She lifted her arms higher.
The shadow dome overhead pulsed.
The hanging bolts of dark gathered into a swirling vortex above me. It spun faster and faster, a whirlpool of black, flecked with pinpricks of sickly light. The air inside it twisted, making my stomach flip just to look at it.
“Oh, that looks bad,” Twobble whispered.
“That is bad,” Nova said. “She’s concentrating the path’s energy. If she lands that on you…”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Bella snapped from her fox-sized battlefield.
I swallowed hard.
I could feel the shape of the spell now and how it reached up into the remaining structure of the Hunger Path, dragging its power down, focusing it. This wasn’t just a bludgeon. It was a scalpel.
She meant to carve me out of the equation.
Remove me as an anchor.
“Maeve,” Ardetia called, voice cutting through the rising howl of magic. “If you must move, move up. The path is threaded horizontally here. The vertical line is weakest.”
Up.
Sure.
That would’ve been great advice.
If I could fly.
The vortex spun lower, funnel tightening, focusing on the spot where I stood. Little sparks of black light began to drop from it, leaving scorched marks on the cobbles.
Keegan pressed closer, teeth bared, clearly intending to throw himself between me and whatever was coming.
“No,” I whispered, grabbing his fur. “You can’t…she’ll—”
He growled, a sound of pure refusal.
The vortex screamed.
The priestess’s eyes gleamed with vicious satisfaction.
“Goodbye, child,” she said.
The spell dropped.
It felt like the sky punching down.
I threw everything I had into a shield of thorns, roots, the taste of dragon fire, the hum of the Wards, the memory of Celeste’s laugh. It wasn’t enough. The incoming magic was huge, a tidal wave of shadow and cold and intent.
It slammed into my hastily constructed defenses and began to eat through them, layer by layer.
My knees buckled.
I tasted blood.
“MAEVE!” Twobble screamed.
I heard him as if from very far away.
“FIND GIDEON!”
Something wood and bristly thumped against my shoulder.
For a heartbeat, I thought a random piece of debris had hit me.
Then I recognized the feel of it.
A broomstick.
Not a nice, shiny Academy model. One of Stella’s spares, probably hauled out of a closet when Twobble went raiding for emergency supplies. The handle was scuffed, the bristles slightly wonky.
It bounced off my shoulder, spun, and started to fall.
Without thinking, I grabbed it.
The spell above me shrieked, its corrosive edge chewing through the last of my hedged shield.
I had a half-second.
Maybe less.
“Up,” Ardetia had said.
My muscles remembered, in a chaotic rush, the awkward, ridiculous flying lessons at the Academy. The feel of the broom under me, the way it had jerked to life when I stopped overthinking and just wanted to move.
Keegan’s golden eyes locked on mine.
Don’t you dare, his expression said.
“I’ll be back,” I whispered, which we both knew was the worst possible thing to say in a situation like this.
Then I hopped.
One leg over the broom.
A desperate, graceless, Hedge-Witch-at-forty-something hop.
For one sick moment, nothing happened.
The broom sagged under my weight, the spell screamed, and the priestess smiled.
And then something in the bristles caught.
The broom jerked forward like it had been insulted and was fleeing the conversation.
The ground dropped out from under me.
We shot up toward the roaring, descending vortex of shadow and light.