Chapter Thirty-Four
If I lived to be a hundred and fifty, and given the week I was having, that seemed optimistic, I was never complaining about my cooking spells again.
The broom yanked me upward like it had something to prove.
Wind slapped my face, tearing the breath right out of my lungs. My fingers clamped so hard on the handle my knuckles ached. For a wild, useless second, I waited for the familiar smell of burning bristles, for smoke, for the inevitable explosion.
Nothing caught fire.
We just… flew.
“Okay,” I croaked to the broom. “Okay, okay, okay.”
Below me, the square dropped away, shrinking in jerky increments. Stella’s tea shop became a dollhouse. The fountain turned into a silver button. People became the tiniest moving dots, sparks of magic flaring like fireflies in a storm of shadow.
From up here, the battle looked less like a fight and more like a painting losing a war with ink. Dark streaks radiated from the priestess, crawling along streets and rooftops, while pockets of light—witches, wolves, fae, goblins—flared and flung themselves against it.
My heart clenched so hard it hurt.
I saw Keegan.
Even at distance, I knew his wolf. That streak of too-dark shadow along his flank, that gold-bright flash of his eyes.
He leapt at a knot of coiling dark, teeth bared, taking the full brunt of it on his shoulder.
The shadows splintered, but he staggered, dropping briefly before forcing himself up again.
“Turn around,” I begged the broomstick through gritted teeth. “We have to go back. We…we need to go back and…”
I tried to wrench the handle sideways, toward Stonewick.
The broom did not care.
It shuddered once, as if offended, and then surged forward, away from the square, away from the dome, away from my entire life.
“No!” I yelled. “You traitor of a twig!”
The wind snatched the words out of my mouth.
We climbed higher, then leveled out, the broom finding some ghastly idea of cruising altitude. Below, the village blurred from streets, houses, the yellow-brown patch of the Academy lawn, the gleam of Ward lines faintly visible to my magic-tuned eyes.
Tiny figures moved in frantic flickers.
A flash of silver told me the Silver Wolf had thrown herself against something twice her size. A curl of gold at the Academy’s roofline hinted at Karvey’s stone bulk leaping. The square pulsed with light and dark colliding.
Then the broom banked.
The whole world tilted.
Stonewick dropped behind me, spinning out of my direct line of sight. My stomach crawled up into my throat.
“Nononono—”
I twisted in place, nearly losing what little balance I had. One wobble and I’d be tumbling out into the air and probably into a shadow net like a very surprised hedgehog.
I caught one last glimpse of the square.
The priestess was a small, dark figure at the center of the chaos. The shadow-dome knitted itself tighter above the town. A brief flare of green from Ardetia, blue-white from Nova, gold from Limora’s circle. A fox streak. A goblin perched on a roof, flinging fizz like fireworks.
And right at the edge of the square, my dad.
Half shifted now with broad shoulders curling into fur, his hands more paw than human, his face a painful in-between. He swung an arm and knocked a lash of shadow away from a doorway, then took another hit straight across the chest.
He stumbled.
Even from this height, I heard a sound rip out of him—a short, guttural yelp.
Something inside me tore.
“Dad,” I choked.
My eyes flooded, blurring the whole scene into a watery smear of light and dark.
I wrenched the broom handle so hard my wrists hurt, trying to turn back, to dive, to anything…
It resisted, then simply ignored me.
House of horrors ride, I thought numbly. The kind that strapped you in, yanked the lever, and did not care if you changed your mind the second the safety bar locked.
“Let me off,” I whispered. “Please. I have to help them. I have to—”
The broom flew on.
Stonewick shrank.
The shadow dome hummed behind me, a faint, wrong curve against the sky, then faded into the distance. The familiar shapes of the Wards blurred and thinned. The safe, invisible line of the Academy’s influence dropped, and the wind changed temperature—less crisp, more metallic.
We were leaving my territory.
My breath came rough, more from panic than wind now.
I wiped at my eyes with the back of one hand, furious with myself for losing sight of the square.
They’re not alone, I told myself in a shaky internal voice. Stella’s there. Nova. Your dad isn’t exactly fragile. Keegan’s mom has teeth like daggers. Twobble will set something on fire accidentally, and it will probably help.
I believed… maybe half of it.
The broom drove on, steady and relentless, like it had been given a GPS location by a very bossy universe and refused to deviate.
The land beneath us changed.
Stonewick’s forests gave way to wilder trees, taller and thinner, their trunks gray and their leaves strangely silvery in the odd light. Shadows pooled under their branches even where sunlight still tried to filter through.
I recognized the geography with a sick feeling.
The Wilds.
Not the part we’d used as neutral ground or that were close to the Academy. This was further out, to the side, along a line I’d only seen in a vision and nightmare. The Hunger Path glowed faintly below, visible to whatever part of my magic had decided it liked to see trouble.
To anyone else, it would look like an ordinary strip of land. To me, it was a black vein, pulsing slowly, stretching out ahead.
The broom followed it.
Of course it did.
“Sure,” I muttered hoarsely. “Why not. Let’s joyride the cursed highway. Great plan.”
The path cut through the Wilds like an old scar, leading toward the hazy, darker smudge on the horizon that was Shadowick.
I’d never flown above it before.
It felt wrong.
Like hovering over an accident scene, promising to help but only gawking.
Time went strange.
Minutes stretched, then snapped.
Wind roared around me, loud enough to drown out thought, so my brain helpfully filled the silence with its own highlights reel.
Keegan’s blood on his fur. My dad’s yelp. My mother’s face when she realized her own mother had made it into the village. The priestess’s calm, cruel smile. Gideon’s voice hissing my name through the torn path.
Maeve—
Tears tracked down my cheeks, hot only until the wind froze them.
“How long is this thing?” I shouted at the broom.
It did not answer, because it was a broom and also a jerk.
Eventually, after what my bones insisted were eons and my rational brain informed me were probably only minutes, the air shifted again.
Colder.
Heavier.
Tired.
The horizon darkened properly now, not just from distance. The trees below knotted into denser, harsher shapes; the leaves lost their shine, edges ragged, shapes warped. Patches of ground glowed faintly with residual spells, like someone had dropped ink in water and never cleaned it up.
Shadowick.
I had been there once before, technically, but not like this. That had been through the Academy’s mirrors, or through neutral ground, or in a way that felt almost dreamlike.
This was… not dreamlike.
This was brutally, bleakly real.
The village of Shadowick came into view with a cluster of low, dark buildings clinging to a crooked road, roofs slanted like they were trying to duck out of the sky’s attention. Thin spirals of smoke rose here and there, but the whole place seemed… hushed. Expectant.
The hunger path dipped toward it, then veered, threading along the outskirts.
The broom veered with it.
We skimmed over the village edge.
For a heartbeat, I saw the central square—smaller than Stonewick’s, dominated by a jagged, black-stone monument. People moved below, some looking up, faces vague and pale, like shapes in fog. A few kids pointed. A man in a heavy coat grabbed one by the arm and dragged them inside.
They weren’t my concern.
Not right now.
Because the broom didn’t slow.
It followed the path as it led past Shadowick, toward the hills beyond.
Hills that, in my visions, had always been gray smudges.
Background.
They resolved now into range and folded into low, rolling mounds covered in sparse, scraggly growth and patches of exposed rock.
The air felt thin. The magic felt… old. Tired and mean.
The broom finally, finally, began to lose speed.
The steady, determined pull under me slackened to something like a glide. My stomach, which had been trying to climb out of my throat for the last several miles, cautiously unclenched.
We dipped lower.
“That’s it,” I whispered. “Good broom. Continue not killing us.”
Up ahead, tucked against the side of one of the hills, I saw it.
At first, I thought it was just another outcrop of rock. The colors blended in grays and browns, a funny, almost greenish sheen to some stones where moss had tried to live and given up.
But as we drew nearer, the lines sharpened.
Straight edges where there shouldn’t be straight edges.
A shape that was almost, uncomfortably familiar.
A house.
If you could call it that.
It looked like someone had tried to build a cottage out of bad memories and leftover fortress plans.
Low and squat, half sunk into the hill, with a roof so dark it might have been slate or simply shadow.
Narrow windows, taller than they were wide, set too high to see into from the ground.
A single, thick door, iron-banded and sullen, sat in a slight recess.
The hunger path ran right up to it.
Not quite touching and stopping just shy of the threshold, pulsing faintly, like a heartbeat at a wrist.
Even before the broom dipped toward it, I knew.
This was it.
Where she was keeping him.
Where she was anchoring her piece.
The broom slowed to a crawl.
My entire body, which had been one elongated scream of motion for the last however long, lurched at the change. My teeth clicked together.
We descended in a wide, hesitant spiral, like the broom itself was wary of getting too close.
“Same,” I muttered.
From up here, the details came into focus.
Sigils carved discreetly into the stones around the foundation were some I recognized from Shadowick texts, some older, curling like thorns. Wards twisted with inverted versions of the ones I knew from the Academy wrapped the whole structure, shimmering faintly.
A thin line of smoke seeped from a hole in the roof, not straight like chimney smoke, but curling sideways at odd angles.
The air tasted metallic and bitter.
Fear prickled along the back of my neck.
“Of course,” I whispered. “Of course, you’d tuck your favorite toy out here, where no one can see you.”
The broom hovered now, a few dozen feet above the ground, indecisive.
Part of me wanted to leap off and run.
Part of me wanted to hang here forever, suspended above the problem, where I couldn’t be killed or make any more huge, life-altering decisions.
But the sight of that house, small and ugly against the hill, wrapped in sigils that looked like chains, made something harden inside my chest.
We needed Gideon.
Not because the priestess had taunted me about his feelings or because my heart was some kind of confusing idiot, but because without him as part of the circle, the circle would never fully close.
And if it didn’t close, my grandmother would keep ripping holes in reality until she found the version she liked.
And Stonewick…
Keegan. My parents. Nova. Stella. Twobble. Everyone…
They didn’t have time for me to sit shaking on a broom and wondering whether I could handle another conversation with a morally complicated man.
“Okay,” I told the broom, voice rough. “We’re here. You did your haunted roller-coaster thing. Now you let me down nice and easy, and I promise not to set you on fire later.”
It dipped another foot.
I took that as a yes.
As we drifted closer, a sound carried up from below.
Faint.
Ragged.
A voice, hoarse and angry, shouting something I couldn’t quite make out.
Then, right before the broom committed to the descent, the words cut clear through the bitter air.
“I SAID I’M NOT YOURS!”
Gideon.
Even shredded by exhaustion and fury, there was no mistaking that voice.
The broomstick trembled once, as if shivering.
I tightened my grip, heart pounding, eyes locked on the ugly little house carved into the hill.
Whatever waited inside those walls, chains, Wards, priestess-designed torture-puzzles, this was the place.
The link we needed.
The boy she’d made into a blade.
The missing piece that might still save or ruin us.
The broom angled toward the ground, finally, mercifully.
And I breathed, “Hold on, Gideon. I’m coming.”
Whether that was a threat, a promise, or both…
I hadn’t quite decided.