Chapter Thirty-Six
The wolf-head knocker never got the chance to do its dramatic booming.
The moment my fingers brushed the iron ring, the door unlatched itself with a soft, smug click and swung inward on silent hinges.
Of course it did.
Shadow pressed outward from the opening, cool and heavy, carrying with it a faint scent of old stone, damp, and something faintly sweet like wilted roses left too long in a vase.
“Come in,” a voice purred from somewhere deep inside the house.
Not the priestess. The voice belonged to the place itself. It reeked of old magic with opinions.
I stepped over the threshold.
The first thought that hit me was this was what the inside of a nightmare would look like if nightmares hired interior decorators.
A great hall stretched before me, longer than could possibly fit inside the building I’d seen from outside.
The floor was polished black marble veined with silver, so perfectly reflective that for a disorienting second, I felt like I was walking on a pool of ink.
My own reflection followed along beneath my feet, pale and ghostly, slightly delayed.
Tall, narrow windows lined one wall, their glass so dark I couldn’t see whether they looked out on anything real or just more shadow. Heavy curtains of deep wine velvet framed them, embroidered with subtle, twisting sigils that gleamed faintly when I glanced sideways.
On the opposite wall, portraits hung in stiff, imposing rows.
People, mostly women, in severe black and jewel-toned robes stared down at me.
Some looked straight ahead, some slightly to the side; all shared a certain hard line to their mouths, a coldness in their eyes.
Every few frames, a man appeared, never alone, always off to one side, like an afterthought or an accessory.
I did not look too closely for family resemblance.
Crystal chandeliers hung from the high, arched ceiling, dripping with teardrop prisms that caught what little light existed and fractured it into thin, anemic rainbows. The candles in them burned with a strange, bluish flame that gave off almost no warmth.
Gargoyles weren’t just outside.
Smaller ones, half my height, perched on stone pedestals along the edges of the hall, wings folded, mouths open in silent snarls. Their eyes glowed faintly, tracking me with the same unnerving attention as their larger cousins on the roof.
“Homey,” I muttered. My voice disappeared into the cavernous space like I’d dropped it into a well.
“Gideon?” I called, louder.
The sound bounced back at me, slightly distorted.
…Gide—Gide—on…
No answer.
I took a few cautious steps forward.
The great hall branched at the far end into multiple corridors like a trident of potential bad decisions.
Each hallway stretched in a flickering, candle-lit gloom, lined with doors. Some were shut, some slightly ajar, each one carved differently. One had a wolf’s head motif, another a pattern of intertwined thorn branches, a third inlaid with something that looked disturbingly like bone.
“Of course you don’t label anything,” I said under my breath. “Why make kidnappings convenient?”
I tried to listen.
For breathing. For chains clinking. For Gideon’s particular brand of swearing. Anything.
Magic pressed from all sides, thick and layered. The house hummed with it, and the priestess’s signature was woven through older, stranger strands. It made it hard to pick out any one strand.
I picked the central hall first.
Partly because it was in front of me, partly because the door to the left had a faint, oozing darkness seeping from underneath it that made my skin crawl, and the one on the right smelled like dried herbs and something suspiciously alchemical, and I did not have the bandwidth for exploding bottles.
The central corridor was narrower than the hall, but still wider than any normal house.
The walls here were paneled in some dark wood, polished to a shine that reflected the candle flames in long, distorted streaks.
The ceiling arched overhead, painted in murals that looked like scenes from some kind of ancient ceremony with robed figures, circles, stars, wolves, and an endless interplay of light and shadow.
The floor runner under my boots was thick and soft, woven in a pattern that shifted if I looked at it too long. At one glance, it was geometric knots; at another, it was vines; at another, twisting snakes.
“Gideon?” I called again, letting my voice carry down the hall.
This time, something answered.
Not words.
A faint sound, like metal scraping stone, distant but real.
My heart thudded.
I followed it.
The corridor branched, then branched again.
Door after door.
A library filled with shelves of neatly labeled jars—powders, roots, things that looked like dried organs—stared back at me when I cracked one door.
Another opened onto a room lined with mirrors, all of them draped in black cloth except for one in the center that showed nothing but a swirling gray fog when I glanced at it.
“Absolutely not,” I told that one, closing the door again.
The scraping sound came again, softer now, as if the house were swallowing it.
“Gideon!” I tried once more, louder.
…deon…
The house threw my voice back at me with a mocking echo.
The hall stretched on.
I kept walking.
Left turn, right turn, another hall that looped back in on itself.
I tried to keep track, mentally mapping my steps, but the geometry refused to behave.
I was nearly certain I’d passed the same portrait twice, even though logically that shouldn’t have been possible unless my grandmother had commissioned a duplicate of an ancestor solely to mess with people.
Time got slippery.
My heartbeat and the soft thump of my boots became the only reliable markers.
The house liked it.
I could feel its amusement in the way the shadows along the baseboards seemed to slither just out of sight, the way candles flickered without any draft.
The architecture had that subtle wrongness I recognized from the hunger path with angles that weren’t quite ninety degrees, distances that stretched or compressed a breath longer or shorter than they should.
The scraping sound faded.
Silence crept in.
I stopped in yet another hall lined with yet more doors.
My shoulders sagged.
“Okay,” I said, forcing a brittle laugh. “You got me. Haunted labyrinth: one, Hedge Witch: zero. This is ridiculous.”
For a second, just a second, I felt it.
The tug toward despair.
Toward sitting down right here on this unnervingly patterned carpet and letting the house swallow me. Imagining Stonewick lost, the circle failed, Keegan’s bond going silent. Gideon’s voice snuffed out. My grandmother’s victory echoing down every corridor.
The priestess would like nothing more than for me to give up.
For me to be overwhelmed.
To believe that because she’d warped the house around herself, she owned everything in it.
I took a slow breath.
In, out.
I let my palm rest flat against the paneled wall.
“You’re very impressive,” I told the house quietly. “The whole expanding hallways thing, the overachieving architecture, very on-brand. But I need you to understand something. You and I? We have a problem in common.”
The wood under my hand felt cool.
“Your mistress uses people,” I whispered. “Twists them. Chains them. Doesn’t let them be what they’re meant to be. That goes for you too, doesn’t it? You could’ve been… I don’t know. A weird but charming little Shadowick manor. Instead, she turned you into a maze to trap scared kids and wolves.”
The silence changed.
Not a lot.
Just a subtle shift.
A pause in the hum.
“If you keep hiding him from me,” I said, “she wins longer. And if she wins longer, she burns more things. More people. More places. Eventually, you’ll be nothing but ashes and stories, too.”
I don’t know if houses could feel persuasion, but I leaned into it anyway.
“You want to keep existing? Help me find Gideon. I’ll do my best to make sure your future doesn’t end with her cackling on top of your ruins.”
I didn’t expect an answer.
So when the floor shuddered, very gently, I almost lost my balance.
The candles nearest me flickered.
Then, far down the hall, one flame flared brighter.
A single sconce, halfway down on the right, burned taller, yellow instead of blue, its light spilling out across the carpet.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
I walked toward it.
The sconce hung beside yet another door. This one looked no different from the others at first glance, with the same dark wood and the same iron latch. The only distinction was a carving near the top: a small circle of thorns.
The priestess’s sigil.
I touched the latch.
It didn’t move.
Locked.
Of course.
I sighed, rested my forehead briefly against the cool wood, then straightened.
“Gideon?” I called, louder now, pressing my shoulder against the door. “If you can hear me, be cliché. Rattle something.”
Nothing.
No scraping, no clink.
Silence.
My throat tightened.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Plan B.”
I stepped back and looked around the narrow hall.
Bookshelves lined the opposite wall from the door, crammed full of volumes whose spines bore titles in languages I recognized and others I didn’t. Some were bound in cracked leather, others in something that looked disturbingly like pale, hairless skin.
A small table sat nearby with a single book open on it, its pages covered in cramped handwriting. A quill lay beside it in a dried-up inkwell. The scene looked abandoned mid-thought, as if my grandmother had gotten up in the middle of a sentence and never come back.
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Books,” I said. “Of course. Because nothing says secret prison like an ominous reading nook.”
I walked over to the shelf, running my fingers along the spines as I muttered to myself.
“Binding Rituals, nope. Commentary on the Eighth Path, hard pass.”
My hand brushed a small, nondescript volume.
No title on the spine. No fancy binding. Just a plain, dark cover, worn at the corners.
Nothing obvious happened.
I moved to the next.
A faint click sounded behind me.
I froze.
Slowly, I looked back over my shoulder.
Nothing.
The door with the thorn sigil still sat, stubbornly solid. The hall was as it had been.
I exhaled and turned back to the shelf.
Leaning against it without thinking, I let my full weight rest into the wood as I tilted my head back, eyes closing for a second.
“Come on, Maeve,” I muttered. “Think. He’s here. He has to be here. You didn’t fly on a death broom over several towns to lose him in a hallway.”
The shelf shifted.
Very slightly.
Just enough that the books in front of me jostled.
My eyes flew open.
“Did you just…?”
I pushed my shoulder harder against the shelf.
Something under the floor groaned, a heavy, low sound. Stone ground against stone. The shelf tipped backward a fraction, then began to swing, pivoting away from the wall like a slow, reluctant door.
“Okay, that’s both cliché and satisfying,” I said, adrenaline spiking.
The gap behind the shelf widened.
Darkness waited there.
Not the thick, oily shadow of the priestess’s path, but a deep, cool darkness. The air that puffed out was colder than the hall, smelling of stone, iron, and faintly of blood.
My stomach knotted.
I slipped through the gap before the shelf could change its mind.
The passage beyond was narrow, barely wider than my shoulders, its walls rough, unpolished stone. The floor dropped in a set of steep steps. A few candles burned in niches, but their flames were tiny, struggling against the dark.
I took the steps carefully.
One hand on the wall, the other ready with a spark of flame if my foot missed. The stone was damp in places, slick with the kind of condensation that only comes from spaces that don’t see much air.
The sounds reached me before the bottom did.
Not the scraping I’d heard earlier.
Breathing.
Ragged, uneven, shuddery.
And… a faint clink.
Not big chains. Smaller metal. Shackles, maybe, dragged along stone by someone who didn’t have much strength left.
My chest pinched.
“Gideon,” I called softly, my voice catching. “It’s Maeve.”
The breathing hitched.
Silence.
I reached the bottom of the steps and stepped into a chamber that looked like the mansion’s idea of a basement.
The floor was marble here, too, but not the polished, decorative kind from the entry hall. It was a slab—cold, unadorned, streaked with old stains. The walls were bare stone, wet in places, covered in faint, ghostly sigils, like someone had drawn them there and then scraped them off, over and over.
A few torches burned in sconces high on the walls, their flames guttering, casting more shadow than light.
And on the floor, near the center of the room, hunched over like he’d been folded and left to rust, was Gideon.
For a heartbeat, I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing with the version of him in my head.
He’d always been… sharp.
Even when exhausted, he’d carried himself like a blade—straight spine, ironic tilt to his mouth, eyes scanning for the angle. Even in a cursed hotel room, even with shadows bleeding out of him, there’d been a feral grace in the way he moved.
This Gideon barely moved at all.
He sat, or rather, crumpled, on the cold marble, knees drawn up slightly, one arm wrapped around his midsection. His other hand lay flat on the floor, fingers splayed, as if he’d been trying to push himself up and given up halfway through.
Chains cuffed his wrists.
Not heavy iron links. Those would have been too mundane for my grandmother. But bands of shadow, solid-looking but flickering at the edges, attached to symbols etched into the floor. The bindings pulsed faintly with each of his shallow breaths.
His hair was a mess of dark curls gone lank with sweat and hung in front of his face, hiding his expression.
His clothes, scorched and torn from our last encounter, were worse now: fabric burned through in places, dark with dried blood in others.
Bare feet, pale against the marble, were raw and bruised-looking.
My throat closed.
“Gideon,” I said again, stepping forward, voice shaking. “Hey. Shadow-boy. You look terrible.”
His head jerked up.
For a second, his eyes didn’t focus. They were all pupil, blown wide with pain, the greenish-gray color around them muddied. Then they sharpened, landing on me.
A dozen emotions flashed across his face in that one split-second.
Shock. Disbelief. Anger. Fear.
And then, because he was who he was, the faintest, incredulous smirk.
“Of all the hallucinations,” he rasped, voice shredded, “I did not expect my brain to conjure you.”
The sarcasm was thin, frayed at the edges, but it was there.
Relief hit me so hard my knees went weak.
He was alive.
Barely. Hurt. Bound.
But alive.
“Unfortunately for both of us,” I said, swallowing hard, “I’m real.”