Chapter Thirty-Seven #2
“Too fast! Too fast!” Gideon gritted. “We are going to die in this hallway, and your little goblin is going to be insufferable about it.”
“Just don’t fall off,” I shouted into his shoulder. “I promised people you’d be alive when I dragged you into a circle.”
He craned his head enough to look back over his shoulder, eyes incredulous. “You what?”
“Later!” I yelled.
The house did not like this.
I felt it in the way the walls seemed to flex, the way the floor runner rippled like a carpet in a windstorm. Doors along the corridor snapped shut of their own accord, slamming one after another like angry punctuation.
The broom zigzagged around invisible obstacles, wobbling dangerously close to the walls.
Ever so helpfully, the house tried to lengthen the hall.
I felt it attempt to stretch the distance between us and the front, pulling the geometry like taffy.
“No,” I snapped, out loud and in my head. “You helped me find him. Don’t you dare trap us now. You don’t belong to her alone.”
The Hedge Magic that had nudged the bookshelf earlier flared.
For a second, the corridor wavered—long, longer, shorter—as competing rules warred. Then the stretch snapped back, leaving the same number of sconces between us and the great hall as before.
The broom bucked like a startled horse.
We shot out of the corridor into the vaulted entry.
Gargoyles snarled from their perches. The bluish candles in the chandeliers flared, then guttered, as the house’s main wards recognized something moving against their grain.
Cold pressure slammed into us from above.
My grandmother’s magic tried to push down, pin us.
The broom shuddered, losing altitude.
“Up!” I shouted, pushing power into the command. “Up, you traitorous twig!”
It jerked, forcing its way through the pressure like someone climbing through wet cement.
We wobbled, fishtailed, and then, with a protesting squeal of bristle and wood, shot through the open front door.
The world outside hit us like a slap.
Colder air, different magic, the stark open sky instead of a ceiling pressing in.
We burst out over the brick path, clearing the front steps by a foot. The gargoyles on the roof lunged, wings unfurling with grinding roars, but they were a heartbeat too slow. Stone claws raked empty air where we’d just been.
The broom tilted, overcompensated, and we dove.
“Too low!” Gideon rasped.
“Working on it!” I yelled back.
I yanked the handle up.
We missed smashing into the hillside by inches and skimmed along it instead, trailing dust and stray pebbles. The mansion loomed behind us, its tower spiking against the sky, windows glinting like furious eyes.
Magic snapped against my back and away from my grandmother’s reach, thwarted by the fact that we were no longer on her anchored ground.
We were on the path.
The Hunger Path.
It pulsed underneath us, visible to my hedged senses as a dark, bruised vein stretching back toward Shadowick and forward toward Stonewick.
It hummed in time with Gideon’s ragged breathing.
He leaned back against me, the weight of him solid and disconcertingly human. Every time the broom jolted, he sucked in a breath, the sound catching in his throat.
I tightened my arm around him.
“I’m not going to drop you,” I said, softer now that we were clear of immediate walls.
“Would be a very on-brand ending,” he said, voice thin. “Shoved off a broom by a midlife Hedge Witch on a heroic tear.”
“That’s Chapter Seventy,” I said. “We’re only in the sixties. Try to keep up.”
He huffed, then winced.
The broom steadied as we climbed, leaving the mansion and its snarling gargoyles behind. The hills fell away beneath us, the twisted trees of the Wilds spreading out like a hostile ocean.
Ahead, far on the horizon, Stonewick waited.
A dark curve against the sky.
The shadow lattice around the town still held. Here and there, tiny pinpricks of light punched through where someone had shoved back, but the overall impression was of a net thrown over a fire, trying to smother it.
Guilt spiked sharp in my gut.
First, we had to fly over Shadowick.
“They’re still fighting,” I said quietly.
“They’d be fighting even if you were there,” Gideon said. “Your wolf would just be bleeding closer to your shoes.”
“Comforting,” I said.
“Realistic,” he replied.
I swallowed.
“Keegan’s hurt,” I said. “I felt it. My dad, too, maybe. I left them. I got dragged out of there by a… broom with boundary issues. And I did it because we need you.”
He was silent for a long moment.
The only sound was the wind tearing past us and the broom’s faint, offended hum.
“You came to drag me into your little circle,” he said at last. Not accusing. Just… tired.
“Yes,” I said. “Because if we can get you in it with us, my dad, Keegan, me, if we can close the path properly, it might finally be over. We can weaken her. No more Malore. No more priestess trying to rewrite the world like it’s her hobby journal. No more hunger chewing at the edges of everything.”
He laughed.
It was not a happy sound.
“You really believe that,” he said.
“I have to,” I said. “Otherwise, I have no idea what I’ve been doing for the last year beyond collecting trauma and learning new tea blends.”
“Those are important skills,” he murmured.
The broom banked slightly, adjusting its course toward Stonewick.
Wind tangled in my hair. My eyes stung from speed and from the ache in my chest.
“You helped build this thing,” I said, voice rough. “You know how it works better than any of us. You’re the only one who can pull your piece out without tearing the whole world open. You said you’d stand in the circle. We’re holding you to that.”
He was quiet so long I thought he might have passed out.
Then he shifted, breath harsh.
“It will never be over,” he said, the words scraped raw. “Close this path, she will find another. Break this circle, and she will draw a different one. Power doesn’t stop wanting itself because a handful of us decide we’re tired.”
His head tipped back slightly, just enough that I caught his profile in the corner of my vision—eyes closed, jaw tight, and bruised mouth twisting.
“But,” he added, so softly the wind almost stole it, “we can make it hurt. We can make it cost her. We can make it so she never gets to pretend the world lies down just because she says so.”
The broom flew on toward the dark curve of Stonewick’s besieged sky.
His words lodged under my ribs.
Never over.
But maybe, just maybe, we could end this chapter.
The rest… we’d fight when it came.