Chapter Thirty-Eight
If this had been any other day, flying over Shadowick would’ve been the worst part.
The town below us was a bruise on the land.
From this height, the buildings crouched around their crooked streets like guilty secrets.
Smoke oozed from chimneys and cracks in the ground, but it didn’t rise; it curled low, clinging to rooftops and alleyways as if scared to brave the sky.
Magic shimmered along the streets in dull, oily streaks—residue from rituals and bargains that never remembered how to end cleanly.
The Hunger Path pulsed under us, a black vein threading past the village and back toward the Wilds, toward Stonewick.
Every beat of it hurt.
Not physically, not like Keegan’s pain, but somewhere behind my eyes, where the Hollows had decided to make its permanent home. It throbbed in my mark. It nagged against the Hedge that lived under my skin. It hummed against Gideon’s ribs.
It waited for something I wasn’t sure I could give.
Gideon made a rough sound as the broom crossed directly over the path, like the two were magnets scraping past each other.
“You okay?” I shouted over the wind, my mouth close to his ear.
“No,” he rasped. “Keep going.”
I wrapped my arm tighter around his waist.
The ache in my own body was catching up, layer by layer; the adrenaline was wearing off. My muscles shook from bracing against the wind, my hands were numb, my shoulders screamed from hauling him up off the marble.
But underneath all that, there was a different pain.
Keegan.
It pulsed through my chest in sharp little flashes, not constant, not steady, but like a bad connection crackling in and out.
Images hit without warning.
His wolf flinging itself between me and a wave of shadow, eyes bright with fury.
The line of his jaw set in that stubborn way he had when he’d already decided to be stupidly brave.
Blood soaking into fur. The sound, half snarl, half choked-off yelp, that had ripped through him when the priestess’s magic struck too deep.
Every time a memory spark jumped the line, my lungs seized.
He’s alive, I told myself. I’d know if he weren’t. The bond would go dead, not painful.
We soared past Shadowick and into the Wilds again.
The trees below grew thicker, taller. Their twisted branches threw long fingers of shadow over the land. Pockets of old magic glowed faintly, like coals left to smolder for a century.
Ahead, the sky darkened.
Stonewick.
Even from this distance, I could see the dome.
Where before it had been a thin, shadowy lattice, now it was a solid shape that was thick and heavy, like a bruised-black shell draped over the town. The shadow net the priestess had woven had swelled and fused, its lines no longer just a pattern but a solid mass.
Fog clung to it, pressed against it from the inside and outside both. It wasn’t normal fog. There was no gentle, shifting mist. It moved like thought, eddies and swirls forming shapes that never fully resolved. Shadows crawled along the inside of the dome, trying to find seams.
Gideon sucked in a breath, and I felt his whole body tense against me.
“Too much,” he muttered. “She poured too much into it.”
“How are they still?” I swallowed the rest.
Still fighting? Still breathing? Still there?
The broom slowed, circling.
It skimmed the outer edge of the Wilds where the trees thinned, and the first hints of Stonewick’s familiar fields should’ve begun. Instead, the ground below was covered in a low-lying blanket of fog, thick and gray, swirling in restless currents.
Shadow fog.
I’d seen Malore summon it, watched it crawl like smoke with teeth. This was worse. Denser. It covered everything, trees, paths, the Wards’ visible markers, with a smothering layer.
“Is that…” I started.
“Not all hers,” Gideon said, voice raw. “Some of it’s the Wards. Pushing back, bleeding sideways. They’re trying to hold and choking at the same time.”
Like the town was suffocating under a wet blanket of its own magic, mixed with hers.
The broom dipped lower, searching.
I didn’t need my eyes to know we were crossing the threshold into Stonewick’s reach. The familiar buzz of the Wards brushed my skin—Maple’s steadiness, Butterfly’s shimmer, Stone’s deep hum, Flame’s stubborn flicker.
None of them felt right.
The tones were off. The harmonies clashed. The echo in my bones was discordant, frayed.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Let me in.”
We skimmed along the edge of the dome. From the outside, it was like flying next to a storm cloud made of tar…thick and dark, with veins of pale light trapped inside. Shapes moved under its surface, flashes of spell-fire, flares of ward-light, shadow spikes.
If the priestess’s magic had a sound, it would be that dome.
The broom made disgruntled little jerks, as if trying to find a way through and not liking its options.
“You’ve done this once,” Gideon muttered. “Getting in where you shouldn’t.”
“Flattering,” I said.
I closed my eyes and reached, not with my hands, but with the lines that connected me to Stonewick.
Carved circles in the Academy’s floors. The Butterfly Ward’s garden under my feet so many times I’d know it blind. The feel of Stella’s front stoop. The way the cottage had woven its threads through the town’s history and tugged me, again and again, to stand at its intersections.
I pictured the square. The fountain. The crooked lamppost. The front of Stella’s tea shop, door crooked, bell chiming.
“All right,” I told the town. “I brought you a piece you need. Let us in.”
For a second, nothing changed.
Then a thin, bright line appeared in the dome below us.
Not a crack. Not a wound.
A seam.
The broom dove.
“Warn me before you do that,” Gideon hissed, clutching the handle, breath catching.
We arrowed toward the seam.
The dome’s surface rushed up, shadows crawling across it.
Just before we hit, the line widened, and a slit opened like an eye squinting.
Fog roared up around us, cold and damp and threaded with static.
For a heartbeat, everything was gray with no sky, no ground, and just thick, choking mist that smelled like wet stone and burnt rosemary.
Then we were through.
Stonewick spread out below us.
Or what I could see of it.
Fog lay over the streets, thicker than any morning mist. It pooled in courtyards, seeped around doorways, draped the roofs. Shadows wormed through it, trying to twist it into shapes, hands, claws, gaping mouths, but wherever they formed fully, a burst of ward-light hit, scattering them.
It was chaos.
Not the loud, obvious kind. A muffled chaos.
The sound was wrong. Spells cracked dull and distant, like hearing fireworks through walls. Somewhere, something crashed with wood splitting and stone groaning.
The pain in my body deepened, echoing the town’s.
Every breath scraped. Every muscle throbbed. My mark felt peeled open, every nerve exposed to the magic storm.
Flashes of Keegan snapped through my mind like sudden lightning.
His wolf silhouetted against the priestess’s shadows. The moment he took a blow for me and fear tore through him, not for himself, but for us. The grit of his teeth as he shook off pain and plunged back in.
Now, there was… less.
Not silence.
A thready, straining pull, like a line stretched too far.
“Where is he,” I whispered.
Gideon didn’t answer.
The broom circled once above the square.
From up here, Stella’s shop was a hazy outline, its door dimmed by a film of frost. The fountain was barely visible under the fog, just a hump. The lampposts leaned at odd angles, some broken. The shadow dome we’d passed through pulsed above, thick and heavy. Beneath it, the shadow fog churned.
We needed to get down.
“There,” I said, spotting a thinner patch of fog near the edge of the square, close to the path that led toward the Butterfly Ward gates near the alley. The Wards pulsed stronger there, like they had tried to punch conditions into the storm.
The broom, for once, agreed.
It angled toward the clearing, descending in a cautious glide instead of its usual death-plunge.
The moment its bristles brushed the fog, static ran up my legs, prickling my skin through my boots. I hissed and held onto Gideon tighter.
We slipped into the murk.
It swallowed the world.
For a few heartbeats, all I could see was gray. The ground rose up to meet us with only a slight jolt. My knees buckled, and I caught myself with a hand on the handle.
We were down.
The broom hovered a few inches above the ground, as if wary of committing.
The fog here wasn’t inert. It moved in slow spirals at ankle height, brushing my calves like curious hands. Shadows coiled in it, trying to form, but frayed apart before they could become anything solid. The Wards’ energy popped and sizzled in the air, like static before a storm.
Every hair on my arms stood up.
“This is wrong,” I breathed.
“Welcome home,” Gideon said, voice dry but shredded.
His fingers slipped from the handle.
The broom dipped.
He slid down and off before I could grab him, landing on his knees with a hard thud that made me wince in sympathy.
He grimaced, one hand bracing on the packed earth, the other clutching his side.
“Okay,” I said quickly, swinging my leg over awkwardly and hopping down. “Okay, you stay—well, not stay. But you sit. For a second. We need…”
Something moved in the fog ahead.
Shapes.
Multiple.
I tensed instinctively, magic leaping to my fingertips.
Then the shapes resolved into people.
My people.
My dad emerged first, blurry at the edges until the fog thinned around him.
He looked… wrecked. Blood matted his hair at the temple.
His shirt was torn, one sleeve hanging in shreds, scorch marks blackening the fabric over his ribs.
He was limping, one hand pressed to his side, his half shift still clinging stubbornly to his features and eyes too bright, teeth a little too sharp.