Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
My mom was at his elbow, steadying him despite her own battered state. Her hair had come loose from its tie, plastered damply to her forehead. Soot streaked her cheeks. The hem of her jeans was singed. Her hands were scraped raw, bits of gravel clinging to torn skin.
Twobble staggered out next.
He was covered in glitter.
This glitter was sticky, clumping in his hair, smeared across his clothes in weird, patchy streaks. Little burns dotted his sleeves where fizz vials had gone off too close. His expression, somewhere between wild-eyed and shell-shocked, made my throat close.
Skonk clung to the back of his vest, half-hiding behind him, clutching what looked like an empty salt sack. His hat was gone. His ears drooped. He looked like someone had wrung him out and hung him up to dry.
Ardetia moved through the fog like it wasn’t there, but even she wasn’t untouched.
Frost-coated her fingers up to the knuckles, jagged ice clinging in shards that looked like broken glass.
Her usually perfect braids were mussed, a few strands of hair loose and clinging to her cheeks.
A tear in her sleeve revealed a nasty, shadow-dark bruise blooming on the pale skin beneath.
Nova came behind her, staff used as much for walking as magic.
She leaned on it heavily, breath a little ragged.
A line of blood trickled from one nostril, stark against her pale skin.
The green of her eyes was dimmed, not from lack of power.
There was still plenty of that humming under the surface, but from sheer exhaustion.
Lady Limora and her coven, Opal, Vivienne, Marla, followed, their neat hair and impeccable cloaks now scorched and dusty.
Limora’s cane had a new crack along its handle, but she still held it like a scepter.
Opal’s sleeve was ripped up the side, her arm beneath crisscrossed with shallow cuts, each bandaged hastily with strips of cloth.
Vivienne’s lipstick was smudged halfway across her cheek, like she’d wiped blood away and taken half her make-up with it.
Marla’s eyes were wide, shock just beginning to seep through her hardened composure.
And behind them all, padding forward with stiff, measured steps, was the Silver Wolf.
She looked less like a myth and more like a battered veteran.
Her shimmering coat was streaked with dirt and soot. Deep gouges marred her flank where shadow had bitten deep; the wounds oozed an ugly, dark residue that wasn’t quite blood or magic but some foul combination of both. Her eyes, Keegan’s eyes, if he’d been born an animal and not a man, met mine.
They were tired.
They were also very much alive.
No Keegan.
The thought came so fast it wasn’t even a thought. Just an absence shaped like his name.
My body knew it before my brain did.
Not just from sight but from the jagged, empty space in my sense of him. The bond that had been a stretched, painful cable all the way here now thinned to a thread, faint and far.
“Maeve,” my dad said, spotting me.
His face broke.
Relief. Shock. Then fear, fast on its heels.
He started toward me, dragging my mom with him.
Twobble saw me next.
His eyes went huge.
“Maeve!” he squeaked, voice cracking. “You’re alive! I mean, of course you are, I knew you would be, we had a plan, except then everything went very explodey and your broom threw a hissy fit and—”
He skidded to a stop when he saw Gideon, still hunched on his knees next to me.
His mouth snapped shut.
Skonk made a small, distressed sound and stepped half in front of Twobble, like he wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to protect or attack.
Ardetia’s brows drew together, her gaze flicking from Gideon’s chain-burned wrists to my face.
Nova’s eyes narrowed, weighing a hundred factors I couldn’t see and cataloguing them all.
Limora’s grip on her cane tightened by a fraction.
The Silver Wolf’s ears flattened.
None of that hit as hard as the one simple, undeniable absence.
I scanned their faces again, as if I’d somehow missed him.
And Stella.
No Keegan’s half-shifted form standing beside my dad. No tall, too-broad shoulders in the fog. No familiar, unhelpfully handsome glower.
No elderly vampire serving tea.
“Where…” My voice came out paper-thin.
I swallowed, tried again.
“Where is he?” I asked, hearing the crack in my own words.
No one answered.
Not immediately.
My mom’s eyes darted to my dad’s.
His jaw flexed.
Nova looked down, briefly, then back up, her gaze sharp and assessing on me, like she was mentally calculating how much I could take before I broke.
The Silver Wolf whined, a low, pained sound, her gaze shifting away, toward the heart of the square.
Something inside my chest twisted.
“Where is Keegan?” I asked again, louder, the question scraping my throat raw.
The fog seemed to press closer, listening.
Gideon shifted beside me, a small, harsh breath scraping out of him. He didn’t try to stand; his strength was clearly gone. He just turned his head enough to look up at me, eyes narrowed, reading every tremor in my voice.
“Maeve,” Dad started, reaching out a hand.
That was the moment my legs stopped being legs.
The ache that had been building in my muscles since we left the priestess’s house surged, all at once. The magic crash hit. Everything I’d flung at the bindings, the Wards, the broom, catching up like a physical blow.
My knees simply gave.
The world tilted.
Hands reached for me. My dad’s, mom’s, and Nova’s staff angled toward my shoulder. Twobble lunged, arms outstretched, as if he could somehow catch me with his handful of fizz-stained sleeves.
Too late.
The last thing I saw was the Silver Wolf’s eyes, filled with worry.
The last thing I felt was the thin, fraying line of Keegan’s presence, far and faint and wrong.
“Where is Stella?” I whispered, feeling my world spin out of control.
“She went after the priestess…after Keegan,” Twobble said softly, wrapping his tiny arms around mine.
The fog surged in, not from the square but from the edges of my vision.
And I collapsed into it.
The fog swallowed everything.
Sound. Light. The square beneath my feet.
Even my own breath felt distant, as though it belonged to someone else.
Shapes drifted at the edges of my vision, but they dissolved whenever I tried to focus.
I couldn’t hear my mother anymore, or Nova, or Twobble’s panicked scrambling.
The Wards’ familiar thrum faded into nothing.
It was just me and the cold, thick quiet pulling me deeper.
Then a force tugged sharply at my chest.
Not magic from the Wards. Not my own. Something else, something familiar, pulling me upward with a strength that made the fog pulse in protest.
The haze shuddered.
A pressure rolled through the square, pushing the fog back inch by inch. Shadows peeled away, not willingly, but because something stronger had stepped into their path.
I felt the shift before I saw it…the air tightening, the fog thinning around the edges, the unmistakable sense of someone pushing against the darkness with sheer presence alone.
A tall silhouette broke through first, steady and unyielding.
The fog slid off his shoulders as if it knew it couldn’t cling to him.
Another figure moved just behind him, her outline sharp, composed, cutting through the haze with a confidence that steadied something inside me.
The fog resisted one final time, curling around my legs and dragging at my arms, but it was already losing its hold.
The pressure pushing against it grew stronger with every step they took, and strong arms caught me that were warm, certain, and unmistakably real.
The contact sent a flood of heat through my frozen limbs.
My head fell forward against a chest, the steady rhythm beneath me anchoring me more firmly than the ground ever could have.
The square slowly emerged through the thinning fog.
Cobblestones. The broken lamppost. A faint glimmer of the struggling Wards. I lifted my gaze, vision hazy but desperate to see. The figure holding me leaned closer, his outline solid and familiar, his warmth unmistakable after weeks of cold dread.
Behind him, the second figure stood watch, poised and silent, cloak stirring in the shifting fog.
Even as the fog lifted around us, something darker lingered at its edges. Beyond the thinning veil, a ripple of shadow moved with deliberate patience, as if the priestess stood just out of sight, watching the moment she’d failed to stop.
And as the fog thinned, I felt it…the faint hum of the circle we had been so close to sealing, waiting for us just ahead.
The priestess’s shadow lingered somewhere at the edge of Stonewick, but for the first time, I wasn’t afraid. We were steps away from closing what she’d tried so hard to break… and she knew it.