Chapter Forty-One
The Northern Luminary didn’t announce itself with fanfare. It slipped into the world the way cold slipped beneath a door until you realized you’d been shivering for several minutes and couldn’t quite remember when it started.
We’d been moving in careful threads since leaving the basin, splitting and rejoining as the terrain allowed, and still the air changed.
My breath began to catch at the back of my throat, not from exertion, but from a thin frost that seemed to lace itself through the space between my ribs.
just like the last time I’d gotten close to the Luminary.
The path ahead narrowed into a corridor of birches, their pale trunks standing like quiet sentries.
Keegan kept to my left, close enough that I could feel him without needing to look, while Lady Limora’s vampires flowed behind us like a dignified tide, their steps making no sound even when the ground should have crunched beneath them.
The shifters stayed to the edges, shoulders angled outward, noses lifting now and then as if scent could read the wind like a book.
The convergence was happening right on time.
Twobble, perched atop the bramblemule, scanning ahead with a grave look on his face.
“If anyone asks,” he announced, voice carrying back through the line, “I’m in charge of morale.”
Skonk, walking beside the mule, muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Nobody asked, but that’s a terrifying thought.”
Twobble tried to kick him in retaliation, and Skonk whapped his ankle.
I tried to hold on to that small thread of normalcy, but the quiet kept tightening around us. It was the kind of quiet that made even Twobble lower his voice.
Nova slowed and lifted her staff. The crystal at its top caught the thin light and scattered it like fractured ice. She drew a small circle in the air and pressed her palm outward.
The world shimmered.
A web of possible routes unfurled before us, faint lines of silver and blue curling away into the distance like veins on leaves. For a heartbeat, relief warmed my chest, but it soon darkened as each viable path showed a shadow bleed.
“Of course,” Stella murmured, sounding equal parts offended and impressed. “She’s everywhere and nowhere, just like lint.”
Nova’s gaze remained fixed on the shimmering map.
“Not everywhere,” she said quietly. “But she’s seeded the routes.”
“At least we made it a good chunk before she planted herself again.” I shook my head. “We’re so close.”
“She’s made false trails,” Caleb said, stepping closer. His expression had hardened, his attention sharp. “She wants the scouts confused.”
The shifters behind him went still, eyes narrowing. “But not our scouts.”
“Orc scouts,” I said, the realization settling heavy in my stomach. “She’s trying to divert them. Separate us from them.”
Nova nodded once. “Divert the orcs from us because they wouldn’t be looking for duplicity.”
The vampires shifted subtly, as if gravity itself had tilted by half a degree. Several lifted their chins, gazes turning northward.
I felt it then, too.
There was a strange pull tugging at the marrow in my bones, my soul, my mind...
Shadowick’s direction wasn’t visible, but it announced itself all the same, the way a steep drop makes your stomach tighten even before you reach the edge.
“That,” Lady Limora said softly, her voice smooth as velvet and twice as sharp, “is her favorite trick.”
We were north where we needed to be, but I felt an intense desire to head east.
To Shadowick.
I turned toward Lady Limora. “You’ve seen this before.”
Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
“Yes. Centuries ago,” she said. “During the last border war. Everyone blamed everyone else while she stood in her quiet towers and let panic do the marching. She didn’t fight with blades. She fought with paths.”
“Wait. How could the Priestess have been alive centuries ago if my mom and I are so…”
The vampires traded glances, and Stella cleared her throat as if they were trying to figure out who was best to deliver the news.
Stella touched my cheek as if that would make the news less startling. “It’s probably not best to hammer out all the details on a battlefield, darling. But your grandmother has figured out a way to trick time.”
“What she’s saying is you two are not her first rodeo,” Twobble explained.
I frowned. “What?”
“You’re not her first granddaughter. Your mom is not her first daughter. But Celeste…is her first great-granddaughter.”
“And no one thought this was relevant?” My brows lifted.
“It’s more of a you have to see it to believe it type of thing, I’d imagine.” Skonk frowned.
The pull toward Shadowick strengthened briefly, then eased, like a hand brushing the back of my neck. The vampires noticed it too, their shoulders tightening almost imperceptibly.
“It feels like gravity,” one of them murmured. “Like the world wants to lean that way.”
“It’s a lure,” Lady Limora replied.
“What happened to the others?”
“It’s a long story,” Lady Limora said quietly.
Caleb inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring, then his expression darkened.
“Fear,” he said. “Right here.”
He pointed to a patch of ground that looked no different than the rest, bringing us back to the reality of the situation.
“There’s fear on the wind,” he continued, “but there’s nothing to fear.”
Bella crouched, palm hovering just above the soil.
“It’s planted,” she said. “It’s a scent memory to add panic.”
My birthmark warmed again, and I felt the sensation of eyes on me, even though no eyes were present. As if my blood itself had become another map she could read.
“She wants us chasing ghosts.” I glanced at Keegan and then at my mother, who looked like she was still trying to comprehend what the vampires had said about her mother. She appeared to be having as difficult a time as I was, but now wasn’t the time.
Nova lowered her staff. The shimmering routes remained, but the lines quivered, shadow bleed clinging to them all like rot at the edges.
“There is a short path,” she said, closing her eyes as her staff illuminated a route.
One path brightened faintly, cutting through the birch corridor toward the Luminary.
The shadow bleed along it pulsed darker.
“And there is a long path,” she continued, and another line appeared, looping wide into terrain that refused to fully resolve, the map blurring there as if the Luminary itself resisted being pinned down.
“Unknown,” Twobble said, peering at the blur. “That line is basically scribble.”
Skonk grunted. “That’s because it’s probably death.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Twobble replied, then leaned closer.
I stared at the two routes, my thoughts racing. The short path would get us there faster. It would also give the Priestess certainty. She’d invested effort there. She expected us to take it, which meant it was designed.
The long path was unknown and meant risk—but it also meant she couldn’t predict it as easily.
Keegan’s hand found the small of my back again, steady and warm.
“You already know,” he murmured.
I swallowed. “The short path is a trap.”
“And the long one?” he asked softly.
I looked at the blurred line. “Is a question.”
“Sometimes questions are safer than answers,” he said.
Lady Limora watched me with calm interest, while Caleb and the pack stood ready.
Stella’s eyes glittered with defiant irritation, and Nova waited.
My birthmark pulsed again, slow and insistent.
“We’re taking the unknown,” I said.
The words felt like stepping off a ledge and finding solid ground beneath my feet.
Nova nodded once and swept her staff through the air. The blurred route brightened, and the air shifted as if the Luminary approved, the birches ahead thinning, the silence changing shape.
We moved, and behind us, the shadow bleed along the short path pulsed once, as if irritated at being ignored.
“Let her sulk,” Stella murmured. “I want her to know we’re not predictable.”
We traveled on, frost clinging to grass even where the light suggested noon, Shadowick tugging at the edges of awareness, offering easy answers.
But the iciness told us we were getting closer.
I kept my gaze forward anyway as we made headway and could feel the Northern Luminary close by.
The rumble started low, so low at first I thought it was my imagination filling the quiet with something it could justify.
The Northern Luminary had a way of playing tricks with sound.
It swallowed echoes. It stretched footsteps.
It made distance feel shorter than it was, then longer than it had any right to be.
But the ground vibration didn’t fade. It deepened.
It moved through the soles of my boots and up my legs. Frost clung to the edges of grass, and the light overhead had turned strange, too bright and too dull at once, as if the sky couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be day.
Keegan’s gaze sharpened. “That’s not thunder.”
“And it’s not the Luminary,” my dad seconded.
Caleb slowed, then lifted his hand in a quiet signal. The shifters along the perimeter eased into a tighter formation, shoulders squaring, eyes scanning the horizon.
“That’s marching,” he said, voice low. “Thousands of feet.”
My stomach flipped.
Nova moved closer, her staff angled slightly forward, the crystal at its top catching the thin, shimmering light.
“We’re close,” she murmured. “Closer than I expected.”
“Because the long path wasn’t as long as she wanted it to be,” Stella muttered. “That’s the first good news we’ve had since breakfast.”
Twobble made a pleased sound from atop the bramblemule.
“You’re welcome. My morale leadership is working. The silver lining way of looking at things is always better.”
Skonk didn’t even bother answering.
The rumble grew louder as we climbed the final rise, the path narrowing into a ridge of pale stone that opened to a view beyond. The air tasted different here, metallic and sharp.
And then I saw them.
They weren’t a group or cluster.
They were a moving mass.