My heart stopped.
The image hit me like a blow.
Gideon, stumbling through the halls, past the charms, past students who had no idea what evil looked like up close.
Twobble groaned, throwing his hands up. “Nothing says summer school is under control like this situation.”
“Wait until Nova runs into him.” Skonk chuckled, entirely too pleased with himself. “But at least if he’s wandering around the Academy, at least we don’t have to carry him.”
Keegan would never forgive me. Nova would call it treachery. Ember would have her teacup ready to clout me over the head.
And yet, if I abandoned Gideon now… everything we had fought for would unravel.
“He could barely move when I talked to him last, let alone move. He shouldn’t be impossible to find.”
Bella nodded, her fox tail flicking once before disappearing. Twobble scratched furiously at his head, muttering about how he hadn’t signed up for this level of chaos. And Skonk’s grin widened, devilish as ever.
The Wilds held their hush, watching, listening.
And I knew, with a certainty that ached in my bones, that Stonewick’s fragile summer had just cracked wide open.
Chapter Thirteen
The hush in the Wilds shifted. The air cooled and sweetened as we continued walking on ferns and pine needles.
“He could barely move when I saw him,” I repeated, more to steady my own thoughts than to argue with the trees. “He shouldn’t be impossible to find.”
“Then we look for heavy footprints, pressed foliage, and the smell of…” Bella didn’t finish, slipping ahead. Her tail flashed into sight through some ferns. “Shifter senses are good at all, so I’m glad I’m here.”
Twobble leaned down and sniffed theatrically at a boulder that looked like the dirt had been brushed off. “I mostly get… mushrooms. And regret.”
“You always smell like regret,” Skonk said cheerfully. “It’s your signature scent.”
“Not me.” Twobble rolled his eyes. “The rock.”
The mushroom ring pulsed, one slow heartbeat of red, then dimmed. I skirted it wide, mindful of the Sillipa’s tricks.
“No spores today,” I told the caps, as if scolding a child about sneaking cookies. “We’re on a schedule.”
The path braided into two and then three. The Wilds loved to change its mind. Ferns grew taller, fronds unfurling like sleepy hands, and the vines overhead sagged with blue bells thatbumped our shoulders and chimed softly where they brushed Bella’s fur.
Dragonflies stitched silver threads through shafts of light, vanishing again when the gloom swallowed them.
Bella lifted her chin. “There.”
I didn’t see what she saw at first. Just a bank of moss more vivid than the rest, but then I caught it.
Scuff marks that were wide and uneven, not by paws or hoofs. The path of a body trying to remember the shape of walking.
“He got up,” Bella said softly. “He tried to walk. He went that way.”
Skonk rocked onto his heels, satisfied. “I knew he’d move. Shadows are stubborn. So are men who think they own them.”
“Spoken like a goblin who’s never met a consequence,” Twobble muttered, but he was already following the disturbed moss, nose close to the ground.
We moved more quickly, darting through the mushroom groves.
“Don’t breathe close,” I warned, and Twobble made a big show of inhaling through his mouth, nose turned up.
