I rubbed my face, trying to shake off the dream. I didn’t have the luxury of pity. Gideon’s choices had cost Stonewick decadesof suffering. But still, the thought gnawed at me: what if things could have been different?
I looked back at Keegan, his body curled into the quilt, the faint crease in his brow even in sleep.
I should have been dreaming of him.
Instead, I was haunted by the man who had almost destroyed us all.
And I couldn’t decide which truth scared me more.
The knocking rattled again, sharper this time, and a voice hissed through the wood.
“Maeve! It’s me. Skonk. You gonna open this or you want me to break the handle off?”
I let out a breath, released the latch, and pulled the door open.
There he was, leaning casually against the frame as if he hadn’t just threatened to maul Academy property. His grin stretched wide, devilish as ever, though the twitch in his left ear gave him away. Skonk never twitched unless something was wrong.
“You look like you’ve been dragged backward through a chaotic bush,” he said, cocking his head. “Not a pretty shrub, either. One of those gnarly ones with thorns and squirrels plotting murder inside.”
“Skonk,” I warned, my voice already trembling, “what is it?”
His grin slipped, and just like that, my stomach plummeted.
“It’s Gideon.”
The words hit me harder than any shove.
“He’s slipping away,” Skonk went on, the twitch in his ear faster now. “Twobble already wrangled Nova and Ardetia over there, trying to keep him tied to this plane, but…” He trailed off, shrugging, as if the weight of the truth pressed even against his goblin mischief.
I staggered back a step, one hand gripping the doorframe to steady myself. “No. He can’t. Not now.”
Skonk’s expression softened a fraction, though his grin never vanished entirely. “Trust me, I don’t make a habit of running across the Academy at night to share bedtime stories. This is the real thing.”
Panic clawed up my throat. If Gideon went now, if he bled out of this world before I could pull him into the circle with Keegan, with my dad, with me, it was over. All of it.
The old rites, the true rites, the only ones strong enough to crush Malore’s false teachings, would die with him.
We could end Malore, but we needed Gideon to end what Malore already started.
The unity we were barely scraping together, the fragile threads tying Stonewick back into itself, none of it would matter. The circle demanded all of us. Witches, shifters, bloodlines, and betrayals alike. Without Gideon, it was only fragments pretending to be whole.
“He can’t die,” I whispered, almost to myself.
“Well, you could try telling him that,” Skonk offered. “Maybe he’ll sit up and say,Oh, pardon me, didn’t realize Maeve said no. I mean, it’s worth a shot.”
I shot him a glare, though it didn’t stick. My heart was pounding too hard.
“We have to get there,” I said, already pushing past him into the corridor.
Skonk fell into step beside me, short legs moving with surprising speed. “I’ll admit, this isn’t how I planned to spend my evening. I was halfway through a very complicated poker game with a couple of sprites in the hotel lobby. Stakes were high. One of them had wagered a stack of sugar cubes.”
“Skonk.”
“All right, all right,” he muttered, though his grin widened again. “Just trying to lighten the mood. You humans look like you’ll keel over if no one cracks a joke.”
I barely heard him. My mind was spinning, tallying up every failure, every choice. If Gideon slipped now, Malore wouldn’t even have to lift a finger. He’d win by default, by absence.
The Academy’s halls blurred as we rushed through them, candlelight flickering over stone and shadow. Skonk kept pace, skittering around students who blinked blearily at us, too tired to wonder what crisis this time.
