“Fine,” he said, “lead the way.”
Blightbend lay hushed under the moon, its crooked row of shops sleeping like old dogs in the dark. Only theirs was awake. The fused façade pulsed faintly, pastel sweets and creeping rot locked in their uneasy stalemate. From a distance, it looked less like a shop and more like a beast—breathing shallowly, waiting.
Maude’s hand hovered on the latch. Every part of her wanted bed, silence, five hours of being no one. But pridestitched her spine into something resembling upright, and she pushed inside.
The air slapped her. Sugar clogged the back of her throat; damp rot crept like mold under the floorboards. It smelled like a wedding and a funeral shoved into the same church and told to get along.
Grim appeared from behind a tower of boxes, tail flicking, yellow eyes gleaming with that eternal feline expression:I’ve been in charge since forever, and everything you’ve done is wrong.
Maude dropped her satchel and crouched, fingers twitching into sigils. “Hold still,” she ordered.
He didn’t. He never did. He arched his back into the spell like it was a back rub he’d been waiting for all night.
The wards skimmed his fur—nose, ears, paws—glowing briefly. No new spread. Still just the faint pink shimmer, stubbornly contained.
Relief pooled in her chest. “Of course you’d fight off a curse out of spite,” she muttered, pressing her forehead to his.
That should’ve been the end of it. But Grim, contrary menace that he was, did something almost alien—he butted his head against her chin once, twice, hard enough to sting. Then he purred. A real, rolling purr, deep and even.
Maude went very still. Grim did not dole out affection. He tolerated. He suffered. He sometimes refrained from murder. But this—this was love, plain and uncamouflaged.
Her throat tightened around words she didn’t know how to say, so she just held him there, one hand curled in his fur, letting the vibration shake through her bones until it almost felt like they belonged to her again.
Eventually, Grim tired of her sentimentality and hopped down like he hadn’t just shattered her heart in the gentlest way possible. The warmth went with him, and in its place came the colder, heavier truth waiting on the counter.
She spread Bailey’s parchment across the scarred wood and pinned the corners with jars. The shadowbell flowerswaited beside it, the price of them still lodged in her chest. One by one, she set out what they’d dragged from the Wilds—less a list on paper than something carved into her bones:
Ironvine, coiled tight as tempered wire.
Blackthorn bark, bitter to the tongue.
Rosemary, biting clean, its scent cutting through the mix.
Bloodroot, damp, still smelling faintly of copper.
Yarrow, pale and stubborn as weeds between stones.
Moondust caps, fragile spheres that powdered to silver at the touch.
“Salt and iron filings,” she said at last, her voice steady for once. “Circles. Wide. Runes at the quarters.”
Wesley moved without question, sifting the mixture into careful arcs. Pale dust drifted in the lamplight. It powdered his hair, softened him, made him look like he’d been standing under falling snow.
Grim hopped onto a stool like a disapproving overseer, tail giving a single thump when Wesley finished the circle and dusted his palms clean, waiting for her next move. Maude ground the shadowbell flowers into powder, the pestle grating low against stone. The scent rose—sweet ache, sharp as pressing your forehead to a door you weren’t ready to open.
When everything was in place—the salt ring, the powder, the half-finished notes Bailey had left—she and Wesley stood shoulder to shoulder before the cauldron-mixer abomination. Its gears ticked faintly in the hush, runes pulsing like an anxious heartbeat.
“Ready?” she asked.
His nod was curt. Serious.
Maude measured, every motion clipped as though the wrong breath might topple it all. A pinch of ironvine to bind intention. Shavings of blackthorn for teeth against undoing. Rosemary to cut through the muddle, to make clean paths. A smear of bloodroot to tie it to the living heart. Crumbled yarrow for purification. A careful drift of moondust caps to speak to tides andtiming. And finally, the shadowbell—ground to dark silk, petals dissolving into dust that smelled faintly of rain. Shadowbell was grief made tangible—loss distilled. It gave the spell memory, weight, the ache that made magic linger when it wanted to slip away.
Wesley poured water in a thin stream, and the salt-and-iron circle brightened under their feet. The runes on the iron casing woke, violet and low.
Bailey’s lines came out of Maude’s mouth like she’d been carrying them inside of her cheek the whole time, saving them for when they tasted right. His script had always been more music than instruction. She hummed the notes of it under her breath, then did the thing he’d taught her when magic refused to listen—she changed one thing.
Tiny. A twist in the last couplet turned inward instead of outward, not“bind the breach”but“teach the blend to loosen.”Not an order. A suggestion.
