The dough hook turned.
Slow, then faster, catching the petals, the powders, the shred of rosemary. The air thickened. The floorboards heaved under their boots. Somewhere, glass sang.
“Steady,” Wesley murmured, and the word curled deep in her gut. It was the first time she’d heard him talk to magic like it could listen—like she did. Her fingers faltered for half a breath before she forced them to behave.
The runes flared sapphire. The mixer bucked once, hard enough to rattle the jars, and then the hook settled into a thick, rolling pull. Power climbed the air—damp, sweet, iron, smoke. Sugar and sage rose together, braid over braid. The floor shivered. The glass bell above the door trembled against its bracket with a delicate, maddeningtink.
The walls tried to split—she felt it like a stubborn seam under her palms—and she pushed the cadence harder, urging the binding to change its mind about what binding meant.Not you to me. Not thing to thing. Tie to breath. Tie to dawn.
Rot pulled back like a tide. The damp tug in the boards dried to simple old wood. The garish confectionery sheen dimmed to an honest gloss. Shelves straightened. Jars shimmied back into their grooves. Sprinkles retreated from her apothecary scales; her labels unblistered, curling flat again.
The air cleared to something that still wasn’t proper but was no longer a fight—lavender and cinnamon lacing instead of clawing. Even Grim’s ears relaxed.
Maude didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until her lungs remembered themselves. She braced a hand on the counter. “Oh,” she said stupidly.
Wesley’s laugh broke out of him like relief does when you’ve had a hand around your throat for too long and it finally loosens. Warm. Unvarnished. It made space in the room. And, saints help her, she laughed too. It sagged with exhaustion, but it was real. A sound she’d lost somewhere in the last six months elbowed its way up and out and existed again. She clapped a hand to her mouth.
“Saints,” Wesley said, staring at her like she’d grown a second head. “You laugh.”
“Don’t make it weird,” she managed.
“Too late,” he said, grinning in a way that erased ten years and three layers of armor.
She almost smiled again before the room tipped—no, not the room. Her vision. For a second, everything blurred and swam and?—
Wesley vanished.
The space where his body had been went cold so fast that the blood under her skin tried to follow it out. Maude’s stomach dropped to the floor.
“Wesley?” It came out as a bark, a stupid, desperate thing that bounced off glass.
Silence. The cauldron hummed on, very proud of itself.
“Wes—” Panic snapped a cord in her chest. Her mind flashed through all the ways magic ate: unraveling, unmaking, pinchingthe wrong thread and watching a person come apart like cheap knitting.
A shout cracked the night open across the street. “Maude!”
She pushed off the counter too fast and almost fell, but caught herself on a shelf and flung herself out the door with enough force to rattle the bells. Maude stumbled into the fog, breath tearing, and there—across Blightbend Way—his shop stood where the shell had been, pastel and ridiculous and whole. Light burned in the window like a smug sunrise.
Wesley leaned in the doorway, grinning like the cat that got the cream. His hair was a disaster. His shirt was torn at one sleeve. He looked like a painting of joy made by someone who’d sworn they didn’t believe in it.
Maude’s laugh—real this time, bright and wicked—ripped out of her so hard it bent her double.
Five strides across the narrow lane and Wesley was there, scooping her off her feet before she could pretend she didn’t want that to happen. She went airborne—just a spin, the world a blur of crooked roofs and wet stars and the foolish, relief-drunk face of the man who’d helped her breathe tonight. He set her down before any part of her pride could file a complaint, but not before her hands had found his shoulders and held.
“You did it,” he said, breathless, laughter threaded through his voice. “You brilliant witch.”
The street tilted pleasantly. Her mouth hurt from smiling. She felt like she’d swallowed a spoonful of Shifter’s Delight. For one slow, ringing heartbeat, it was just them and the fog and the empty street and the relief.
A bell in the distance tolled the hour.
Clarity cut through on the tail of it, sudden and uninvited. She knew he felt it too—could read it in the way his touch turned hesitant. He set her down as if she were glass and eased back a hand’s width.
They looked at each other like the first inkling of a headache, like a good dream caughtby daylight.
“Well,” he said, mouth tipping crooked. “That’s that, isn’t it?”
“It is,” she said. The words felt too tidy and not true enough. She lifted her hand between them anyway, palm open for a shake. “Terms of truce honored.”
