He’d made the interlock as a stabilizer, something to hold fragile things together until they could be mended—a cracked wall until the mason arrived, a bridge until new timbers could be laid, a broken body held together until a surgeon could finish the work. Pragmatic, temporary, a way to buy time. His notes stressed it again and again:must be severed. Left unchecked, bond will keep seeking more until all is drawn into one.He assumed anyone using it would know how to unpick the seams.
Two spells not meant to touch had tangled—her spell meant to fracture, his meant to hold—and the result had been a runaway loop. Fracture, bind, fracture, bind. Over and over. Until it stopped being a patch and became a hunger.
That was why the street had blurred, softened, melted into nightmare. The combined spells were simultaneously trying to break Blightbend and make it one.
Her mouth went dry. She read the lines three times, then four, hoping they would rearrange themselves into a joke. A test. Anything but exactly what they were.
Maude put her hands flat on the counter because they were shaking. She shut her eyes and saw the street as it had looked an hour ago: marshmallow grass and sugared wheelbarrows, stone cracking to rot. She saw the line of shops as a mouth of crooked teeth, all of it softening under a tide.
Wesley’s laugh echoed in her skull, warm, unguarded.You did it.Her own laugh answered it, like a fool.
The cauldron ticked once as the spell cooled. The lamp over the counter hummed. In the alley, something—crow, demon, wind—scratched stone.
Maude opened her eyes.
Bailey’s hand waited on the page, neat as ever. She swallowed. Across the street, the light went out in the bakery. Wesley’s silhouette passed the window and vanished.
“Of course,” she said softly. It didn’t sound like her voice. “Of course it isn’t over.”
Grim head-butted her jaw. She didn’t swat him away.
She folded the parchment along its original crease, then folded it again because she couldn’t bear to see the words. She slid it into a drawer and closed it gently, the touch of a priest at the altar.
The shop was quiet. The quiet had teeth.
Outside, Blightbend Way slept like a beast that had only rolled over, not settled.
Maude blew out the lamp. The dark came down all at once, clean and absolute. In it, she could hear her heart and the last, almost inaudible murmur of the runes in the cauldron—like a clock ticking toward a time she didn’t like the sound of.
Not long at all.
Fourteen
Opaline light spilled through the shop windows, turning dust to glitter and cracks to character. Even Blightbend Way looked polished instead of crumbling. Maude stood at her counter, hands wrapped around a steaming mug, and tried not to think about how wrong the quiet felt.
The curse had lifted—but only the way a shadow lifts when a candle gutters. The shop sounded whole again: jars settling on their shelves, the faint chime of glass in the draft, wood groaning softly in reply. Across the street, Sugar High gleamed like fresh paint over a wound. No grotesque fusion. No marshmallow cobblestones. Just two shops, separate again, as they were meant to be.
She should’ve felt triumphant. Instead, her chest was a hollow drum.
The shadowbell petals she’d jarred sat on the shelf, deceptively still. Bailey’s scrawled note gnawed at her thoughts.Interlock. The word branded itself on the inside of her skull.
When the first knock rattled the glass door, she nearly dropped her cup.
It wasn’t the magistrates, or Wesley, or even Oli—worse. It was a customer.
Then another. And another. By midmorning, the Elixir Emporium sounded like festival day—murmurs, laughter, the scrape of boots across its uneven floorboards. Her newly found sanctuary was officially breached.
And they weren’t here for what she actually made. No one asked for Bailey’s calming tonics or the lung draught he’d perfected after weeks of testing on himself until he coughed blood. No, they came clutching Sugar High’s greasy little paper bags, faces glowing with excitement, chirping requests that made her teeth grind.Can you just sprinkle something on this? Make it sparkle? Maybe make it wiggle, like it’s alive?
At first she tried the death-glare-and-wave-off approach, perfected over years of discouraging the cheerful. But then came the sound—coins clinking against the counter, one after another, a metallic waterfall. Each drop felt like an accusation, like the stack of unpaid bills in her drawer whispering,“Take it, you coward.”
Maude pinched the bridge of her nose, muttered a curse at the universe, and finally sighed. Against every better instinct she had, she agreed.
A charm of floating candles woven into a croissant. A sugared rune that made eclairs sing—off-key, but the crowd howled with laughter. Cupcakes that whispered compliments when bitten. The shop transformed into a theater of edible mayhem.
Every time someone clapped or gasped, Maude’s stomach sank further. This wasn’t Bailey’s legacy. This wasn’t what he’d built, what he’d taught her. He hadn’t spent years turning weeds into salves and superstition into medicine just so she could enchant muffins to moo like cows.
But the coins piled high, glittering with promise.
