With a silver needle, she threaded peel through the figure-eight, cross-stitching it over the narrow throat where thetwo loops met. A muffler. A cover. So the spell wouldn’t look directly at her when it snarled.
She chose three shadowbell petals and set them on her tongue one at a time to warm her voice, then laid four more along the seam-loom’s center line, each one a soft, impossible note.
A knock hit the door like a dare. One, two, three—in Oli’s exact rhythm:I’m a nuisance; open up.
She thought about hiding like a feral cat. Instead, she opened the door.
Oli filled the threshold, smelling like night air and too-expensive soap. A coat slung over one shoulder, collar loosened, his smile tempered by worry. “You’ve been ignoring me,” he said, breezing past like the house belonged to him.
Maude rubbed at her temple. “I haven’t had it in me to be social lately.”
“Lucky for you, Ihave.” His grin snapped back on, quick and bright as a lantern. “In fact, I’ve been hosting my ass off with the city magistrates.” He paused, eyes glinting, letting the words hang like bait. “Because I’m maneuvering for an open seat.”
She blinked. “You want to be a wolf?”
“I want to be the fox inside the henhouse with the blueprints,” he said dryly. “They’ll vote after Samhain. If I win, I can stall condemnations, pull inspections, funnel protection your way. Quietly. I don’t even need the seat to gum up their gears—a tavern expansion’s already crawling because I asked a few too many questions about the builder trying to push a widow off her lot. The magistrates don’t like the smell of scandal, so the paperwork found its way to the bottom of the stack. She gets another month. If I lose, I still have leverage on three of them—debts, favors, little knots they don’t want untangled. Enough to buy time when it matters.”
“You’ve been…campaigning.”
“Like hell,” he said. “Not for the hat. For the door it opens. I didn’t tell you because you’d make a face.”
She made a face. “This face?”
“That face.” He huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I’ve made promises I don’t love to people I don’t trust so I can put my body between them and people I do. You can be furious later. Right now I came because—” he glanced at the loom, then back, “—because I—” The grin drained out of him. For the first time in forever, Oliver Hale looked not in control. Not composed. Human. “What’s going on here, Maude? What are you making?”
“A mess,” she said. “Hopefully a useful one.”
“What kind of useful?”
“The stop-this-before-the-curse-swallows-everything kind.” She didn’t look up. “It didn’t end with the shops.”
He went still. That was the thing about Oli—under the silk, he was a wire you could pluck, and he’d sing.
“Tell me.”
She did. Not the worst of it—she didn’t need to hand him her panic—but enough. Roses turning into books. Duet bells. Cobbles wrong. The itch of something rooting beneath plaster and skin. Bailey’s note about the interlock.
“I’m making a drain. A place the curse has to pass through, one throat then the other. I’ve braced it, muffled it, salted it down so it can’t flash or wander. It’ll cut if it tries to swell, but it’ll catch, too—hold it, keep it from spilling into everything else.”
He folded his arms. The careful smile didn’t come back. “And you were going to do that alone because…?”
“Because people make things more complicated.” She met his eyes. “And because if it goes sideways, I’d rather it burn me than anyone else.”
He looked around as if he were searching for a second opinion. “Shouldn’t we fetch the coven? The wizards? The druid-whatsits who charge triple on solstice?”
“No, they’re all twits,” she said, “and they’ll crowd my home. And argue. And make a committee.”
He pointed at his chest. “What about this twit?”
Her mouth tugged, but the retort lagged. For one unguardedbeat, her face slipped—eyes catching on him, touched with something bare. Worry.
Oli’s grin faltered. “I can follow directions,” he said. “I won’t get clever. I’ll grind, I’ll stir, I’ll keep my sleeves out of the fire. You don’t have to do this alone.”
She hesitated a second, then nodded once—briskly, like she was signing a death warrant. “Fine, but if I tell you to duck, you duck. If I tell you to run, I’d better see your ass hurling out my front door before the words finish leaving my mouth.”
His grin crooked, warm as a lantern flaring back to life. “Deal. Though, for the record, my ass hasexcellentreaction time.”
They moved like they’d practiced, even though they hadn’t. Maude explained, and Oli didn’t interrupt unless there was a reason to. He warmed the glasswort while she tested the ivy’s give. He sifted wolfsbone and heartmire together carefully until the powders married and shone. He cupped his hands, and she shook a pinch of the blend across his palms so he could feel the weight.
