He rose and offered a hand without thinking. She ignored it and stood on her own, then took it anyway when her legs swayed. His fingers closed around hers like a promise.
She grabbed her kit. He shouldered the rest before she could argue. And they ran.
Twenty-Two
Behind them, light cracked the sky.
Maude’s fireworks burst into wyverns, crowns, and one very questionable shape that made three grannies gasp before laughing behind their hands. The crowdoohed at just the right volume for a town being neatly distracted.Bless you, Oli.
As they cut through an alley and over the weir, Maude’s mind tried to cram panic, calculation, and the stray flicker of joy into the same corner. She shoved the happiness into a pocket. Later. Maybe. If they lived.
The river wind hit like a slap. The Bonebridge rose ahead: old iron gone black with weather and stories, its arches spanning white water that hurled itself at stone like it bore a grudge. Paper lanterns dangled from the rails, small moons shivering in the gusts. The air quivered. At the bridge’s center, the Weftmark pulsed faintly where she’d chalked sigils into the pitted iron earlier and wedged the ring into a cradle of stone.
She dropped to her knees and opened the satchel. Ashen ivy shimmered in her fingers; she wound it through the ironvine band, whispering the unbinding’s exact opposite, a promise that the ring would hold what didn’t belong anywhere else. Heartmire salt—three lines, then three more, then the little crosshatch Baileyhad taught her. Glasswort resin, one bead on each cardinal tooth of blackthorn. Night-apple peel braided through the copper chain with hands that refused to tremble because she told them not to. Wolfsbone dust along the rivet line.
Wesley had already set the quadrants: salt, ash, water, thistledown. He poured the moondust oil in a slow figure-eight over the ring, and when the wind tried to take the shimmer, he cupped his hand and blocked it like he’d been born with the instinct.
“All right?” he said.
Her throat locked. She forced a nod. “Now.”
They spoke together. Words layered, tangled, caught in the river’s roar. For a heartbeat Maude faltered—surprised he knew them. She shouldn’t have been; he’d done this with her twice already. But the fact that he was paying this close attention, that he’d memorized them down to the syllable…
The bridge shuddered beneath them, iron drawn taut as a bowstring stretched too far. Lanterns above snapped against their strings, light jerking wild across black water.
The ring answered, its glow climbing sharp and ravenous, singing high and thin as glass about to crack. It wanted more.
The first interlock snapped wrong. Bolts split their seams, and the bridge rolled under their knees. Maude pitched sideways, breath torn out of her throat—but Wesley caught her, his arm clamping around her waist, hauling her upright as the whole span lurched like a beast trying to buck them off. They slammed against the railing. Rusted iron bit her palms as she clung. The spell stayed rooted, tethered to the bridge’s bones, and the structure groaned under the weight.
“Merging!” Wesley shouted over the roar. She followed his gaze: a cart piled with gourds and candied pears had collapsed into itself, wheels and fruit fused in a sticky, rolling mass. Nearby, a string of festival lanterns had fused into one long, wavering spine of glass, their flames trapped inside, flaring in unison. A dog yelped, half-swallowed by its owner’s coat until the cloth spat itout again. Reality itself was mis-threading, knotting tighter with each beat of the spell.
And then the bell tower struck midnight.
The sound didn’t just ring—it shook. One toll, then another, each strike reverberating down her spine. The air snapped taut.Samhain.
The veil was not a curtain drawing back. Not something gentle. It was a tear in the weave of the world, sudden and bright, as though someone had split the sky with a knife.
Light bled through first, faint and silvery, but wrong—too pale. The lanterns on the bridge guttered, and every shadow stretched long and unfamiliar, bending toward that seam. The air grew heavy, copper-sweet, metallic like blood in the mouth. Maude’s skin prickled as if thousands of tiny hands brushed against her arms, curious. The smell changed: smoke, old incense, something damp and grave-cold threading beneath it all.
And the sound.Saints, the sound. The veil sang low, a deep current threading her bones, a cadence like a second heartbeat. Voices drifted through it, not whispers but impressions: laughter that was not laughter, crying that was not grief, names half-remembered. Bailey’s voice, clear as bells,Let go—or maybe it was only the sound of her needing someone to say it.Magic is meant to bind so it can loosen. Stop trying to hold the whole world by yourself, Maudie girl. You’ll break your fingers.
The veil didn’t just open outward; it pressed inward—like standing at the mouth of a storm and feeling it reaching for you: your breath, your bones, the small spark that kept you tethered. Her vision blurred as the fabric of things rippled. The river split into two currents at once, one flowing white, the other black, as though every possibility of it existed together.
The bridge rails wavered, half iron, half bone. Her own hands flickered in and out of themselves. She tried to seize it, to force that flood into her lines, to drive it through the Weftmark’s throat. It screamed back, ravenous. It wanted everything she had—and still clawed for more.
Heartache surged through Maude, stronger than the magic, teeth at her throat. The urge to step back nearly broke her—not from the spell, but from the ache that never left.
She clenched her jaw and shoved it down into the pocket where she’d already buried her joy. No room for either. Only the spell. Only the line.
The bridge bucked. Lanterns snapped free, spinning into the dark. Water below rose in fists of foam, slamming stone with the sound of applause turned violent.
Her knees wavered. Her voice cracked. She was slipping.
And then Wesley’s hand closed over hers. Heat poured through her knuckles, a current steady enough to tell her body what to do when her mind locked.
“Trust me,” he shouted over the veil’s howl, voice hoarse and unflinching.
Grief wants rules, she remembered.Give it rails and it will carry itself.
