“I was joking,” he added quickly. “Mostly.”
Luna.
My stomach tightened.
She’d disappeared with Gideon after the battle. Helped him escape. Tied up Stella and the vampires in the hotel, thinking, somehow, that she was preventing something worse. We’d met her again in the neutral ground. She’d stood there, eyes wide, magic fluttering, looking like someone who’d stepped into deeper water than she’d expected.
She’d promised to make sure he came.
Now, the clearing’s empty westward edge yawned like a missing tooth.
“Luna wouldn’t—” I began, then stopped.
Wouldn’t what? Wouldn’t lie? Wouldn’t falter? Wouldn’t get scared? I didn’t know her well enough to hang anything that heavy on her shoulders.
“What if something happened to them?” My mom asked, the lines around her mouth deepening. “The priestess is not exactly known for letting her toys roam without punishment.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Dad muttered.
“We’d feel it,” Nova said. “If she took him. If the Shadowick Wards reached this close, we’d know.”
“Unless she learned from the last time,” Ardetia murmured. “Silence can be sharpened.”
The wind gusted, lifting the hairs at the back of my neck. The trees bordering the clearing rustled uneasily.
Lady Limora stepped closer to the circle’s outer edge, her cane tapping lightly against the ground.
“We can’t hold the Hollow’s attention indefinitely,” she said. “If he isn’t here soon, we’ll have to decide whether to attempt a partial closure or stand down and he will face the wrath of the Hollows.”
“Partial closure is a bad idea,” Nova said at once. “The pattern is balanced on four anchors. Remove one, and it will reconfigure in ways we cannot predict. If it was a good idea, we would have done it long ago.”
“Standing down sends a message,” Keegan said tightly. “To him. To her.” I knew which her he meant. “That we flinch.”
“Better a flinch than a fracture,” Ardetia replied calmly.
“So those are our options,” Twobble said. “Difficult, terrible, and worst. Excellent. Very on brand.”
My heart had slowly, steadily sunk from my chest to somewhere near my toes.
The Wilds’ edge seemed to lean closer, listening. The Wards hum shifted in my bones. My butterfly mark pulsed a quiet, uneasy rhythm.
Hewouldcome.
He had to.
He’d said…
Time slid by in increments with the length of a breath, the tapping of Stella’s fingernail against the parasol handle, the scritch-scratch of Skonk’s quill as he kept recording, even now.
“Maybe he took a wrong turn,” Bella said, more to herself than anyone. “The Wilds aren’t exactly well signposted.”
“He lived in Shadowick for years,” I said. “If he can navigate that place, he can find the Wilds.”
Keegan shifted beside me, shadows stirring under his skin. “Unless he doesn’twantto,” he said.
The sentence hung in the air like smoke.
Stella uncrossed and re-crossed her legs, eyeing the empty west point. “I have to say,” she drawled, “if our entire plan to save the world hinges on the punctuality of a broody boy with a martyr complex, perhaps we should revisit our priorities.”
