The words landed like stones in my stomach.
The Wilds seemed to lean back, as if withdrawing its own tentative welcome.
For a long, taut moment, no one spoke.
My heart, which had been trying to be reasonable and hopeful and strategic all at once, finally admitted the thing it hadn’t wanted to say even to itself:
Gideon, true to form, might just not come.
Not because he was dead. Not because he was captured. Not because he’d failed.
Because he’d chosen not to.
Because when faced with the chance to stand with us, to risk being bound into something bigger than his own orbit, he might have decided he’d rather take his chances alone, with the hunger path still open and my grandmother still holding one end of the leash.
Fear slid through me, laced with something sharper and pettier—hurt.
“We trusted him,” I heard myself say, voice steadier than I felt. “We built this whole thing around his word.”
Keegan’s hand brushed mine, not quite taking it, just there.
“That was always the risk,” Nova said softly.
The west quarter of the circle stayed empty.
And for the first time since he’d said yes in that frozen neutral ground, I had to look at that emptiness and whisper, deep in my chest where no one else could hear:
What if he never meant it?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
We stayed.
Because of course we did.
Nova warned us.
“Fifteen minutes,” she’d said, voice quiet, the Hollow’s glow reflected in her eyes. And then she’d gone silent again, listening to threads I couldn’t see, staff rooted in the earth.
The Hollows hummed louder, impatient. The trees rustled, then stilled. Everyone shifted, but no one left their post.
We stayed for fifteen minutes.
And then five more, because hope is stubborn and so am I.
By the time Nova finally lifted her staff and let out a long, low sigh, my legs ached and my heart felt bruised.
“The pattern is retreating,” she said at last. “We have to let it go.”
The words hit like a physical thing.
The circle’s glow dimmed stanza by stanza, sigils fading back into ordinary lines of chalk and disturbed soil. The thrum of power under my feet thinned until it was nothing more than a faint, residual echo.
Across from me, my dad’s shoulders slumped. Mom’s hand found his, almost unconsciously, and he didn’t pull away.
Keegan went still beside me, that particular stillness that meant he was holding a lot very tightly. The curse-shadows under his skin pulsed once, then settled into a darker pattern.
The Silver Wolf sat, tail curled around her paws, head lifted toward the empty west quarter as if she might still catch a scent on the wind.
