You belong tous,I told the stones. Not to her.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the shadow lines hissed.
The runes she’d etched lit up, bright as magnesium, thencracked.The spears of darkness that had driven down into the ground shivered and retracted, as worms yanked back out of the soil. The half-formed circle crumbled, light leaking away.
The priestess’s head snapped toward me.
Her eyes werecold.
“How dare you,” she said, almost softly.
“She’s very daring,” Twobble yelled overeagerly from behind me. “It’s her whole spiel.”
He and Skonk were flinging something at the creeping shadows around the edges of the square that looked like tinyglass vials. They shattered on impact, releasing sudden bursts of fizzy, sparkling light. Wherever the bubbles touched shadow, it recoiled, hissing.
“What is that?” I shouted.
“Bottled dawn!” Skonk yelled back. “Stella let me raid the basement!”
“You stole my dawn fizz,” Stella snapped, but the corner of her mouth twitched. “Fine. Throw it faster.”
The priestess lifted her hands again.
This time, the shadows didn’t just creep.
Theyleapt.
A wave of black swept down the main street leading out of the square, flooding it like fast water. Doors slammed without being touched. Windows darkened. In the distance, far beyond the village, I saw a smear of darkness reach the treeline andcling,wrapping the trunks in creeping, thorny silhouettes.
The forest beyond dimmed.
She was stretching Shadowick’s fingers across Stonewick’s veins.
“Stop watching,” Nova said sharply, hand flying to my shoulder. “Move.”
I rolled aside just as a tendril of shadow lashed down where I’d been kneeling, cracking the stone.
The Silver Wolf lunged, teeth flashing, and snapped at the shadow. Her jaws closed around nothing physical, but the darkness theretore,shuddering.
She shook her head like a dog demolishing a toy, and the torn shadow unraveled, vanishing with a pop of displaced air.
“Good girl,” Keegan’s dad muttered, even as his own wolf pressed harder at his skin.
Across the square, my mother lifted both hands.
I had never seen her do that before…never seen her go full witch in public.
Wind answered immediately, whipping her hair around her face. The air in a ten-foot radius swirled, picking up dust and stray leaves. She spun her fingers, weaving an old pattern, and the wind tightened into a twisting column.
She aimed it at one of the thickest clusters of shadow crawling up the side of the apothecary.
“Get. Off. My. Town, Square,” she said through her teeth.
The wind hit the shadows like a pressure washer hitting mold.
Darkness peeled off the building in long, reluctant strips, flung away into the air, where it dissolved under the high, sizzling light of Stella’s sign, which had suddenly decided to glow much brighter than normal. The apothecary’s bricks reappeared, color bleeding back in.
