The tendril hit the fire andevaporatedwith a shriek like metal grinding.
For a second, the flames flared so bright I saw dragon eyes in them, reflected.
Then they guttered, leaving a faint, shimmering line on the ground.
My heart hammered.
“Okay,” I panted. “We’re doing that now.”
“You’re singeing my sign,” Stella said.
“You’re welcome,” I shot back.
The high priestess watched all of this with a strange expression.
Not impressed…not exactly. Not furious either. More like someone who’d planned for a small skirmish and found herself at an unexpectedly lively dinner party.
“You’ve improved your little defenses since I last glanced this way,” she said.
“Big talk for someone failing their home invasion,” Twobble yelled.
“Twobble,” Skonk hissed. “Taunting the omnipotent priestess is not in the strategic handbook.”
“Maybe that’s the problem with your handbook!” Twobble shouted, hurling another vial of fizz at a creeping patch of dark.
The priestess ignored him. Her gaze locked on me.
“The circle failed,” she said. “Your little plan to close the path has… evaporated. Do you think this frantic display of provincial magic will change that?”
She lifted her hands again, and this time I felt it, apullalong the invisible line of the hunger path, a tug at the edge of the world.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Outside Stonewick, far beyond the trees, the air rippled.
I saw it in my mind’s eye through the Luminary’s echo, the way a spider feels a vibration in its web: the old road that led toward Shadowick, the places where Malore had walked and burned, the scars he’d left in the earth.
Those scars… lit up.
Black fire, crawling along an invisible route.
The hunger path answered her call.
“No,” I breathed.
If she got that fully awake, with the circle open, she could rewrite the old rites however she liked. Feed it new sacrifices. Give it new terms. Turn it into something the ancient rites never intended.
WeneededGideon.
We needed his piece of the path to close it. His agreement. His yes.
He was nowhere in sight.
But Ifelthim.
Somewhere in that pulsing, dark line, a knot resisted. A piece of the path that didn’t want to move forward. Like a rock lodged in a throat.
“Gideon,” I whispered, before I could stop myself.
