Every shadow froze.
Every breath held.
Even the wind paused as the priestess lowered her hand, chest heaving, eyes blazing with raw hatred.
And then, slowly, she turned her gaze back to me.
“Maeve Una Bellemore,” she said, voice trembling with the effort of forced calm, “you have no idea what you’ve just done.”
She lifted her fingers, and the shadows poised like a thousand spears ready to fall.
Chapter Thirty-Three
If the priestess had been angry before, now she was something worse.
Focused.
The shadows poised above us with thousands of black spears hanging in the air, trembling with the urge to fall. The lattice dome overhead had stopped flickering and gone solid, like a night sky someone had painted too dark.
Every instinct I had screamed to make myself very small.
Instead, I straightened.
She’d said I had no idea what I’d just done.
She was only half right.
I didn’t know the details. I didn’t know exactly how Gideon had cracked her hold or what that meant for the hunger path in the long term.
But I knew this much.
She wasn’t untouchable anymore.
She could be shaken.
“A bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Stella called, teeth very much out. “Making the sky into your own personal cutlery drawer?”
“Stella,” Nova said warningly.
“What? Someone has to heckle her. It’s practically a magical law.”
The priestess ignored her. Her eyes, those pale, cold eyes, never left my face.
“It would be so simple,” she said, voice deceptively soft. “One moment of yielding. One flicker of understanding. You kneel, you open, and all of this stops. The path stabilizes. The Wards cease their whining. Gideon lives.”
Her gaze sharpened, the last words a needle.
My stomach clenched.
She didn’t sayand you live.
Noted.
Around us, the square seethed.
Small battles had broken out in messy, erratic clusters. At the far end, Lady Limora and her witches formed a tight, glowing knot, their joined magic holding a wedge of shadow at bay. The Silver Wolf and my dad fought side by side in their half-shifted states with fur and claws and human curses mingling as they tore at any tendrils that slithered too close to fleeing villagers.
Some people had managed to run, ducking down side streets, vanishing into doorways the shadows hadn’t reached yet, but more were huddled in their houses, shutters closed. I could feel them through the Wards: pulses of fear, small candle-flames of life in the dark.
