The smaller battles around the edges of the square blurred into background noise. It was like she’d flipped a switch.
Everything she had?
Came for me.
Shadows struck in rapid succession, like a storm of spears.
I dodged one but felt the cold kiss my cheek as it grazed by. I threw up a hedged shield against another, picturing a woven wall of thorns. It hit, sizzled, and tried to push through.
“Not today,” I hissed, shoving back.
A third bolt aimed for my legs.
Keegan lunged, taking it in his flank.
He yelped.
Pain tore through our bond, sharp and electric. I almost dropped my shield.
“Keegan!” I cried.
He staggered, but stayed on his feet, snapping at the dissipating tail of shadow, tearing it apart with his teeth.
“Maeve, move!” my dad bellowed, half-shifted now, one hand clawed, the other still human as he slammed a tendril out of the way.
I tried.
The ground felt sticky under me, every step dragging, like the shadows were thickening the air around my ankles.
The priestess’s magic wove around my hedge lines, probing and pressing. She didn’t need to hit me directly. She just had to wear me down, creep through the cracks, and then my own magic would become her door.
“I see you,” she murmured, voice somehow right against my ear even though she stood twenty feet away. “You’re a little loom yourself, aren’t you? Threads everywhere. So many connections. So muchleverage.”
I pictured shears.
Big, funny, cartoonishly oversized hedge shears, snapping at any mental image of her hands pawing at my magic.
Stay out.
Not yours.
I wasn’t sure if it helped, but imagining it made me feel better.
She lifted her arms higher.
The shadow dome overhead pulsed.
The hanging bolts of dark gathered into a swirling vortex above me. It spun faster and faster, a whirlpool of black, flecked with pinpricks of sickly light. The air inside it twisted, making my stomach flip just to look at it.
“Oh, that looks bad,” Twobble whispered.
“Thatisbad,” Nova said. “She’s concentrating the path’s energy. If she lands that on you…”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Bella snapped from her fox-sized battlefield.
I swallowed hard.
I could feel the shape of the spell now and how it reached up into the remaining structure of the Hunger Path, dragging its power down, focusing it. This wasn’t just a bludgeon. It was a scalpel.
