I tried to wrench the handle sideways, toward Stonewick.
The broom did not care.
It shuddered once, as if offended, and then surged forward, away from the square, away from the dome, away from my entire life.
“No!” I yelled. “You traitor of a twig!”
The wind snatched the words out of my mouth.
We climbed higher, then leveled out, the broom finding some ghastly idea of cruising altitude. Below, the village blurred from streets, houses, the yellow-brown patch of the Academy lawn, the gleam of Ward lines faintly visible to my magic-tuned eyes.
Tiny figures moved in frantic flickers.
A flash of silver told me the Silver Wolf had thrown herself against something twice her size. A curl of gold at the Academy’s roofline hinted at Karvey’s stone bulk leaping. The square pulsed with light and dark colliding.
Then the broom banked.
The whole world tilted.
Stonewick dropped behind me, spinning out of my direct line of sight. My stomach crawled up into my throat.
“Nononono—”
I twisted in place, nearly losing what little balance I had. One wobble and I’d be tumbling out into the air and probably into a shadow net like a very surprised hedgehog.
I caught one last glimpse of the square.
The priestess was a small, dark figure at the center of the chaos. The shadow-dome knitted itself tighter above the town. A brief flare of green from Ardetia, blue-white from Nova, gold from Limora’s circle. A fox streak. A goblin perched on a roof, flinging fizz like fireworks.
And right at the edge of the square, my dad.
Half shifted now with broad shoulders curling into fur, his hands more paw than human, his face a painful in-between. He swung an arm and knocked a lash of shadow away from a doorway, then took another hit straight across the chest.
He stumbled.
Even from this height, I heard a sound rip out of him—a short, guttural yelp.
Something inside me tore.
“Dad,” I choked.
My eyes flooded, blurring the whole scene into a watery smear of light and dark.
I wrenched the broom handle so hard my wrists hurt, trying to turn back, to dive, toanything…
It resisted, then simply ignored me.
House of horrors ride, I thought numbly. The kind that strapped you in, yanked the lever, and did not care if you changed your mind the second the safety bar locked.
“Let me off,” I whispered. “Please. I have to help them. I have to—”
The broom flew on.
Stonewick shrank.
The shadow dome hummed behind me, a faint, wrong curve against the sky, then faded into the distance. The familiar shapes of the Wards blurred and thinned. The safe, invisible line of the Academy’s influence dropped, and the wind changed temperature—less crisp, more metallic.
We were leaving my territory.
