The hunger path ran right up to it.
Not quite touching and stopping just shy of the threshold, pulsing faintly, like a heartbeat at a wrist.
Even before the broom dipped toward it, I knew.
This was it.
Where she was keeping him.
Where she was anchoring her piece.
The broom slowed to a crawl.
My entire body, which had been one elongated scream of motion for the last however long, lurched at the change. My teeth clicked together.
We descended in a wide, hesitant spiral, like the broom itself was wary of getting too close.
“Same,” I muttered.
From up here, the details came into focus.
Sigils carved discreetly into the stones around the foundation were some I recognized from Shadowick texts, some older, curling like thorns. Wards twisted with inverted versions of the ones I knew from the Academy wrapped the whole structure, shimmering faintly.
A thin line of smoke seeped from a hole in the roof, not straight like chimney smoke, but curling sideways at odd angles.
The air tasted metallic and bitter.
Fear prickled along the back of my neck.
“Of course,” I whispered. “Of course, you’d tuck your favorite toy out here, where no one can see you.”
The broom hovered now, a few dozen feet above the ground, indecisive.
Part of me wanted to leap off and run.
Part of me wanted to hang here forever, suspended above the problem, where I couldn’t be killed or make any more huge, life-altering decisions.
But the sight of that house, small and ugly against the hill, wrapped in sigils that looked like chains, made something harden inside my chest.
We needed Gideon.
Not because the priestess had taunted me about his feelings or because my heart was some kind of confusing idiot, but because without him as part of the circle, the circle would never fully close. And if it didn’t close, my grandmother would keep ripping holes in reality until she found the version she liked.
And Stonewick…
Keegan. My parents. Nova. Stella. Twobble. Everyone…
They didn’t have time for me to sit shaking on a broom and wondering whether I could handle another conversation with a morally complicated man.
“Okay,” I told the broom, voice rough. “We’re here. You did your haunted roller-coaster thing. Now you let me down nice and easy, and I promise not to set you on fire later.”
It dipped another foot.
I took that as a yes.
As we drifted closer, a sound carried up from below.
Faint.
