Time got slippery.
My heartbeat and the soft thump of my boots became the only reliable markers.
The house liked it.
I could feel its amusement in the way the shadows along the baseboards seemed to slither just out of sight, the way candles flickered without any draft. The architecture had that subtle wrongness I recognized from the hunger path with angles that weren’t quite ninety degrees, distances that stretched or compressed a breath longer or shorter than they should.
The scraping sound faded.
Silence crept in.
I stopped in yet another hall lined with yet more doors.
My shoulders sagged.
“Okay,” I said, forcing a brittle laugh. “You got me. Haunted labyrinth: one, Hedge Witch: zero. This is ridiculous.”
For a second, just a second, I felt it.
The tug toward despair.
Toward sitting down right here on this unnervingly patterned carpet and letting the house swallow me. Imagining Stonewick lost, the circle failed, Keegan’s bond going silent. Gideon’s voice snuffed out. My grandmother’s victory echoing down every corridor.
The priestess would like nothing more than for me to give up.
For me to be overwhelmed.
To believe that because she’d warped the house around herself, she ownedeverythingin it.
I took a slow breath.
In, out.
I let my palm rest flat against the paneled wall.
“You’re very impressive,” I told the house quietly. “The whole expanding hallways thing, the overachieving architecture, very on-brand. But I need you to understand something. You and I? We have a problem in common.”
The wood under my hand felt cool.
“Your mistress uses people,” I whispered. “Twists them. Chains them. Doesn’t let them be what they’re meant to be. That goes for you too, doesn’t it? You could’ve been… I don’t know. A weird but charming little Shadowick manor. Instead, she turned you into a maze to trap scared kids and wolves.”
The silence changed.
Not a lot.
Just a subtle shift.
A pause in the hum.
“If you keep hiding him from me,” I said, “she wins longer. And if she wins longer, she burns more things. More people. More places. Eventually, you’ll be nothing but ashes and stories, too.”
I don’t know if houses could feel persuasion, but I leaned into it anyway.
“You want to keep existing? Help me find Gideon. I’ll do my best to make sure your future doesn’t end with her cackling on top of your ruins.”
I didn’t expect an answer.
So when the floor shuddered, very gently, I almost lost my balance.
