My grandmother’s magic tried to push down, pin us.
The broom shuddered, losing altitude.
“Up!” I shouted, pushing power into the command. “Up, you traitorous twig!”
It jerked, forcing its way through the pressure like someone climbing through wet cement.
We wobbled, fishtailed, and then, with a protesting squeal of bristle and wood, shot through the open front door.
The world outside hit us like a slap.
Colder air, different magic, the stark open sky instead of a ceiling pressing in.
We burst out over the brick path, clearing the front steps by a foot. The gargoyles on the roof lunged, wings unfurling with grinding roars, but they were a heartbeat too slow. Stone claws raked empty air where we’d just been.
The broom tilted, overcompensated, and we dove.
“Too low!” Gideon rasped.
“Working on it!” I yelled back.
I yanked the handle up.
We missed smashing into the hillside by inches and skimmed along it instead, trailing dust and stray pebbles. The mansion loomed behind us, its tower spiking against the sky, windows glinting like furious eyes.
Magic snapped against my back and away from my grandmother’s reach, thwarted by the fact that we were no longer on her anchored ground.
We were on the path.
The Hunger Path.
It pulsed underneath us, visible to my hedged senses as a dark, bruised vein stretching back toward Shadowick and forward toward Stonewick.
It hummed in time with Gideon’s ragged breathing.
He leaned back against me, the weight of him solid and disconcertingly human. Every time the broom jolted, he sucked in a breath, the sound catching in his throat.
I tightened my arm around him.
“I’m not going to drop you,” I said, softer now that we were clear of immediate walls.
“Would be a very on-brand ending,” he said, voice thin. “Shoved off a broom by a midlife Hedge Witch on a heroic tear.”
“That’s Chapter Seventy,” I said. “We’re only in the sixties. Try to keep up.”
He huffed, then winced.
The broom steadied as we climbed, leaving the mansion and its snarling gargoyles behind. The hills fell away beneath us, the twisted trees of the Wilds spreading out like a hostile ocean.
Ahead, far on the horizon, Stonewick waited.
A dark curve against the sky.
The shadow lattice around the town still held. Here and there, tiny pinpricks of light punched through where someone had shoved back, but the overall impression was of a net thrown over a fire, trying to smother it.
Guilt spiked sharp in my gut.
First, we had to fly over Shadowick.
