Or what I could see of it.
Fog lay over the streets, thicker than any morning mist. It pooled in courtyards, seeped around doorways, draped the roofs. Shadows wormed through it, trying to twist it into shapes, hands, claws, gaping mouths, but wherever they formed fully, a burst of ward-light hit, scattering them.
It was chaos.
Not the loud, obvious kind. A muffled chaos.
The sound was wrong. Spells cracked dull and distant, like hearing fireworks through walls. Somewhere, something crashed with wood splitting and stone groaning.
The pain in my body deepened, echoing the town’s.
Every breath scraped. Every muscle throbbed. My mark felt peeled open, every nerve exposed to the magic storm.
Flashes of Keegan snapped through my mind like sudden lightning.
His wolf silhouetted against the priestess’s shadows. The moment he took a blow for me and fear tore through him, not for himself, but for us. The grit of his teeth as he shook off pain and plunged back in.
Now, there was… less.
Not silence.
A thready, straining pull, like a line stretched too far.
“Where is he,” I whispered.
Gideon didn’t answer.
The broom circled once above the square.
From up here, Stella’s shop was a hazy outline, its door dimmed by a film of frost. The fountain was barely visible under the fog, just a hump. The lampposts leaned at odd angles, some broken. The shadow dome we’d passed through pulsed above, thick and heavy. Beneath it, the shadow fog churned.
We needed to get down.
“There,” I said, spotting a thinner patch of fog near the edge of the square, close to the path that led toward the Butterfly Ward gates near the alley. The Wards pulsed stronger there, like they had tried to punch conditions into the storm.
The broom, for once, agreed.
It angled toward the clearing, descending in a cautious glide instead of its usual death-plunge.
The moment its bristles brushed the fog, static ran up my legs, prickling my skin through my boots. I hissed and held onto Gideon tighter.
We slipped into the murk.
It swallowed the world.
For a few heartbeats, all I could see was gray. The ground rose up to meet us with only a slight jolt. My knees buckled, and I caught myself with a hand on the handle.
We were down.
The broom hovered a few inches above the ground, as if wary of committing.
The fog here wasn’t inert. It moved in slow spirals at ankle height, brushing my calves like curious hands. Shadows coiled in it, trying to form, but frayed apart before they could become anything solid. The Wards’ energy popped and sizzled in the air, like static before a storm.
Every hair on my arms stood up.
“This is wrong,” I breathed.
“Welcome home,” Gideon said, voice dry but shredded.
