His fingers slipped from the handle.
The broom dipped.
He slid down and off before I could grab him, landing on his knees with a hard thud that made me wince in sympathy.
He grimaced, one hand bracing on the packed earth, the other clutching his side.
“Okay,” I said quickly, swinging my leg over awkwardly and hopping down. “Okay, you stay—well, not stay. But you sit. For a second. We need…”
Something moved in the fog ahead.
Shapes.
Multiple.
I tensed instinctively, magic leaping to my fingertips.
Then the shapes resolved into people.
My people.
My dad emerged first, blurry at the edges until the fog thinned around him. He looked… wrecked. Blood matted his hair at the temple. His shirt was torn, one sleeve hanging in shreds, scorch marks blackening the fabric over his ribs. He waslimping, one hand pressed to his side, his half shift still clinging stubbornly to his features and eyes too bright, teeth a little too sharp.
My mom was at his elbow, steadying him despite her own battered state. Her hair had come loose from its tie, plastered damply to her forehead. Soot streaked her cheeks. The hem of her jeans was singed. Her hands were scraped raw, bits of gravel clinging to torn skin.
Twobble staggered out next.
He was covered in glitter.
This glitter was sticky, clumping in his hair, smeared across his clothes in weird, patchy streaks. Little burns dotted his sleeves where fizz vials had gone off too close. His expression, somewhere between wild-eyed and shell-shocked, made my throat close.
Skonk clung to the back of his vest, half-hiding behind him, clutching what looked like an empty salt sack. His hat was gone. His ears drooped. He looked like someone had wrung him out and hung him up to dry.
Ardetia moved through the fog like it wasn’t there, but even she wasn’t untouched. Frost-coated her fingers up to the knuckles, jagged ice clinging in shards that looked like broken glass. Her usually perfect braids were mussed, a few strands of hair loose and clinging to her cheeks. A tear in her sleeve revealed a nasty, shadow-dark bruise blooming on the pale skin beneath.
Nova came behind her, staff used as much for walking as magic. She leaned on it heavily, breath a little ragged. A line of blood trickled from one nostril, stark against her pale skin. The green of her eyes was dimmed, not from lack of power. Therewas still plenty of that humming under the surface, but from sheer exhaustion.
Lady Limora and her coven, Opal, Vivienne, Marla, followed, their neat hair and impeccable cloaks now scorched and dusty. Limora’s cane had a new crack along its handle, but she still held it like a scepter. Opal’s sleeve was ripped up the side, her arm beneath crisscrossed with shallow cuts, each bandaged hastily with strips of cloth. Vivienne’s lipstick was smudged halfway across her cheek, like she’d wiped blood away and taken half her make-up with it. Marla’s eyes were wide, shock just beginning to seep through her hardened composure.
And behind them all, padding forward with stiff, measured steps, was the Silver Wolf.
She looked less like a myth and more like a battered veteran.
Her shimmering coat was streaked with dirt and soot. Deep gouges marred her flank where shadow had bitten deep; the wounds oozed an ugly, dark residue that wasn’t quite blood or magic but some foul combination of both. Her eyes, Keegan’s eyes, if he’d been born an animal and not a man, met mine.
They were tired.
They were also very much alive.
No Keegan.
The thought came so fast it wasn’t even a thought. Just an absence shaped like his name.
My body knew it before my brain did.
Not just from sight but from the jagged, empty space in my sense of him. The bond that had been a stretched, painful cable all the way here now thinned to a thread, faint and far.
“Maeve,” my dad said, spotting me.
