“I did not,” Skonk said primly, and then corrected himself because honesty sometimes visits goblins on Tuesdays. “We did not. Luna and I have been busy with reconnaissance.”
I blinked. “You and Luna. How and why are you with Luna?”
My pulse sped up.
“The knitting lady has range,” he said solemnly, which felt like a sentence I would embroider on a throw pillow. “We have contacts. We have birds. We have…a guy. Anyway, I wasn’t with her per se.”
Keegan’s fingers brushed mine, a silent wait.
Skonk’s grin did not arrive. “If your grand plan is to lure Gideon out of Shadowick, you’ll be luring a ghost,” he said, each word clicking. “Because he’s not there.”
The foyer absorbed his statement and offered us our reflections again, a little more blurred than before.
“Not there,” I repeated, my mouth suddenly dry.
Skonk shook his head, eyes bright with the kind of excitement that belongs to disaster.
“Shadowick’s got its own problems, but Gideon?” He snapped his fingers, once, sharp. “He slipped the net. He’s somewhere else, and the somewhereness is the problem.”
Keegan’s hand tightened around mine. “Where.”
Skonk grinned finally, but it wasn’t his usual impish delight. It was sharp and thin, a knife-smile.
“That is the question, isn’t it?”
He rocked back on his heels, pleased and grave at once, and the chandelier above us trembled as if a draft had slipped through a closed window.
“We never stepped foot in Shadowick,” he added, almost proud, as if that tidbit would earn him a gold star. “Didn’t have to. But wherever Gideon went, he didn’t go alone.”
I felt the butterfly at my hip flare.
“Who’s with him?” I asked.
Skonk’s gaze flicked to the staircase where Elira should have been. To the doors where the last students had vanished into the safer part of the day. Back to us. He lifted one finger and then thought better of it, shoving both hands into his vest pockets like he didn’t trust them not to make trouble before his mouth could.
“That,” he said, softer now, as if the walls were the ones who shouldn’t hear, “is why Luna is not with me.”
Silence dropped like a stone into a well. The ripple went out, kissing the corners of the hall, touching the doors, brushing the edges of my heart.
I swallowed and felt how loud it sounded. “Skonk.”
He straightened, shoulders squaring with a dignity that looked ridiculous on him and absolutely correct at the moment.
“We found a trail,” he said. “But before I tell you where it leads, I have to tell you what followed it.”
He lifted his chin and waited, and every lamp in the foyer seemed to lean closer, their flames thinned to listening points, the Academy itself drawing breath and holding it.
And that was where the quiet stopped being kind.
Chapter Three
Skonk didn’t blink. For a goblin who could turn the simplest errand into a one-goblin musical, stillness didn’t suit him. It hung off his small frame like a coat too heavy for the shoulders beneath.
“I found something,” he said finally, his voice pitched low enough that even the chandeliers seemed to dim in curiosity.
Keegan straightened beside me, with that quiet alertness settling over him that reminded me how thin the line was between wolf and man. “Let’s hear it.”
Skonk took a deep breath, his little chest puffing like a kettle on the verge of boiling. “Luna and Gideon aren’t hiding where we thought they were.”
