This wasn’t the life I’d planned, but it was the one I was choosing.
And I couldn’t think of a better way to be.
Chapter Forty
The quiet came first.
It wasn’t the peaceful sort that settles over a place at rest, but the kind that made my shoulders tighten and my magic stir, the kind that felt deliberate.
We moved as one through the Wilds, boots and paws and careful steps pressing into moss and leaf litter that should have crackled and whispered back at us. Instead, the ground absorbed the sound as if it didn’t want to give anything away.
I glanced over my shoulder more than once, half-expecting to see Stonewick already distant behind us, but the trees folded in close, their trunks leaning subtly inward as if to watch us pass. The Wilds had always felt alive, responsive, curious. Today, they felt… alert.
Too alert.
Perhaps it was because they were occupied with hundreds of shifters calling it home.
“This place usually talks more,” Stella muttered somewhere behind me, her voice low, stripped of its usual humor. “I don’t like being ignored.”
Twobble, still perched proudly atop the bramblemule, sniffed the air.
“It’s not ignoring us,” he said, far too cheerfully. “It’s listening.”
That didn’t help.
The group stretched longer than I liked, not because anyone lagged, but because the path itself seemed to continually unwind ahead of us, curving and looping in gentle, almost polite detours after we’d left the Wilds.
It felt like the woods were delaying us.
Nova slowed, her brow furrowing as she studied the faint shimmer in the air ahead. She lifted a hand, fingers splayed, then frowned. “The route’s changed.”
Keegan stopped beside her. “Changed how?”
“Lengthened,” she said. “Not by much. Enough that you wouldn’t notice unless you were watching for it.”
My stomach sank. “It’s not trying to stop us.”
“No,” Nova agreed quietly. “It’s giving us more time to be seen.”
I felt it then, a subtle warmth blooming against my hip, right where my birthmark rested beneath layers of fabric.
I pressed my palm there instinctively. “She knows.”
The words slipped out before I could temper them.
Keegan looked at me sharply. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “The Priestess knows we’re moving. She knows where we’re headed, and she’s hoping they find us before we find them, so she’s making our path more difficult.”
As if summoned by the thought, something shifted at the edge of my vision.
A shadow detached itself from the base of a tree, stretching longer than the light should have allowed. It didn’t rush us, snarl, or strike. It simply… watched. Its shape was indistinct, more suggestion than form, like a smear of darkness where there shouldn’t have been one.
Another appeared farther back, then another, slipping between trunks and rocks, never quite solid, never quite gone.
“They’re shadow scouts,” Bella said softly, her fox senses clearly picking up more than my eyes could.
“At least they’re not shadow hunters,” Twobble whispered.
