“Okay,” I gasped, clinging as the broom leveled out. “Okay, I get it. You’re excited. But we don’t have time to die dramatically tonight.”
Somewhere below, I heard an audibleoh!—a student’s delighted, scandalized sound, like I’d just performed a trick in a circus rather than barely survived a magical piece of wood with an attitude.
The broom didn’t care about my dignity.
It surged forward, and Stonewick rushed beneath me in a blur of rooftops like dark waves, chimneys exhaling thin smoke, sunlight pooling on the street in warm circles.
And then the crowd came into full view.
It wasn’t just Stonewick residents. It was taller silhouettes with broad shoulders and watchful stances, and at least a few figures whose posture screamedpackeven before I caught the flicker of a canine profile in the light.
Orcs, shifters, goblins too.
And right in the middle, I spotted a confrontation boiling over. A Stonewick man I recognized with rolled-up sleeves and a red face jabbed a finger toward a shifter like he was pointing at a stain.
“Where were you when we needed you?” he shouted.
A woman beside him, gray hair in a braid, apron still tied around her waist like she’d run straight out of her kitchen, lifted her chin, eyes bright with fury.
“You turned your back on us decades ago,” she snapped, voice tight with something old and bruised. “Why should we help you now?”
The shifter she was shouting at didn’t move closer. That was the thing. He didn’t advance or puff up or bare teeth.
He just stood there, shoulders locked, hands open at his sides, the morning sunlight catching the curve of his jaw and the tense line of his shoulders.
He was holding himself back on purpose because he knew exactly how easily a single motion could prove their worst assumptions right.
The orcs weren’t helping. Two of them were arguing back, voices rising.
Another shifter popped up.
“We didn’tturn our backs.”
“What would you call it then?” someone yelled back.
More voices rose above the noise, and the crowd pressed forward like a tide pushing against the shore.
As I watched, the memory from the blue flame surfaced again in my mind, so clear it felt like someone had traced the words along the inside of my skull.
The boy.
Shadowick.
He keeps trying to come into Stonewick.
My stomach tightened.
Stonewick had always been good at telling itself the kind of stories that kept its conscience spotless. We welcome everyone. We’re quaint. We’re safe. We’re cursed, maybe, but still cozy. We endure.
And sometimes those stories were just another way of pretending we hadn’t closed the gate on someone standing right outside it.
But under the fall sky, with voices spitting old grievances like they’d been waiting decades for permission, the story frayed.
I tipped the broom downward and scanned for somewhere to land that wouldn’t involve dropping straight into the crowd. The broom slowed on its own, hovering just above the edge of the courtyard.
That’s when I spotted him.
Keegan came jogging out of the narrow alley that led from the Butterfly Ward. He began pushing through the edge of the crowd. His hair was rumpled at the temples, and his eyes moved quickly over the sidewalk, taking everything in.
