Just slightly.
The forest rustled again, but things felt closer this time.
Rendel noticed it too.
His head turned toward the trees behind him and back at me.
And when he spoke again, his voice dropped lower.
“Whatever you decide,” he said quietly, “decide it quickly.”
Twobble whispered, “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I won’t tell you where it is.”
Rendel glanced into the woods, making it very clear we weren’t alone anymore, but it wasn’t his visitors. I could see it in his eyes.
The noise wasn’t loud at first. There was no thunder cracking through the sky or monstrous roar echoing between the trees. It was a hush that slipped over everything at once.
Even the breeze seemed to reconsider moving.
My skin prickled, and Twobble turned in a tight circle, his ears twitching like tiny radar dishes.
“I don’t like this,” he announced. “I especially don’t like it because I don’t know what I’m not liking, which somehow makes it worse.”
Skonk gripped the broom with both hands like it was a club. “Did the forest stop breathing?”
Rendel’s face had gone still in a way I didn’t trust.
“What did you do?” I asked.
His attention snapped to the trees beyond me. “I came alone.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
A streak of cold slid down the back of my neck.
Then the shadows moved.
Not the ordinary kind cast by branches and light, but something deeper. Wrong. The darkness peeled away from the bases of the trees in long ribbons, lifting from the ground as if the earth itself had decided to breathe out darkness.
One slid up a trunk and stretched into the air as another twisted around a patch of ferns and shot toward us, fast as a thrown knife.
I ducked, and the thing skimmed over my head with a hiss that raised every hair on my body.
Twobble shrieked. “NOPE.”
He threw both hands up, and a spray of bright gold sparks burst from his fingers in a way I’d never seen before. They struck the shadow square in the middle. For half a heartbeat, it held its shape, and I saw claws and smoke and hungry edges, but then it burst apart into a thousand black flecks that scattered through the trees.
“That worked!” Skonk yelped.
“Of course it worked,” Twobble snapped, already edging closer to me. “I’m brilliant under pressure and charming during disasters.”
Another shadow dropped from above.
This one struck the forest floor in front of Rendel and lunged at him low and fast. He moved quicker than I expected for someone who spent most of his time standing around being mysterious. His arm sliced through the air, and a blade of pale silver light flashed across the clearing.
The shadow split cleanly in half, and both pieces writhed.
