I knew it instantly, and I ran toward it, trying to raise my arm toward her with every ounce of quickness and strength I had.
Our fingers almost touched, but the darkness above the chamber dropped, and I lost her.
Chapter Twenty Three
“I can feel your mom’s presence,” Keegan shouted as Gideon's gaze snapped to him.
“Can we be sure?” I asked.
Keegan's hands moved along a stone wall as Gideon went up next to him.
“We don't have long before the room shifts again,” Gideon confirmed.
“Don't move,” Keegan told me as I moved toward where my daughter had just been.
Unfortunately, my daughter’s fingers had been inches from mine before the darkness dropped through the chamber and swallowed the moon door whole. Her panic still rang through me, trapped somewhere between my chest and my throat.
“This is absolutely horrid,” Twobble said softly, pacing between Keegan and Gideon.
Every single instinct I had as a mother shoved me forward before common sense could get a word in.
“Maeve,” Keegan warned.
“I heard you,” I said, though I didn’t stop.
“That’s historically not the same thing as listening,” Twobble muttered from somewhere behind me.
The chamber groaned around us, the six doors trembling in their frames as the darkness overhead churned like it had weight. The masked fighters had fallen back for the moment, caught in my thorned vines and Twobble’s goblin powder, but their bodies twitched unnaturally beneath the bindings. Whatever lived inside them wasn’t done trying to get loose.
Keegan’s focus stayed on the stone wall where he’d caught my mother’s presence, his fingers pressing along the stones as though he could claw a door into existence through pure will.
Gideon stood beside him, his face pale from whatever magic he’d used on the moon door.
“She moved your mother closer to the foundation level.”
“How can you tell?” Keegan asked Gideon.
Gideon’s jaw tightened. “I can feel her…”
“Feel her what?” My stomach twisted, but I kept moving toward the place where the moon door had been.
“Fear.”
Anger flashed through me. “You can sense fear?”
“I’m not proud of it, but it’s part of shadow magic.” Gideon turned to look at me. “Shadows tend to feed off it.”
“The more I find out about you, the less I like,” Twobble said, stopping to stare at the mage.
Keegan’s lips twitched as my hand ran along the door and stone where Celeste had once been, where only a stretch of blank wall remained.
Behind me, Keegan grunted as stone scraped against stone. Gideon whispered words I didn’t recognize, and blue light spread beneath his hands in jagged lines that reminded me too much of the magic in the tower windows.
Twobble came up beside me, his little face unusually serious as he stared at the crack.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I can feel my daughter.” I turned toward a narrow crack in the stone I hadn’t noticed before. It ran from floor to ceiling, thin as a thread, and a cold breeze slipped through it.
