“Let them go now, and I will stay.”
Celeste gasped. “Mom, no.”
“It’s okay. I’ll be fine.” I smiled at her. “And I’ll be back in Stonewick before you know it.”
The lie floated between us, flimsy and bright, and I hated that my daughter was old enough to recognize it.
Her eyes filled with the kind of terror I had spent her whole life trying to keep away from her. The kind that didn’t come from thunder or nightmares or the first day of school, but from knowing the person you loved was making a decision you couldn’t stop.
“No.” Celeste shook her head, fingers clamping around the pendant at her throat. “No, I’m not leaving you here with her.”
Keegan took one step toward me, and the pit answered.
The shadows below rose in one smooth, awful motion, curling upward like a warning. The entire floor trembled beneath us, and a thin crack spread from the edge of the pit toward Keegan’s boots.
He stopped.
The Priestess smiled faintly. “You see? The compound can behave when respected.”
“That isn’t behavior. That’s training,” Gideon said.
“How poetic you’ve become away from me.” Her gaze slid over him, and there was something possessive there that made my skin crawl. “It’s a shame.”
Gideon’s mouth twitched, but there was no humor in it. “It’s a relief.”
Her expression cooled, and the shadows below shifted again, scraping across one another in a whispering hiss that crawled over my bones.
Twobble had gone very still near the broken column at the edge of the chamber, with one hand pressed to his chest as if keeping his heartbeat inside. His other hand curled around a little pouch of goblin powder, though even he seemed tounderstand that throwing anything right now might send us all into the pit.
“Maeve,” Keegan said, and his voice did something to my chest.
I looked at him because I had to, and his face held every protest he couldn’t risk speaking too loudly. The anger. The fear. The love. The terrible understanding that I had already stepped into the center of a choice, and if he charged at me now, the Priestess would use it against us.
“I need you to take her,” I said softly.
“No.” His eyes darkened. “We’re not making a deal with her.”
“Keegan.”
Celeste started toward me, but Gideon caught her gently by the arm. She jerked against him immediately, fury flashing through her fear.
“Let go of me.”
“You need to listen to your mother,” Gideon said quietly.
“I don’t need to do anything you say.”
His face shifted, and for a moment, the ancient brooding enemy of Shadowick looked less like someone shaped by darkness and more like someone standing in the path of another person’s grief because he knew exactly how badly it could destroy things.
“No,” he agreed. “But you need to live long enough to argue with her later.”
Celeste’s mouth trembled.
The Priestess watched it all with an expression that made me want to slap the certainty right off her face.
“Touching,” she murmured. “Really. I did wonder how much of the Bellemore softness survived.”
“My daughter is not soft,” I said.
