Page 42 of Magical Mayhem

“You’re inhaling jelly,” Skonk said. “Hardly better.”

“Berries are grounding,” Twobble sniffed. “That’s science.”

A branch creaked above us, slow and deliberate.

We froze. Leaves shivered without wind. On the ground ahead, a scatter of bark chips formed a crescent around a root like a dropped necklace.

Bella touched my wrist. “Hear that?”

At first, I only heard the thud of my own pulse. Then, beneath it, the faintest rasp. Not words. Not the voice from last night. A breath laboring, catching, deciding. Near. Far. Both.

“This way,” Bella whispered.

We followed the scuffs around a stand of birches so white they looked like bones. Beyond them, a thin stream meandered through stones, murmuring secrets to itself.

Twobble crouched, finger to lips, then pointed: a smear on a stone where someone had steadied a hand. Not blood, not quite. The stain shimmered darker than water, lighter than pitch. A shadow’s fingerprint.

“He’s close,” I whispered.

The mushrooms answered with a sympathetic dimming, and I wondered if the groves were accomplices or witnesses.

“Maeve,” Skonk said softly, warning.

He pointed to a low branch ahead where strands of moss hung like a curtain, but a few strands of dark hair clung to it.

“Gideon.”

The name bounced between trunks. The trees did not echo it back.

“Hair doesn’t walk, but he obviously does,” Skonk said gently. “Keep moving.”

We slipped under the moss curtain, and I saw an imprint. He’d fallen here and risen. The greenery bore the print of a hand.

A sound flickered behind us like an echo with feet. We spun as a group of one, but only a bellflower swayed where no breeze moved.

“He’s circling,” I said, the certainty arriving as if delivered, wrapped, and signed. “He doesn’t know the Academy is behind him. He doesn’t know which end is up. He can’t find his way out.”

“Can’t or won’t?” Skonk asked, too softly to be cruel.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

We pressed on. The path of scuffs tightened into a loop, then frayed into uncertainty, as though he’d paced, stopped, turned, and argued with direction. On a low stump, I noticed a depression where a body had sat and went to kneel.

“Maybe he’s stronger than we think,” Bella said.

I straightened. My birthmark throbbed. “He’s searching, too.”

“Or hiding,” Twobble offered.

We slipped through a notch between two boulders furred with lichen. The world brightened suddenly.

“Look,” Bella breathed.

On the sunlit bank, the scuffs deepened: both knees, both hands. And above them, traced in the fine silt by the stream, a mark. Not a word. A line that had begun to be one and then been abandoned.

I swallowed around the ache in my throat. “He tried to show he was there.”

Twobble crouched and sniffed again, more careful now, less clown.