Page 13 of Magical Mayhem (Stonewick Magical Midlife Witch Academy #7)

The hush in the Wilds shifted. The air cooled and sweetened as we continued walking on ferns and pine needles.

“He could barely move when I saw him,” I repeated, more to steady my own thoughts than to argue with the trees. “He shouldn’t be impossible to find.”

“Then we look for heavy footprints, pressed foliage, and the smell of…” Bella didn’t finish, slipping ahead. Her tail flashed into sight through some ferns. “Shifter senses are good at all, so I’m glad I’m here.”

Twobble leaned down and sniffed theatrically at a boulder that looked like the dirt had been brushed off. “I mostly get… mushrooms. And regret.”

“You always smell like regret,” Skonk said cheerfully. “It’s your signature scent.”

“Not me.” Twobble rolled his eyes. “The rock.”

The mushroom ring pulsed, one slow heartbeat of red, then dimmed. I skirted it wide, mindful of the Sillipa’s tricks.

“No spores today,” I told the caps, as if scolding a child about sneaking cookies. “We’re on a schedule.”

The path braided into two and then three. The Wilds loved to change its mind. Ferns grew taller, fronds unfurling like sleepy hands, and the vines overhead sagged with blue bells that bumped our shoulders and chimed softly where they brushed Bella’s fur.

Dragonflies stitched silver threads through shafts of light, vanishing again when the gloom swallowed them.

Bella lifted her chin. “There.”

I didn’t see what she saw at first. Just a bank of moss more vivid than the rest, but then I caught it.

Scuff marks that were wide and uneven, not by paws or hoofs. The path of a body trying to remember the shape of walking.

“He got up,” Bella said softly. “He tried to walk. He went that way.”

Skonk rocked onto his heels, satisfied. “I knew he’d move. Shadows are stubborn. So are men who think they own them.”

“Spoken like a goblin who’s never met a consequence,” Twobble muttered, but he was already following the disturbed moss, nose close to the ground.

We moved more quickly, darting through the mushroom groves.

“Don’t breathe close,” I warned, and Twobble made a big show of inhaling through his mouth, nose turned up.

“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.

“Two scents,” he said. “His. And… us.”

“Us?” Skonk frowned.

Twobble pointed with his chin to the mushrooms, to the vine lattice, to the moss where our boots had left faint, clean prints. “He’s following our following. Like a dog chasing its own tail.”

“Well, foxes don’t do that,” Bella said.

“Goblins don’t, either,” Skonk added. “That’s a human trick.”

I looked downstream

“Maeve,” Bella said, voice dipping into the register she used only when she meant to be kind and couldn’t afford it.

“If he’s circling, we should split. You and I follow this drag, and the goblins take the high path and watch for crossings.

If the Wilds want to keep him, they will try to fold the paths. We’ll need more than one thread.”

I nodded, relief and dread tangling. “Twobble, Skonk—”

“High path,” Twobble said, saluting with two fingers and more bravery than sense. “If I see him, I’ll squeak exactly once. Twice if I’m being eaten.”

“By what?” I asked.

Twobble shrugged, and Skonk tipped an imaginary hat before they left.

Bella and I took the lower route. Every so often, a mushroom stood like a watchman on a root, pulsing us past.

We found more signs like another thread of hair snagged on thistle; the half-print of a palm in damp silt, the fingers long and elegant even in ruin.

“He’s afraid,” Bella said. “Not of us. Of himself.”

“I agree,” I said, and my voice cracked.

Because I did know. Because I’d seen that same fear in Keegan’s eyes when his wolf raked the inside of his skin and he bit his lip to keep from howling.

Because I’d seen it in my own reflection when the Wards spun wrong and I believed, for a moment, that my magic might break what I loved more than mend it.

We rounded a sweep of witch hazel. The air changed again, and my skin prickled.

“It smells like smoke,” I whispered.

“Shadow-scorch,” Bella said, nostrils flaring.

Yet another thing I would have to look up in the library.

We followed the scorch to a stand of yews hunched together like conspirators.

I caught a twig twisted into a loop, a feather black as pitch with a single white bar, and three pebbles, flat and moon-pale, stacked carefully.

“What’s going on?”

“He’s making anchors. Little proofs saying I’m here, I’m here.” She glanced at me. “He must know he’s going in circles.”

“We see you,” Bella told the empty clearing, and her voice didn’t shake at all.

Something flitted at the edge of sight. We spun. A branch lifted and settled. The feather quivered. For a single heartbeat, I heard the shape of my name wrapped in silence.

Maeve.

I didn’t call back. Not with voice. I set my palm to the yew’s bark and let the truth move the other way.

“Close,” I breathed.

The mushrooms here were few but bright as spilled paint. One pulsed slow-slow-fast, slow-slow-fast, as if trying to teach me a code.

We rounded a final bend and stopped as one.

Ahead, at the base of a split oak whose two trunks twisted around each other like a married union, the prints ended.

There was no mossy canopy here, no mushroom guard. Only the oak’s twin hearts and the smell of smoke-that-wasn’t and the faintest whisper of breath not far enough away to be imagined.

Bella didn’t speak.

Neither did I.

The Wilds held its breath with us.

We were close enough to hear him not speaking.

Close enough to feel the circle tightening.

Close enough to know we would find him or he would decide to be lost.

I lifted my hand, steady at last.

“Together,” I said.

Bella nodded, and we stepped toward the twin-hearted oak.