Page 43 of Magical Mirage (Stonewick Magical Midlife Witch Academy #6)

The halls of the Academy always smelled like a happy memory, with a little bit of candlewax, chalk dust, and someone’s forgotten cinnamon tea cooling on a windowsill.

After the dragon den, when Lumi’s forehead pressed to my palm and the elders’ voices folded through me like a strong tide, I couldn’t go back to the others right away.

I drifted.

I wasn’t sneaking or hiding, just wandering.

The sconces dimmed as I passed, and then brightened again, as if the Academy were saying hello.

Unfortunately, Gideon’s name walked with me. The thoughts weren’t about the nightmare he’d become, but the boy I’d seen, no , felt.

When our magic stumbled into the same illusion months ago, a small figure at the edge of Stonewick invaded my mind.

I remembered the shoes too thin for spring mud, shoulders sunken around a secret he didn’t have the words for yet.

That image of the boy standing outside of Stonewick had haunted me since I felt it.

Gideon didn’t go home. He hovered in the in-between, as if waiting for permission to exist, but the residents of Stonewick didn’t provide it. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But Gideon wasn’t innocent. He’d grown into something wicked, lurking in the shadows and twisting the truth. His illusions were pitched to pry.

Now I knew better. I saw the destruction Gideon enjoyed employing and manipulating. But Malore didn’t invent holes in people. He sniffed them out, widened the edges, and conjured the wickedness to spread.

A man had to turn long before darkness recruits him.

I let my feet become drumbeats as I thought about how best to persuade Gideon.

He had to come to the circle willing and alive. Keegan wouldn’t be thrilled.

But one foot in front of the other from corridor to corridor. A staircase moved in front of me, welcoming me to ascend.

“Not yet,” I told the stairs to the library.

I walked down the corridor and noticed the paintings of old Stonewick watching me.

“Tell me, then,” I murmured to them, voice hushed by stone. “When did the boy become a blade?”

No answer, only the respectful settling of dust.

Still, the question settled correctly in my mouth. Gideon had become a blade that was sharp enough to keep the world from holding him, but useful enough that someone would always pick him up.

What sharpens a boy that way? Abandonment? Betrayal? Keegan faced that, but he wasn’t wicked.

A memory tugged and rattled as I remembered Gideon’s fists pushed into his pockets to keep from shaking.

And there, on the path that cut through scrub and stone, lay a bundle with old cloth and older twine.

I couldn’t see inside, but the feeling had a taste of iron and milk and the ache behind your nose right before you cry.

He had bent toward it and stopped. He had looked back at the town and forward to the trees and chosen neither. It reminded me of the way you choose nothing when everything hurts.

“Where did you go, then?” I asked the air.

The air remembered but didn’t say.

A mirror shimmered as I walked by.

“I won’t turn the truth into a trick,” I told the glass. My reflection lifted one skeptical brow, and I met her with the same. “Not tonight.”

The mirrors weren’t the only listening things in the building. The Academy loves its gossip as much as any village square.

I slipped through the passage that ran behind the kitchen, where the sprites leave their flour dust signatures and arguments about yeast rise like drama.

Someone had been testing a spell for self-warming scones.

It had gone poorly in the most delicious way, filling the corridor with butter and faint cinnamon.

My stomach growled.

I poured myself a cup of tea and added a bit of milk.

Gideon’s pain wouldn’t be catalogued in a subject index. It would be fused into the places that held him when nothing else did. The illusions provided the answers I needed to start with, but it wasn’t yet enough.

I walked into the sitting room along the foyer. The quiet steps of students pattering about as I took a sip and sat on the couch by the window.

Inside smelled like vanilla and patience. Someone had cracked the windows just enough to let the summer night breathe with us.

“Gideon,” I said to the tea’s steam, because sometimes you have to put the name into the air like a key. “Tell me what hurt.”

The boy stared at the bundle on the path like it was a riddle with a bell inside. He didn’t touch it. He sat down beside it, hands still shoved into his pockets, knees up, shoulders around his ears. He stayed. That’s what cracked me open. He stayed.

“Who didn’t see him?” I whispered, and the kettle answered with a low, sympathetic whine.

Malore would have offered him something terrible, calling it solace, and let him think he was calling the shots.

The curse would have threaded itself through that need and said, there, there, I’ll keep you from feeling. Power does that when it’s feral. It numbs as payment.

I sipped the tea and counted backward from thirty, the way I do when feelings try to run the show. By five, I knew. The pull that brought me to Stonewick wasn’t curiosity or duty. It was ache.

The dragons had said the path would cost me more than I wanted to give. They hadn’t been dramatic. They’d been precise.

It would cost me the part that prefers anger to tenderness because anger feels like armor, and tenderness feels like an open door. It would cost me my comfortable story of villains and victims.

I would have to look the man in the eye, who cursed our town, and ask him, not why did you do this , but where does it hurt . And then I would have to stand there long enough for an answer.

And Keegan would not approve. In fact, Keegan would need to stand by my side.

I pressed my hand flat to the thin blanket on the couch, and the weave warmed under my palm.

Midlife magic wasn’t all bright sparks and dramatic gestures. It was also the little moments, like when you turn your ex into a barking dog. Nostalgia filled me up at the thought, and I smiled.

A small, light tap paused in the doorway, and Twobble’s silhouette took up half the frame.

“You’ve gone very quiet since we got back,” he rumbled. “And sneaky. I appreciate that.”

“Thinking,” I said.

“Dangerous habit.”

“Necessary habit.”

“To some.” He rolled his eyes and smiled a toothy grin.

I exhaled. “Gideon is still a boy in my head, and I’m sure that’s the problem and the answer.”

“From the illusions?”

I nodded.

“I remember when you valiantly saved your dad by turning him into something the size of a school bus.” Twobble huffed.

“At least we got him out of there.”

“You have your ways.”

I smiled. “I do, but this time, it’s even more serious. Keegan’s life is at stake. Malore has woven and twisted something far more dangerous. He merely played Gideon, harnessing the pain he felt and using it against Stonewick.”

“Then you’ll go to the place Gideon became something else.”

I nodded in agreement. “I will.”

Twobble’s big eyes studied me. “Do you need anything from me?”

His question warmed me inside and out.

“Yes,” I said, and surprised us both. “When I do go, keep Keegan within the Wards even if he calls you names and pretends he can walk straight.”

Twobble’s mouth did something I will generously call a smile. “Consider the names already endured.”

“Thank you.”

He turned to go, then paused. “You will not do this alone.”

“I know.”

“You always say that as if it’s a vow you’re making to someone else,” he said. “Make it to yourself. You are not alone.”

I held his gaze. “I won’t do this alone.”

The door eased shut behind him with a softness I’d never heard a goblin achieve.

I began by compiling a mental list of things I’d learned since touching magic in Stonewick and how they might apply.

Maps: outer paths, the years Gideon would’ve been small.

Names: question midwives, bakers, anyone who sees what official ledgers miss.

Archives: records that aren’t about mischief but absence and crime

Nova: what threads she can follow without breaking.

Grandma: what she will not say out loud, and what her eyes already told me.

Keegan: tell him the truth that I don’t want to say. We mustn’t kill our way out of this. We must sit with it until it cracks…whatever it is

I finished my cup of tea and stood making my way out of the room.

In the corridor, the sconces brightened as I headed toward the library, ready to scratch at records and try to bait reluctant truths out of their foxholes.

The Academy’s hum rose, warm as a hand between my shoulder blades. I let it guide my steps through the arches, past the artwork and mirrors, and toward the library.

This familiar pull had followed me since the day I set foot in Stonewick, and it wasn’t a mystery anymore. It was plain as day, and it was not gentle, which was good.

I’m not gentle either, not where it counts.

I opened the library door and went to find the boy at the edge of town.

“I’m coming for your hurt, Gideon. Not to excuse you. To unmake the thing that uses you.”