Page 160 of Magical Mischief

He didn’t finish that sentence either.

We walked back in silence, though my thoughts were anything but quiet. My birthmark still ached, like the magicinside me was warning me that the balance had tipped and we hadn’t even seen the worst of it yet.

As we passed under the bare branches lining the path, I looked back once more.

The arch stood quiet and gray in the distance.

The butterflies were still gone.

And I knew—deep down in the marrow of my bones—that this was only the beginning.

The Academy had awakened.

But so had something else.

The ache in my side hadn’t eased by the time we reached the top of the path. If anything, it had settled into something deeper—less a stab and more a pull, like a memory trying to tug me backward.

I pressed a hand against my hip through my coat, fingers resting over the mark. It throbbed softly. Not painful, exactly. Just…present.Persistent.

Keegan glanced at me but didn’t say anything right away. He knew better than to ask if I was alright. We both knew I wasn’t.

We stopped at the top of the ridge, where the Butterfly Ward’s garden had once bloomed wild and brilliant. Even in the off-season, it usually carried a shimmer—petals curled in frost, the promise of green sleeping beneath the surface. But now? It looked pale. Faded. Like the life had been drained from the soil.

I let out a slow breath and stepped further in, my boots crunching on what little snow had settled on the gravel. There was a bench near the old statue of the seated woman holding an open book in her lap. I always liked that statue. It wasn’t grandor overly magical—just calm. Patient. As though it had all the time in the world.

I sat beside it, the cold from the stone biting through the layers of my clothes.

Keegan stood nearby, hands in his coat pockets, his gaze scanning the ward like he expected it to shift again, to crack further or speak in some hidden voice only he could hear.

“Twobble’s still watching the cottage,” he said after a moment, gently, like he could hear the direction of my thoughts without me speaking them aloud. “Your dad’s alright. Nothing’s stirred near the perimeter, and Twobble would throw a fit before letting anything slip past him unnoticed.”

I nodded, grateful for the update, though it didn’t ease the knot in my chest. If anything, it only made it worse.

And Gideon.

That name landed in my mind like a dropped stone.

I looked up at Keegan, the cold biting at my cheeks, my breath fogging between us.

“What if he’s doing this?” I asked, voice barely above a whisper.

Keegan’s brows drew together. “Gideon?”

“What if… there’s some kind of tie? A bond. Something I didn’t mean to make, but…” I swallowed hard. “What if he can feel everything I’m doing? What if he leeches it the moment I step closer to opening the Academy? Sucks the magic dry from wherever he is?”

Keegan didn’t answer immediately. He looked down at the garden, at the stone beneath our feet, then slowly crossed to sit beside me. The statue watched us in her quiet, carved wisdom.

“You think he left something in you,” he said, not as a question. Just a truth he’d seen written across my face.

“I don’tknow,” I admitted. “But it keeps coming back. I remember all the times I ran into him, how easily he found me, and how he always seemedclose enough.And now, with the Ward fading and my birthmark burning, I—” I stopped myself, swallowing the rest.

Keegan didn’t move. He watched the ground for a long moment, then said, “Magical ties are real. You know that.”

I nodded.

“But they’re rarely one-sided. If there’s a tether, Maeve, you can feel him too. You’d know, somewhere deep down, if he were actively feeding off this place. If he was draining it.”

I looked away. “Unless he’s hiding it. Unless Idon’tknow.”