by Emma Savant
“In the fridge,” Rowan said. “Container with the red lid.”
With fragile cookies and tea in front of me, and members of my expanded coven on every side, I finally felt myself relax.
I couldn’t blame Brendan for insisting he be part of our plan, I realized, looking around as everyone dug into the cookies and chatted about the plans we’d discussed at tonight’s meeting. There was nothing anyone could have said or done to keep me away, either, and I was in arguably more danger than all of them.
The danger didn’t matter, to Brendan or to me or to anyone else.
We would protect our families, no matter the cost.
30
The cold air bit at my face. Behind me, the lights of the Glimmering Harvest Festival sparkled and danced over a field covered in hay bales and tents. The air smelled like kettle corn and the smoke from the fires at the warming stations, and the rollicking music from the main stage gave the event a festive feeling.
I tugged my dark-red hoodie forward to make sure it concealed as much of my face as possible. Alec had given me the hoodie, since he claimed my red leather jacket was too recognizable even under a glamour, and it smelled like him, a bit like sawdust and cinnamon and forest air.
Clutching the paper of candied almonds I’d purchased just to make myself fit in more, I moved under a string of turnip lights, all carved with spooky faces and accompanied by an educational sign sharing the history of jack-o’-lanterns. The educational signs were all over the place, and each one dispensed magical tokens that were part of a scavenger hunt for all the kids. This was a family-friendly Glimmering event first and foremost, and that knowledge kept me on edge. I was standing on prime hunting ground, and I could barely afford to blink.
A line was forming over by the corn maze, and Blaze was there wearing a glamour and giving out tickets with shifting golden numbers on them that indicated the time each ticket holder could enter the maze. Close by, hidden in the middle of a stack of hay bales, one of the Wildwood werewolves used one of our brass dagger charms to let Blaze know which ticket holders smelled like Burnsides.
Someone touched my arm, and I jumped.
“It’s just me,” Alec said in a low voice.
I caught a whiff of the strong cologne he’d used to mask his scent. He had a different appearance tonight, with his russet hair glamoured to black and his skin a few shades paler than normal. His eyes were darker, but still large and long-lashed. At first glance, it would be easier to assume he was a vampire rather than a werewolf tonight. I hoped that would be enough to keep any of the Burnsides from looking at him twice.
“Too many Halloween costumes,” I said quietly. “Blaze has been insisting people remove their masks when she hands out tickets.”
“What’s the excuse there?”
“A one-time-through rule,” I said. “She’s been claiming the maze is so in demand that anyone who wants to go through a second time has to wait until after ten and keeps insisting to people that she never forgets a face.”
He laughed, or tried to, and handed me a paper cup of apple cider. I took it and sipped, keeping my face buried behind my hood.
“You know I’d rather you stay out of all this, right?” I said.
“You know I’d rather you stay out, too,” Alec said. “Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen for either of us.”
“Where’s Brendan?”
“In the maze,” Alec said. “The others are getting into position.”
Over at her station, Blaze checked a few tickets before waving a group of my coven sisters and their werewolf dates into the maze. They seemed like a group of ordinary Glimmering couples ready to face a few jump scares and sneak kisses in dark dead ends.
My stomach twisted itself into knots as the group disappeared between stalks of corn. I was sending them into a trap that would allow no escape. Once our sealing spell fell over the maze, there could be no backing out, no never-minds, no second chances. They would be in an arena with more werewolves than any of us had ever faced, and the responsibility for the decision to send them in there rested squarely on my shoulders.
Alec put an arm around me, giving us the appearance of intimacy and him the chance to whisper in my ear.
“This isn’t going to be wasted. I don’t have a way to guarantee that the whole pack is here, but Cate just clocked another group of them walking in and heading for the maze. And Matt says he overheard one of the Burnsides bragging about how this was easy hunting ground, since everyone will assume their victims are screaming for fun.”
The audacity of the Burnsides talking about their activities so openly unsettled my stomach. They were confident, and their confidence made me nervous.
“I’d feel better if the bait wasn’t our families,” I said.
“Come on, like anyone we know would be happy attending an ordinary fall festival,” he said. “It’s not a nice evening out unless there’s a little murder and mayhem.”
I tried to smile up at him, but it came out as more of a grimace.
“My sisters like that sort of thing,” I said. “I don’t know about your wolves. They came to Brendan because they wanted an escape, and I’ve given them a battle.”
“And they all chose to fight it,” he said.
He pulled me in for a quick hug, and I leaned into him.
We wandered through the booths, watching a hedge witch’s butter-churning demonstration and a group of pixies making candied apples almost as big as their heads. We passed a few more educational displays about hex moth farming and rampion cultivation, and stopped to scratch behind the ears of the pigs at the petting zoo.
Finally, the dagger charm under my shirt glowed warm, and I received a brief mental flash of a sharp man in a well-cut coat walking onto the field with his arm around a woman—a woman with dark-brown hair with red ombre tips.
Impulsively, I grabbed Alec’s hand. Near the corn maze, Blaze quietly handed the ticketing off to another volunteer, a teenage faerie who had no idea of anything that was going to happen tonight. Blaze slipped into the maze and was gone in an instant.
“They’re here,” I told Alec in a low voice.
We ducked behind a stack of hay bales and waited. Alec leaned me against the bales in a perfect imitation of an overeager boyfriend and shielded me, just in case they came around this way. I breathed in his clean sawdust scent and waited.
My charm flashed hot again.
It was time.
31
We flashed our tickets at the faerie, and she waved us in. Seconds after we stepped into the maze, my charm flashed hot again, and this time it stayed hot. I counted to ten, and then the heat faded. I pulled my hand away from Alec’s and reached into my boot. I closed a hand around my dagger.
The spell, held at each corner of the maze by one of my sisters, had fallen. The maze was sealed off. No one could exit until they lifted the spell, and no one would lift the spell until every Burnside werewolf had been accounted for.
My skin tingled, and my heart raced as the quiet darkness of the maze settled in around me.
We crept quietly forward, listening for the distant sounds of others in the maze over the soft, spooky music that drifted down from speakers hidden in the corn. I heard the soft click of a tongue, a warning, and then someone in monster makeup jumped out at us and roared. I screamed, the way any jumpy woman might have, and the Wildwood in the makeup whispered to us, “They’re up ahead. We’re trying to herd them to the center.”
I nodded, and the girl fell into step behind us. We walked under cobwebs crawling with enchanted spiders and past jack-o’-lanterns whose flames flared as we passed. Every time one of the wolves or witches staffing the maze jumped out to scare us, we feigned surprise and waved them to follow.
Up ahead, a few raised voices spoke.
“This maze was better last year when that sorcerers’ group was running it,” a man said. “Still, this year’s staff can’t be beat.”
This was met with sniggers and laughter. I
exchanged glances with Alec and pulled down my hood. A tendril of dark hair that had come loose from my braid fell into my eyes. I brushed it aside and stepped forward. I felt as if I might miss something or give us away if I inhaled too loudly, so I kept my breaths shallow and ears strained for the next sound.
Someone jumped out at the group ahead of us. A few people screamed, and one man swore loudly before laughing. Their footsteps stopped.
“Nice makeup,” the guy said. There was a long silence, and then he spoke again. “I think this is as good a place for us to start as any, don’t you?”
“Don’t be greedy,” a woman said. “Let the rest of us get ahead, at least, before they all start running out of the maze.”
“You can’t just run out of a maze,” the man replied. “That’s the whole point of coming to one.”
“Still, at least give me a chance,” she whined. “I don’t want to have to chase them.”
Someone roared, as if whoever was staffing the point up ahead was trying to get them to move on. The wolves ignored her.
“I like when they run,” another man said. “That’s half the fun. It’s not like you get enough exercise anyway, Bri.”
A few of the wolves barked with laughter, and I took the chance to inch forward without being heard. I caught a hint of movement around the next corner through the corn stalks and stopped to peer through the gaps.
There were at least five of them, plus Phoenix in zombie makeup and tattered clothes. She was one of the youngest of the teen Daggers staffing the maze tonight, and my heart clenched at the sight of her.
I’d fought against allowing the younger girls to participate, but they had argued for their right to be involved, and I had ultimately been overruled, by both them and Grandma, who insisted that they were our best chance at tempting the Burnsides to attack.
I knew the wolves couldn’t touch Phoenix. The charmed bracelet firmly fastened around her wrist would prevent them from being able to make any kind of contact with her body. The charms had been difficult and time-consuming to create, so we’d only given them to the youngest girls. I couldn’t help wishing every Dagger and Wildwood in this maze had the same kind of protection.
She stepped backwards, away from the wolves, and roared again. The sound was timid this time.
“Fine, you guys go ahead,” the first man said. He leaned in toward Phoenix, and she shrank back into the rustling stalks. “I’m going to stay and get better acquainted.”
He grabbed at the fabric of her zombie costume and yanked her toward him. He couldn’t touch her, but he could do anything he wanted to her clothing. My stomach twisted.
The other werewolves moved forward, deeper into the maze. Silently, attention still fixed on what I could see of Phoenix through the corn stalks, I reached into my jacket. My fingers closed around one of the tiny barbs that filled my pockets.
I waved at the others to stay where they were and crept around the corner. The man was leaning in toward Phoenix, talking to her in a soft voice, and the terror on her face was enough that I wished I’d held my ground and insisted she and the others stay home.
But his face proved her and the other girls right: They were our best possible lure for monsters like this.
I took a cautious step forward, but it wasn’t cautious enough. The sound of my footstep was enough to alert him.
“I told you guys to—” he said, and then his eyes narrowed as he saw me. An instant later, he stood straighter and smiled. “Sorry, I thought you were one of my group.” He gestured, waving me through.
He thought I was just another visitor to the corn maze.
Well, I could use that to my advantage.
I smiled brightly at him and continued walking, as if to go past them both. At the last possible moment, I swung around and buried my minuscule weapon in his neck. The hilt of the tiny potion-laced dagger was the only thing preventing the needle from getting lost in his skin.
The man’s eyes widened before he crumpled to the ground.
I held out my arms, and Phoenix rushed into them. I squeezed her tightly and rocked her back and forth.
“You did good,” I whispered into her ear.
Her breathing was quick and ragged, and it hurt my heart to not be able to stay and comfort her. I pulled back and brushed her hair away from her makeup-covered face. “I’m so proud of you. There’s a group of people around that corner with me, but there’s no one else behind us as far as I know. You run back to the entrance and wait there until the spell breaks, okay?”
She swallowed and looked up at me, resolve all over her features. She nodded briskly, once, and then I gave her a gentle push and sent her running back down the path.
Something inside me hardened as I watched her disappear between the corn stalks. The terror on her face had to be a twin to the terror of every other one of the wolves’ victims, and that particular fear wasn’t something I would ever allow again. If I hadn’t had enough of a reason to fight when I’d walked into this maze, I did now.
I gestured sharply at the rest of my group to keep walking. We were silent but fast. This time, I didn’t creep or try to choke back my own breathing.
I was coming for the wolves, and it didn't matter if they knew.
They didn’t have any escape.
32
The first sound was a scream—not the kind the teenage Daggers and Wildwoods had been making in an attempt to scare visitors, but a real one that stood my hair on end. It was followed by crashing and pounding footsteps far too heavy to belong to a human. We pressed our backs to the corn stalks and waited, and it wasn’t long before the noises fell to silence. Ragged breathing broke the quiet, followed by footsteps running away. It wasn’t until we’d passed two turns that I saw the limp body lying on the path in front of us.
“Rose,” I breathed.
I dropped to my knees and felt frantically for a pulse. It was there, but so was a sickening amount of blood pouring from a gash down her arm and a cut on her head. The blood glinted in the light from a jack-o’-lantern as it pooled around her and stained the ground.
One of the Wildwoods crouched next to me. He was already pulling gauze from a small pouch on his back. Alejandro was young and had only been with the Wildwoods for a few years, but Brendan told me he showed a lot of promise and was planning to start school next year to become a nurse.
“Go,” he said. “I’ve got her.”
I squeezed his shoulder in thanks and led my group forward.
An enchanted skeleton jumped out at us as we passed, and its bones clinked together as it receded back into the gaps between the stalks. I froze, hoping the sound hadn’t alerted the Burnsides to our presence, but no one was paying attention to us. There was crashing up ahead, and shouting, and it sounded like more than two people were involved.
“Let’s go,” I called, and we took off running toward the sounds of the battle.
Alec and the other Wildwoods fell back. An instant later, they sprang ahead, this time in their intimidating wolf forms. I shouted at one of the witches behind me, and she pulled a can of spray paint out of her satchel. She tossed the can to me, and I sprayed streaks of luminescent silver on whatever fur was closest. It was a signal to the other witches, whose sense of smell couldn’t tell one wolf from another: Don’t attack.
Their paws thundered ahead, and one wolf deep in the maze gave a bloodcurdling howl. Other voices rose with it, but the warning was too late. The Burnside pack was trapped.
I ran into a clearing in the maze, then immediately skidded to the side to avoid being hit by a giant wolf body. Alec’s huge eye met mine just before he swung his neck around and bit at the throat of a wolf with shaggy black fur.
I tried to bury one of the tiny daggers into the wolf’s side, but its fur was too thick. Alec snarled at me. It took everything I had to leave him, but there were other Burnsides to fight and other allies to protect. I ran into the next darkened corridor.
Our organized little group had dissolved into
chaos. The wolves were fighting their own battles, and now my sisters ran ahead of me, pulling out their weapons and diverging into different paths whenever the maze offered a choice. In moments, I was alone.
Almost.
A Burnside wolf on the path ahead turned and snarled at me. I was too high on adrenaline to feel fear, although my heart thudded in a way I couldn’t pin down to my running.
I rushed at him, dagger outstretched in one hand and poisoned needle in the other, each ready for the slightest opening. Amid a blur of fur and teeth, I saw it—the wet, glistening skin of the wolf’s nostrils.
I let him get close enough to take a bite out of me, then punched at his nose with the point of the needle. He let out a yelp, then snuffled and fell to the ground, giant paws twitching.
He’d torn a gash through Alec’s hoodie, and blood seeped through the fabric of my arm. I shoved my sleeve up; the injury looked worse than it was, so I pushed the fabric into the wound and pressed on ahead. I passed several downed wolf bodies and found Cerise huddled in a corner making a bandage for herself out of corn husks. She shook her head at me when I stopped to help.
“Get to the center,” she ordered. “Get Brick.”
I ran.
33
Sienna was standing in the large clearing at the middle of the maze, lit by the jack-o’-lanterns floating overhead and flanked by two enormous werewolves that were doing their best to protect her. They snarled and snapped their jaws at my sisters, but one of them was taken down quickly by an arrow shot from somewhere deep in the corn. Sienna screamed as the wolf went down, but it was a scream of anger, not grief.
That wolf hadn’t been Brick.
I found him a moment later, on the other side of the clearing and in his lupine form. It was impossible to mistake him for anyone else now that he was in in the light. He was stunning as a wolf, with a silver pelt and sharp black marks around his eyes that framed them like eyeliner.
