Page 250 of May: Bloom & Bane

He’s too smart, Sage pants. Or the curse is helping him.

I look back in the direction where my cage hung, but there’s nothing but an unfamiliar wall of briars. The clearing is gone. My trap is gone.

“We have to find our way back,” I growl, a cold sweat breaking out across my neck. “I can’t make another one right now—he’s watching us. We need that spot.”

But nothing stays where we leave it, Ash. Sage says. And we can’t out-navigate a forest that’s actively trying to blind us.

For the next several hours, it becomes a brutal game of cat and mouse. We track down our residual shadow magic through the shifting maze while the morning sun climbs higher, burning through the precious hours we have left. Every time we catch a trace of the cage’s dark energy, he appears, subtly warping the path, throwing us off the scent again.

By the time the sun clears the treetops, I have stopped trying to reach her.

It is the hardest thing I have ever made my body do—to feel that thread singing in my sternum, reeling me north, and to deliberately turn my back on it. Everything in me howls every second not spent running to her is a second wasted, but Sage figured it out between one of our many failed attempts.

It’s not him that moves the forest, he’d said. It’s us. Every time you lock onto her, the maze answers. The curse is reading our intent. That’s what it’s tracking—not our feet. Our desire.

Our desire–the one thing I cannot switch off—and the one thing I must pretend not to feel if this is going to work.

We find our way back to the clearing. And high in the canopy, hidden perfectly in the deep frost-tipped needles, the black bars of my shadow trap are waiting exactly where I left them.

See our problem? Sage says. How do we mask our intent from the curse, but show it enough that the beast comes after us?

I pause, looking down at my hands. “If I turn it on completely, the forest will just rip this clearing away before he even gets here.”

Right, Sage agrees. The curse needs time to map our location to bend the path. If you broadcast a full run, we lose the cage.

“So we don’t broadcast a run,” I murmur, stepping directly into the center of the clearing, right beneath the hidden trap. “We give him just a flicker.”

Like a false positive, Sage catches on, a spark of excitement zinging through our bond. A momentary lapse in your concentration. If you let just a drop of our desire slip through—just enough to signal that you’re thinking about breaking north—he’ll materialize to check on us. But the curse won’t have enough time to warp the path because we’ll already have him.

“Exactly. A split second is all it takes for him to step into the trap.” I take a deep breath, planting my feet firmly on the frozen ground. “Get ready, Sage. I’m giving the bond a crack to slip through.”

I close my eyes and reach for the shadows smothering the thread inside my chest. Carefully, I lift a single wisp, freeing just enough of our bond to let it breathe.

For the briefest heartbeat, the bond inhales.

Eden.

Her scent. Her warmth. The impossible certainty that she’s out there waiting for us.

“Come find me,” I whisper. “So I can find her.”

I force the wisp back into place before the curse can answer.

The forest stays silent. A massive silhouette pieces itself together behind the winter mist. Each step he takes sends tremors across the ground.

He takes one final step. Right beneath the waiting canopy.

Now! Sage screams in my mind.

I snap my fingers, and the overhead canopy unleashes. The hidden cage slams down like a portcullis, bars of shadow spearing into the ground one after another until the giant stands imprisoned inside a solid prism of dark energy.

Inside the cage, the beast lowers his head, letting out a long huff. Tension bleeds out of his shoulders, and his frame eases for the first time since we saw him.

Ash… Sage whispers. He’s not even trying to get out. He looks… relieved.

I step closer, my gaze locking on the giant’s green eyes through the bars of the cage. There is no fury in his stare. Only an exhaustion that mirrors my own.

“You wanted us to stop you. Didn’t you?”