Page 89 of Haunt Me, Maybe

“No.”

You are dead.

“Basically.”

Another long pause. Dust drifted in slow spirals at my feet, catching the moonlight like tiny stars. I knew what the mill wanted. I knew what it starved for, far longer than any human lifetime. Company. Not the fleeting kind that came with workers and teenagers playing in its shadow. The permanent kind. The kind that stayed.

I would give it anything. Promise anything if it helped keep Aven safe.

“One way or another,” I promised. “Your loneliness will end.”

Even if you must trade yourself?

I swear I grew a new heart just for it to fracture. But to save Aven…

“Fine.”

A low hum ran through the beams. Not approval, exactly. More like acceptance. Foundation to beam, beam to nail, nail to splinter. The mill would help. When I stepped back into the night, I felt relief. The ribbon at my wrist pulsed once—soft, warm, and alive with her. I wasn’t letting Gideon touch what was mine.

Not my girl.

Not my town.

Not the fragile, impossible future I’d finally admitted I wanted. Let him come. He had no idea what was waiting for him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Aven

We started before the sun fully cleared the rooftops. I called the café and told Briony I was coming down with something, which wasn’t entirely a lie. My magic had been thrumming under my skin since the warped omens tore through the clock tower. I felt feverish and restless.

Like my body hadn’t quite caught up to the fact that I’d almost lost my virginity to a literal ghost on a creaky cot above the town square, only for death to crash the party dressed as a murder of demonic crows. Wes hadn’t brought it up since. Nothing said romantic milestone like getting blue-balled by apocalyptic birds.

The guilt sat like a stone in my stomach. We definitely needed to have a conversation about that. But tomorrow was the festival. And today we were baiting a warlock.

Wes walked beside me toward the edge of town, hands in his pockets, his posture deceptively loose. Only, I could see the tension in him now—the way his gaze scanned the rooftops, tree lines, and shadows that lingered too long.

A few blocks from the inn, the woods greeted me with caution. The trees here weren’t sentient like the maze, but they remembered things. They watched me arrive in Amber Grove, thin and brittle and braced for impact.

I wasn’t that girl anymore.

Once we were a comfortable distance inside, I closed my eyes and let the illusion gather. The decoy peeled away from me like breath on cold glass. A shimmer, a silhouette, and then a near-perfect copy stood right in front of me. Same jacket. Same bun. Same heartbeat woven into the magic. It felt weird every time. Like splitting a nerve.

Send her deep, Fenn had said. Make him work for it.

I nodded to my other self and off she ran. Branches snapped and leaves scattered as the decoy tore into the wilderness, magic pulsing once before fading. The separation hit me hard, but we didn’t wait to see if the sky would blacken with wings.

We ran back to the attic, slipped behind the wards, and waited. No warped crows clawed at the windows. No rot filled the air. I was pretty sure my first intentional decoy was a success. Until an hour later, when Fenn’s voice cut through the quiet.

It’s gone.

My head snapped up. “Gone?”

The pulse weakened at forty-seven minutes. Dissipated entirely at sixty-two.

That was nowhere near long enough. If Gideon felt it, he’d consider it nothing but background noise, not a witch moving through her day.

“You said it needed to last at least three hours to feel organic,” Wes said, jaw tight.