The sun had not risen in three days, and Maddie O'Day was running out of candles. She stood at her workbench in the cottage, sun pendant knocking against her collarbone, and stared at the empty setting she meant to fill. The pendant was the first thing that ever made her believe magic was real. Now she needed to build something stronger. An amulet that could break the curse eating the sky over Everwood, before the dark crept past the treeline and swallowed her street too. Tank sat by her boots, jowls resting on her ankle. She had only recently learned to hear him speak, and the newness of it still made her flinch. "You're guessing," he said. "I'm choosing." She spread four things across the wood: a shard of quartz, a dried marigold, a copper coin she'd carried since childhood, and a lock of her own hair. "One of these goes in the setting. The rest are wrong." "And if you pick wrong?" "Then the night keeps spreading and I've burned my one window." She'd read every book she owned twice. None of them agreed. Power came from rare stones. Power came from living things. Power came from what you loved. The books were writing about different worlds. She pulled out her notebook. For months she'd tracked timing: which spells worked, which failed, what she'd been wearing, what she'd been feeling. She flipped back through the pages under the candle. A pattern surfaced she had missed before. Every spell that held had one thing in common. She had been touching the pendant when she cast it. Not the stone. Not the herb. Her. "The amulet isn't the power," she said. "It's the anchor. The witch is the power." Tank huffed. "Took you long enough." She cut a strand of her hair with the kitchen shears and coiled it into the setting. She pressed her thumb until it bled and let one drop fall on top. She closed the clasp and held the finished amulet up to the window. The flowers in the window boxes were gray now, colorless in the endless dark. The amulet caught the candlelight and threw a warm ring across the wall. Her chest went hot. The pendant at her throat went hot too, in answer. Two suns, talking. Then the ring on the wall flickered and shrank. Maddie lowered her hand. The amulet was warm, and it was working, but it was small. A candle where she needed a bonfire. It could light a room. It could not break a sky. Tank stood up. His nails clicked on the boards. "Something's outside." She heard it then — a slow drag along the porch, testing the wood. The dark had noticed her. She had made a light, and the light had called something to the door. Maddie closed her hand around the new amulet and blew out the candle.

Maddie waited by the door until the dragging stopped. The porch went quiet. Tank stood between her boots and the threshold, chest low, ears back. She held the new amulet in her fist and felt it pulse once, then dim. A candle where she needed a bonfire. If she opened the door now, the dark would eat her light in a breath. "We can't stay," she whispered. "The amulet needs a real sun to feed on. There isn't one in the sky anymore." "Then find one on the ground," Tank said. She thought of her notebook. Every working spell traced back to her, and her pendant, and one other thing she had not written down until now: the woods behind the cottage still had color. She had seen it two mornings ago through the kitchen window. A patch of green that refused to gray. Something in the trees was still holding light. She packed fast. Salt in a jar. Notebook. Shears. She tied the weak amulet to her wrist so both hands were free. She cracked the back door, checked the yard, and slipped out with Tank pressed to her leg. The cottage stood behind her in the dark, its window boxes colorless, its yellow door the only warm thing left on the block. The green pulled her deeper than she wanted to go. Tank growled low the whole way. Then he stopped. A doe stood in a small clearing, lit from inside. Vines wound up her legs and along her ribs, leaves still bright as summer. She should not have been visible in this dark, but she was, because she was making her own daylight. Maddie's pendant went hot against her throat. "Don't move," Tank said. "That one's older than the curse." Maddie knelt. She did not reach. She unclasped her sun pendant, laid it in the moss, and set the weak amulet beside it. Then she pressed her bleeding thumb — reopened with the shears — to the ground between them. "I'm not taking," she said. "I'm asking." The doe walked forward. Leaves brushed Maddie's knee. The doe lowered her head until one antler tip touched the amulet on the moss. Light climbed the vines. It ran down the antler into the amulet and did not stop. The metal grew hot enough to sting. The weak ring on Maddie's wrist flared, held, and stayed held. Her pendant answered, steady now, a third sun in the chain. Three lights, joined. The doe lifted her head and stepped back into the trees. The green went with her. Maddie stood. The amulet on her wrist burned bright and even. It would break a sky. Tank's growl came back, closer this time. Behind them, in the direction of the cottage, something large moved through the brush. The light had called it. It had followed her in.

The doe was gone. The green was gone with her. Only the amulet on Maddie's wrist still burned, steady and bright, and whatever the doe had woken was crashing toward it through the brush. Maddie grabbed her pendant from the moss, clipped it back at her throat, and ran the other way with Tank at her heel. She ran until her lungs burned. The amulet lit the trees in a hard white circle around her. That was the problem. She was a lantern in a black wood. Every step told the thing behind her exactly where to bite. "Cover it," Tank said. "Cover it now." She skidded, dropped to her knees, and clamped her palm over the amulet. Light leaked between her fingers. It would not dim. Whatever the doe gave her, it was not hers to turn off. Behind her, brush cracked. Something huge dragged its weight through the trees the way it had dragged along her porch two nights ago. She pulled the salt jar from her bag and poured a ring around her boots. Tank pressed against her knee. The dragging stopped just past the light. She could not see it. She could hear it breathing, wet and slow, and she could smell the cottage on it — her own kitchen, her own doorframe, coming at her out of the dark. Then the wood in front of her went cold. A shape stepped between her and the sound. It was a bear, taller than she was at the shoulder, mint green and half-transparent, its edges smoking into pale ribbons. Blue eyes, no pupils. It did not look at her. It looked past her, at the thing in the brush, and it planted its feet. The breathing behind the light hitched. Backed up. The brush cracked again, moving away this time, fast, until she could not hear it at all. The bear turned its head. Its eyes found the amulet on her wrist. Found the pendant at her throat. It held her there a long moment, the way a teacher waits for a student to understand the question. Then it lowered its nose to the salt ring, breathed once across the line without breaking it, and walked off into the trees. The cold went with it. Maddie sat down in the moss. Her hands shook. Tank climbed into her lap without asking. "That wasn't the doe's," she said. "No," Tank said. "That one came for you." She looked at the amulet. It was still too bright to hide. The thing from her cottage would find the light again the second the bear was far enough away. She could not go home. The cottage was already lost. She stood up. The woods were bigger than she knew, and something in them had just chosen to stand between her and the dark. She needed to find it again before the other thing came back.