Page 39 of Spookily Yours

“Of course,” I chuckled. “Anything you want, Wil.” Wrapping an arm around her waist, I pulled her in tighter to me, inhaling the smell of her sweetness. I couldn’t get enough of it.

“Oh!” she squealed, pulling away from me. “I found them!” She rushed farther down the row, where two pumpkins were sitting side by side. They were almost equal in color and shape, despite one being slightly smaller than the other. “What do you think?” She looked up at me, and I nodded.

“Perfect.” But I wasn’t talking about the pumpkins.

Hefting them into my arms, I took them over to the weigh station so Willow could pay for them before depositing them in the car.

On our way back, Willow stopped at a few food booths, continuing to feed me different sweets. I’d lost how many forms of pumpkin I’d tried. Fudge, bread, muffins, scones…

“How are you still eating?” I asked her, watching her plop another bite of pumpkin spice cake in her mouth.

She stopped chewing to stare at me. “I have a bottomless stomach for sweets.” Willow’s voice was so matter-of-fact. “Obviously.”

I wiped a smudge of frosting from the corner of her lip before she handed me a small bag of candy.

“What is this?”

Picking one out, I held up the strange multicolored candy—yellow, orange, and white in a triangle shape.

She giggled. “It’s candy corn. Try it. It’s one of my favorites.”Corn?I made a skeptical face before popping it into my mouth.

Sweet.I made a face. It tasted like frosting and sugar, all rolled into one.

“What?” She laughed. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s too sweet. Are you sure you aren’t just eating pure sugar?”

Willow stuck her tongue out at me, grabbing a few pieces from my bag. “More for me, thank you.”

I didn’t mind at all as she finished it, entranced by watching her happily munch on the candy.

“Should we go through the maze now?” She asked, looking towards the stacks of straw bales stacked on top of each other.

We promptly deposited our food wrappers in the trash before she dragged me over to it.

The witch working the front handed us a map of the maze, so we could apparently find our way out of it. I stared at the diagram, showing the view from above. They’d made the damn thing the shape of a jack-o’-lantern, complete with the eyes and mouth in the middle.

“One year, they made it so hard that old Granny Crowley couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. They had to send in a search party,” she giggled.

“It’s a pumpkin,” I stated plainly.

“Last year it was a ghost.” She pretended to look contemplative. “Should I see if next year they’ll make it a cat?”

I rolled my eyes, pulling her into the opening of the maze. “Let’s do this.”

But when I turned around, she couldn’t see the ghost of a smile that spread over my lips.

How much straw could be in one fucking place? Hell. This place wasactualhell. We’d been going through it for fifteen minutes already, but it felt like hours. The tall walls of straw made me feel trapped, like I couldn’t get out—even though I knew it would only take a moment, one use of my power to get out.

Letting my shadows curl through my fingers, I breathed out, calming down slightly.

I turned around to ask my witch a question, but she wasn’t behind me.

“Willow?” I spun around. Where’d she go? “Willow!” I shouted, backtracking slightly, checking the other branches of the path before going back to where we hadn’t walked yet.

“Fuck,” I cursed, rubbing my forehead.

How had I managed to lose her?

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