Fox and Birch (The Rowan Harbor Cycle Book 3)

by Sam Burns

  Table of Contents

  Also by Sam Burns

  He’s Not a Diplomat

  Lessons from the Forest

  Just Us

  Man Comes to the Forest

  What Fear Makes

  Fletcher Carries On

  Cabin in the Woods

  A Beacon

  Afterword

  Excerpt from Hawk in the Rowan

  About the Author

  Fox and Birch

  Sam Burns

  Copyright © 2018 by Sam Burns.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Content Warning: this book is intended for adult audiences only, and contains violence, swearing, and graphic sex scenes.

  Cover art © 2018 by Madeline Farlow at clause-effect.com

  Editing by Madeline Farlow at clause-effect.com

  Also by Sam Burns

  The Rowan Harbor Cycle

  Blackbird in the Reeds

  Wolf and the Holly

  Hawk in the Rowan (May 2018)

  Stag and the Ash (Coming Soon)

  Adder and Willow (Coming Soon)

  Wilde Love

  Straight from the Heart

  Sins of the Father

  Strike Up the Band

  Saint and the Sinner

  A Very Wilde Christmas

  For more information, click or visit:

  Burnswrites.com

  For my husband, the first person I ever trusted who didn’t let me down.

  Contents

  Also by Sam Burns

  1. He’s Not a Diplomat

  2. Lessons from the Forest

  3. Just Us

  4. Man Comes to the Forest

  5. What Fear Makes

  6. Fletcher Carries On

  7. Cabin in the Woods

  8. A Beacon

  Afterword

  Excerpt from Hawk in the Rowan

  About the Author

  1

  He’s Not a Diplomat

  The book was whispering again.

  It wasn’t exactly a book anymore, since its pages and binding had been consumed in the fire and the only remnant of it was in his head. But Fletcher didn’t have another word for it than “book,” so that was what he was calling it to himself. Out loud, he tried to talk about it as little as possible.

  He hadn’t learned Gothic, and he wasn’t going to, especially not in order to understand the things whispered in his brain by an evil, magic book. Tristan Hunter had assured him that the book hadn’t been evil, just the grimoire of a power-hungry witch who had died hundreds of years ago. Fletcher was hard pressed to see the difference.

  The pursuit of power rarely ended well. To see that, a person only had to look at what had happened with the book in the last twenty-five years. They didn’t know how many people Hector MacKenzie had killed in his desperation, but it was at least two, with another planned.

  And Fletcher had killed a man over it too, which was how he’d ended up in the position of being driven crazy by a dead witch whispering Gothic straight into his brain.

  “Shut up,” he mumbled to it, as though that ever had any effect. The damned thing just kept rambling, like it didn’t understand him any better than he understood it. It probably didn’t. When it whispered to him at the station, it was all he could do to refrain from banging his head against the nearest filing cabinet.

  He was sitting at his desk, trying to catch up with the massive backlog of paperwork he’d accumulated over the previous month. With his partner on medical leave for more than half of December, he’d fallen so far behind on everything he wasn’t sure it was possible to catch up. Every time he had a chance, the voice would start again, like a monologuing movie villain.

  He had only told Devon, Jesse, and Isla about the whispering, but even to them, he’d downplayed how bad it was. How sometimes it drowned out actual conversations he was trying to have. How sometimes it chanted in a way that sounded like magic to him, and he felt things in his body shifting unnaturally. He shuddered.

  Someone put a cup of coffee in front of him, on top of a report about a broken taillight, and he looked up to find his partner, Wade, watching him, concern on his face. Fletcher suspected that he knew about the whispering too, since he was Devon’s mate. Wade didn’t say anything about that, though, just looked at the paperwork.

  “Can I help?”

  Fletcher started to wave the offer away but had to stop himself and catch the cup of coffee before he sent it spilling all over the papers he’d managed to finish. He sighed. “It’s just the usual stuff.”

  “But you had to do double while I was gone,” Wade said, jaw tight. It was obvious he still felt guilty, like he’d failed because he hadn’t stopped the sociopath who had almost killed him. While Fletcher wanted to tell him that his guilt was unwarranted, he knew Wade would ignore him. He knew how he would feel if their situations were reversed, and he’d been the one to almost die trying to protect Isla.

  Fletcher pulled the coffee close to his face and sniffed it. From the diner, he guessed, which was far superior to the sludge they made at the station. It wasn’t that they were bad at making their own coffee, but he thought the sheriff had bought the station’s coffeemaker before Fletcher was born. He motioned to the chair next to his desk. “Look, if you want to help with some kitten-in-a-tree reports, I’m not gonna bitch, but don’t feel like you have to do it. It’s not like they’re hard, just . . . boring. Really, really boring.”

  “And time consuming,” Wade added, and without hesitation, he sat down in the chair facing Fletcher’s and picked up the report on top of the pile. “Sheriff Green is still trying to make me take it easy anyway.”

  “He’s human. He knows how fast you heal, but it’s still hard to really understand it. Especially with how bad it was for a while.”

  Wade shuddered. “Don’t remind me.” He scrubbed a hand over his half inch of recently shorn hair and muttered. “I feel ridiculous with this haircut, but so much of it fell out that I looked like an idiot before I cut it off.”

  Fletcher smirked at him. “Devon complaining?”

  “Are you kidding? He hasn’t said a word about it. He’s trying to avoid talking about the whole thing. I keep worrying they’re not telling me everything, like I’m still poisoned, but they don’t want to tell me I’m going to die.” Grabbing a black pen, Wade started to fill out the form. His handwriting was tiny and perfect, like it had come out of a printer, and he wrote in succinct sentences.

  Technically, he shouldn’t be filling it out, since he hadn’t been present at the incident, but all of the situations had been pretty routine. The only unexpected things that had happened in Rowan Harbor in the previous month were the ones involving Wade’s incident and what had come after, but there had been no police reports about that.

  Fletcher sighed. He’d killed a man, and they hadn’t filled out a police report on it. What would they say if they did, though? There was no body. White had been completely incinerated in some kind of magical sacrifice. Those records would have been accessible by outside law enforcement officials. They couldn’t have even a hint of magic in them.

  “You’re thinking pretty loud over there, partner,” Wade said without looking up from the form he was filling out.

  Again, Fletcher sighed. “I seem to be doing that a lot lately, don’t I?”

/>   “Understandable,” Wade told him as he set the report on the finished pile and moved on to the next.

  The voice in Fletcher’s head stopped talking and hissed. For a second, Fletcher thought it was because Wade had leaned toward them—him, dammit, not them—but that didn’t make sense. He’d done that before and not gotten such a reaction. Wade paused in filling out the form and took in a deep breath through his nose, mouth open as though he was scenting the air. Voices drifted to them from the front desk, the officer there sounding vaguely annoyed, though Fletcher couldn’t make out the words.

  In the absence of understanding, he watched Wade’s reaction for cues on what he should do. Not for the first time, he wished for werewolf hearing.

  Wade’s eyes narrowed, and he froze in place, which didn’t seem like a good sign. After another moment of listening in, he pushed the paper away and stood, muttering, “We’re on our way out for patrol.”

  Fletcher nodded, stood, and did a quick mental check of his belt. After three years on the job, it was almost, but not quite, second nature. Then he pushed in his desk chair and followed after Wade.

  There were three strangers in the front room, and when they approached, even Fletcher’s less sensitive nose picked up the familiar tang of silver in the air. No wonder it had put Wade on edge; he’d almost died of exposure to the stuff less than a month earlier. The fact that he’d willingly walked into a room where he could smell it made Fletcher feel inadequate.

  The three men stood spaced far apart, in stances that screamed of false calm. One of them had his jacket open, showing off a shoulder holster. No doubt he’d have the proper concealed carry permit if asked for it.

  “Everything okay, Jen?” Wade asked the officer on desk duty. She was the newest member of the local force, so she tended to get the duty no one else wanted. She was also the one who usually complained that they needed a new coffee maker, since she had to deal with it most often. Fletcher was more than willing to back her on it, but the sheriff tended to be a little slow to accept changes, even unimportant ones.

  She turned and looked at Wade, a pinched frown on her lips. “These guys are bounty hunters,” she told him, in a tone that said she thought they were at least as bad as whatever criminals they might be hunting.

  Wade quirked an eyebrow and looked over at the guys—who Fletcher didn’t believe for a second were bounty hunters. Hell, they had one guy standing lookout in the doorway, his back to them so that he could see anyone coming in. Wade was calm, though. The corner of his mouth turned up, and he looked every inch the arrogant small-town cop that he often played. He was scarily good at it and even fooled locals sometimes.

  “And what would ‘bounty hunters’ be doing in our tiny town? Has there been a prison break I don’t know about?” Wade’s tone said he thought the men were idiots for even making the drive to Rowan Harbor, and Fletcher had seen people break under that stare. He had a feeling these guys weren’t going to be that easy.

  The man who had been leaning across the front counter—the one whose gun was on display—looked Wade over and rolled his eyes. “This is just the kind of place people go to hide, kid. Middle of nowhere, no media attention, tiny police force who aren’t expecting trouble.”

  Wade’s smile went wolfish. “Only trouble I’ve seen in this town in a while is standing right in front of me. You looking for someone in particular, or just thought you’d show up, hang out, and wait for something to happen?”

  That seemed to get under the guy’s skin a little. “We’re looking for a dangerous criminal. A murderer. We only came here as a courtesy to the local police, and I suggest you steer clear of our work. Wouldn’t want you to have to deal with real trouble.”

  The guy with his back to them snorted loudly, and something in Fletcher’s stomach curled in sick anticipation. He stared at the back of the man’s head.

  Wade, meanwhile, was on a roll. “Any particular reason you think a murderer is hanging out in Rowan Harbor?”

  “There was a report of two people being attacked last month, and no arrest made,” the man said, his tone smug.

  “So you think a murderer turned up in the Harbor, tried to kill someone, and then what, stopped feeling murderous? We didn’t find the culprit because he left town. They found his abandoned car on the road halfway between here and Portland. You think he dropped it off and walked back?”

  The truth was that they had driven it there and abandoned it after scrubbing it for any kind of evidence. They hadn’t wanted it tracked back to Rowan Harbor, dammit.

  “But he was a blond guy? Short? Pale?” the other man, who had previously been silent, asked. He was younger than the man at the counter and looked concerned and earnest.

  “Yeah,” Wade agreed. “Came into the bar one evening, said his name was Sol White. We think he attacked one person that night, but no one saw anything, including the victim. Then a few days later, he attacked a guy on the pier. We impounded the car, but someone broke the lock on our lot and stole it. Car turned up a few days later, and nothing exciting has happened since. Your murderer has moved on, gentlemen.” Wade leaned an arm on the counter, standing between Fletcher and the men, and halfway between them and Jen, and smiled. “Then there’s the fact that I ran the name through our database, and we didn’t turn up any hits for crimes committed by a man fitting the name and description.”

  “He’s got a couple of aliases,” concerned guy said. It was strange, but if he hadn’t known what they were, Fletcher would have thought the guy was serious.

  Fletcher had seen their kind before. The tactics, the attitude, and the smell marked them as clearly as if they’d worn signs. They liked to call themselves “hunters” or some such crap, but Fletcher knew a killer when he met one. These men hunted and murdered supernatural creatures. Looking back at the man in the door, he knew without doubt that these men were killers. That smell of barely contained body odor, bad breath, silver, and cigarette smoke was so familiar that it almost brought tears to his eyes.

  The guy turned to look at him and flashed a smile. Recognition hit Fletcher head-on. For a second, he felt the panic of a fourteen-year-old child, the child he’d been when he’d first seen that smile, but there was no recognition there. The guy wasn’t taunting him; he was just being an asshole.

  He didn’t know that he had murdered Fletcher’s mother.

  Fletcher tried to keep his face blank. Don’t react, he commanded himself mentally.

  The voice in Gothic answered. Fletcher still didn’t understand it, but the tone sounded like a question.

  He didn’t know what the question had been. He suspected it was about why he was cold all over, why his eyes were stinging. Why he could almost feel the fire reaching out for his body. Hear his parents screaming. Until his mother stopped.

  That man burned my mother alive, Fletcher told the book. He didn’t know if it understood, but it went suddenly, blessedly silent. He and another man blocked us into the RV we lived in and set it on fire.

  Fletcher still rarely ate red meat and never went to barbecues. The smell of burning flesh made his stomach turn, almost as much as the scent of this man. This murderer, who probably thought he’d done the world a favor by murdering a thirty-three-year-old woman who’d spent her life fighting not physically, but in peaceful protests. She had been the kindest, gentlest woman he’d ever known.

  In all his life, only Devon Murphy had come close to the same level of caring for other people. Fletcher thought that was why he liked Devon so much. His soft-spoken manner and kindness even to people who were rude to him reminded Fletcher of his mother.

  Wade was still talking to the murderers, playing his role with practiced ease. He couldn’t force the men to leave. Being too adamant about wanting them gone would be suspicious and possibly attract others. It was a fine line to walk, and Fletcher was glad he wasn’t the one doing it. He’d have probably broken down in tears like a schoolboy.

  None of their words sunk into Fletcher; nothing got past t
he shell he was trying to build around himself. After a few more minutes, the men turned to go. The one in charge actually thanked Wade for something.

  The faker turned and looked at Fletcher as they left. He gave a tiny smile that almost seemed hopeful, or at least kind. Fletcher let his eyes go back to the man who had murdered his mother and didn’t stop watching until they disappeared into their oh-so-predictable, beat-up, black SUV and drove away.

  “Fletcher?” Wade asked, and his tone said he’d been trying to get Fletcher’s attention for a while.

  He opened his mouth to speak, to explain, or even just to say that he didn’t want to talk about it, but nothing came out. He tried again and didn’t recognize the words that he spoke.

  Gothic.

  Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The thing was taking advantage of his terror and grief to take over his brain. He turned and headed for the back door of the station, ripping at the buckle of his belt and the buttons on his shirt.

  “Fletcher?” Wade called after him, sounding almost scared. “Fletch, don’t leave. Let me call Devon. Or Jesse, or Isla. Whoever you want.”

  He couldn’t stop, though. He couldn’t be there, where his mother’s murderer had stood only moments before, with the book using his mouth to speak. By the time he got to the back door, he’d managed to half strip, and dumped the clothes in a pile on the closest chair, toeing his shoes off and flipping the switch in his brain to make the change.

  When Wade followed him into the back room, all he found was a messy pile of uniform and a scared fox staring up at the back door. Fletcher looked over at him, his fox brain nervous about being trapped in a room with a huge predator, even though his human consciousness knew that Wade would never hurt him. He whined and pawed at the door. With a sigh, Wade nodded.