I found out, randomly one day while out walking on the grounds, that the Garden Club witches weren’t the only ones who could commune with nature. It turned out I had a special thing for trees. I owed this discovery to Cordelia, an old black walnut that had been like a friend to me as a child. Noticing a dead twig hanging from one of her branches, I willed it to fall. It did.
From that day on, I started to cultivate the talent. It wasn’t easy. Plants don’t have a lot of will or vitality of their own, which makes it easy to impose your own will on them, but difficult to get them to actually do much. My witch friends—Wendy, her Granny, Lydia—were politely befuddled that I would spend the time, and I couldn’t really blame them. The point of being able to shake a few leaves wasn’t immediately obvious, even to me.
But considering that the greatest threat to the safety of everything and everyone I loved was the possibility of some sort of sentient, evil forest claiming us all as slaves, I figured being a tree-whisperer couldn’t hurt, at least as a backup plan for a rainy day.
And now my persistence was about to pay off.
I focused on the river birch beyond Talon’s right shoulder, even as I spoke to him. “Fine. I’ll tell you how to get to the seed, but on two conditions.”
“Verity!” Cooper turned to me, shaking his head. But I could tell by his wide eyes and tinny voice that he knew I was up to something. His bad acting was, frankly, adorable, but I hoped Talon didn’t know him well enough to realize he was playing along.
“No!” I yelled at him. “Don’t you dare tell me that stupid seed is worth dying for. I am sick of living like this. For all I care, the Wicks can grow their sapwood forest and live happily ever after, as long as they leave us to do the same.”
I turned back to Talon. “Which brings me to my conditions. I’m the only one who can help you, you know. I worked the spell. Even Cooper doesn’t understand it, not completely.”
Talon smiled his friendly, earnest smile again. He was like a crossing guard—authoritative, but harmless. Except for the gun, of course. He still had it pointed at my head, his finger on the trigger, his eyes alert. “I imagine there are a lot of things Cooper doesn’t understand.”
“You’ve got that right,” I grumbled.
“Verity—”
“Stop!” I held up a hand, as if to shut Cooper up, but I kept it raised there. “My terms are these,” I said to Talon. “One, both Cooper and I walk away. Two, the Wicks find someplace else for your forest, and never trouble Bristol again. Any of you.”
“Any of us,” Talon repeated. A muscle in his jaw twitched, the only sign in his otherwise placid face that he was angry. “There are fewer of us to trouble you than there once were. Surely you must realize there needs to be a reckoning for that.”
“A reckoning?” I considered this. “How about we call it a price? A complete set of sapwood seeds seems fair, don’t you think?”
“Careful,” said Talon. “You’re talking about my family’s lives. They weren’t for sale.”
“Your family’s lives are exactly what you need to be thinking about,” I countered. “The survival of your clan depends on you growing a sapwood forest.” For one brief moment, I felt a stab of compassion for that hard truth. A stab of compassion I quickly suppressed. They were cold-blooded, murderous vampires, and it was either the Wicks or the rest of the world.
Talon looked slightly discomfited. Maybe he didn’t realize that I knew his clan was dying out, starved for more vitality than they could get in my world. Or maybe he just didn’t like being reminded of it. “Even if I wanted to make such a deal,” he said, “you haven’t got a complete set of seeds to offer.”
“No?” I smiled. “As it happens, I’m a bit of a seer. And Cooper, bless his heart, is handier in bed than he is with his computer. He doesn’t protect it as well as he thinks he does.”
Cooper cleared his throat, no doubt feeling that I was overdoing it. But it didn’t really matter whether Talon believed me or not, as long as he kept listening.
“Not only can I give you the West,” I went on. “I can tell you who carries the North and the East. And how to get around their defenses.”
It wasn’t easy, concentrating on that tree behind Talon and talking to him at the same time. Plus the river birch was young, and a stranger to me. I wasn’t at home; it wasn’t one of mine.
But finally, I felt it bending—literally—to my will, just as Talon opened his mouth to respond to my offer. I waved my still-raised hand in its direction to help it along, pushing my will out toward it. It responded, and one of its branches, weakened by weather, fell to the ground.
It sure would have been nice if it had hit Talon. But he wasn’t standing close enough. Still, the racket it made served its purpose. Talon turned, startled, toward the sound, and that gave Cooper his chance.
Cooper closed the distance between them in seconds, grabbing Talon’s gun by the barrel. I knew what he was about to do. He’d tried to explain the trick to me when he taught me to shoot the summer before, although to tell the truth, I didn’t retain much of it. The important thing was that the round would go off, but the gun would be jammed after that—this bullet would be the only one we needed to avoid.
Sadly, the direction I chose to try to avoid it in turned out to be the exact wrong one. Talon pivoted just as I ran. At the same time, Cooper jerked the gun upward and sideways, doing something with his other hand. Somehow, I managed to get myself into the proverbial line of fire.
I howled as pain—and, I supposed, a bullet—ripped through my back, and I fell. Not since I’d torn off a piece of my soul had I felt agony like that. For a few seconds, I was focused mainly on trying to get some air, and secondarily on not throwing up into the patch of ferns I found myself in.
At least it wasn’t the poison ivy.
The thought had an edge of hysteria. My breaths made a whistling, wheezing kind of noise that didn’t sound promising.
Do I attribute that to a wounded lung, or just panic?
It was hard to say. I’d never been shot before.
In the meanwhile, Talon swung his now-mostly-useless gun like a club, but he was no match for Cooper at hand-to-hand combat. Even when Talon pulled a knife, Cooper easily turned it on his enemy, and it was Talon who ended up with a gaping, gory-looking wound in his side.
Cooper punched and kicked with a speed that was hard to follow, pummeling Talon until I was sure the latter would go limp and die.
Unfortunately, Talon had one more trick left in him. Whatever he had fed on couldn’t have been very powerful, because he didn’t work nearly as much magic as his sister Kestrel had managed after she fed off me. But he still had enough vitality left to turn the tide of battle in his favor, at least for long enough to get away.
Crouched down by then, arms thrown over his head to ward off Cooper’s blows, Talon let out a strange call. Within seconds a small army—well, a murder, I supposed—of crows came at Cooper, seemingly out of nowhere. They pecked and clawed, flocking around him, blocking his view, getting tangled in his limbs.
I tried to get to my feet to help, but couldn’t.
Talon was not quite so weak. He straightened up, then clutching at his bloody side, ran crookedly away.
Cooper managed to beat off the crows, batting one of them straight into my river birch. The crow cawed its outrage as it caromed off the trunk and fell to the ground. For a moment, my vision seemed to narrow until all I could see was a pinpoint of glossy black feathers.
I shook my head in an effort to clear it, then immediately regretted it, as another wave of nausea hit me. I willed myself not to pass out, and tried again to get up as my eyes found Cooper, his shirt torn and bloody, a great gash across one cheek already closing. He started to run after Talon.
But he stopped and wheeled around when he heard me cry out, only then realizing that I’d been shot.
My last effort to move was one time too many. Dark spots filled my eyes.
Verity came to no harm
on the road to Boston.
So much for that.
I faded away.
I woke up on a thin mattress, in a creaky bed, in a small dingy room I didn’t recognize. There was a humming sound; I turned my head to blearily regard a standing fan, blowing slightly cooler air than that around me into my sweaty face.
“Cooper?”
My voice sounded gravelly and weak, but he heard me. He came into the room so quickly, I wondered if he’d been waiting outside the door.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Shh.” He touched my forehead, then reached for a cloudy glass of water on the bedside table and handed it to me. “Drink.”
I sat up just enough to take a sip. The pain in my upper back was punishing, but I kept my face as stoic as I could manage .
“We’re in Maryland,” Cooper said. “In the apartment of a sort of doctor I know.”
“A sort of doctor?”
“One who takes cash and doesn’t ask questions. The cash was yours, by the way. I used your ATM card.”
“You know my PIN?”
“You’re not that hard to figure out.”
I smiled at that. “So we’re in some sort of underground doctor’s smelly apartment.” I angled my head away from the fan, which was indeed blowing less-than-fragrant air into my face. “I thought places like this only existed in gangster movies.”
“It would seem not.”
My mind was sluggish as I tried to force my thoughts and memories to catch up to my present reality. I was hot, and my eyes hurt. I couldn’t stop thinking of crows, of inky black feathers and cold eyes.
“I passed out,” I said. “I remember that much.”
“You got lucky,” said Cooper. “The bullet went straight through. It’s going to be sore as hell for a while, but it missed everything really important.”
I blinked at him, still groggy, trying to figure out what was wrong. He didn’t seem relieved by this luck he mentioned. He didn’t look happy to see me. He looked…
“By a quarter of an inch,” he added.
…angry. Really angry.
“What… ?”
He seemed to understand the question, and answered with one of his own. “What were you thinking?”
Cooper’s aqua eyes were maybe the coldest I’d ever seen them. Even colder than the day I’d suggested giving up that piece of my soul for the sanctuary spell. Which meant this gunshot wound had scared him even more.
Just how close to death did he think I came? And was he right?
“I don’t know, I thought it was pretty good thinking,” I said, forcing myself to stay calm. His anger was irrational, and he’d see that soon enough. There was no need for both of us to get mad in the meanwhile. “The thing with the tree, I mean.”
“It was,” he agreed. “But after that, why didn’t you move out of the way? We’ve talked about this. You leave the physical fighting to me.”
“I tried to get out of the way. I just misjudged the direction. You can’t always predict a bullet, you know.”
“No, which is why you get down when you know one is coming.”
“Well, I was. Or I would have. I just—”
“Why do you think we did so many drills last summer?”
I shrugged, the movement provoking another burst of pain. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, but Cooper saw it anyway.
“I told you,” he said. “Sore as hell, remember? Try to stay still.”
“Drills aren’t the same as real life,” I said. “I don’t have as much experience as you do in situations like that. Not everyone can think fast.”
“Yeah well, you need to learn to think faster.”
“Your bedside manner sucks.”
“Next time just get out of the way, okay?”
Without another word, he left the room, leaving me feeling incompetent and useless. I had to allow that get down during gunfire was a pretty fundamental rule. Still, my bit of tree magic had practically saved the day. Why didn’t that count for anything? My resolve not to get angry failed, and I sat fuming until Cooper came back fifteen minutes later, carrying a chipped mug.
“Dr. Claus says you should drink this,” he said.
“Dr. Claus? Really?”
He smiled a little. “No, not really, but it’s not like he’ll tell anyone his real name anyway. And wait until you meet him.” He put an arm around me and tipped the mug to my lips. The contents proved to be tepid, salty broth.
“I’m sorry,” Cooper whispered, and kissed the top of my head, then my temple as I drank. “My bedside manner really does suck. It’s just…”
“You were scared,” I supplied.
“You should have seen yourself.”
“Feeling it was bad enough.”
“I couldn’t stand the idea of… if you’d been…” Cooper swallowed hard and turned to put the mug down, so I couldn’t see his face. “You know. We’ve been together a while now. You’ve never said…”
I didn’t ask what he meant as he trailed off again. “You’ve never said it, either.”
“Yeah. Well. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
After that, the room didn’t seem to smell quite as bad, and my back didn’t seem to hurt quite as much. And Cooper Blackwood didn’t seem like quite such a jerk.
I met Dr. Claus half an hour later, when he came in to check me over. I’m sure I need not describe the white beard, the rosy cheeks, the big belly. He was every bit as jolly as the name implied, too.
“I have some herbs for you,” he said. “Best steeped into tea, but we can do more broth instead if you’d like. Or,” he added, with what I swear was an actual twinkle in his eye, “just put them in some whiskey.”
“I can manage tea,” I said. “Herbs, huh?”
He laughed, a deep rumbling sound. “I’ve got some magical knowledge as well as medical, of course. What do you expect of a guy who looks like me?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Cooper, who stood in the doorway watching us. “Or who serves clients like him?”
While I drank the tea, Dr. Claus took my temperature and blood pressure, listened to my heart and lungs, and rebandaged both my entry and exit wounds. He told jokes all the while, most of them unexpectedly lewd, given the rest of his persona.
His presence gave the whole squalid place an entirely different atmosphere, and I began to feel like I was on a grand adventure, instead of recovering from a gunshot wound in a bed that might well give me an infection just from the questionable sheets.
When he was finished he said, “Well, the physical holes will heal cleanly enough. I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for your other malady.”
My stomach lurched, but I pretended, even to myself, to be confused. “What other malady? There’s nothing else wrong with me.”
Dr. Claus glanced back at Cooper, then lowered his voice. “I told you, I have magical powers as well as medical. That’s a powerful combination. I can see perfectly well that your soul is suffering from some affliction. Some mark, or maybe even a tear. What happened to you? You haven’t been bartering with demons, I hope.”
“No!” I whispered. “Of course not!”
Cooper was frowning at our hushed tones, looking like he was itching to come closer. He didn’t, but if I wanted to keep it that way, I needed to end this conversation.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said to Dr. Claus. “And I don’t need help with anything but the bullet holes, thank you.”
It was obvious he knew I was lying; the whispering alone was ample evidence that I had something to hide. But he let it go. No doubt he was used to people keeping things from him.
For my part, I’d already begun to suspect that my black moods since I’d left Bristol might have something to do with leaving a piece of my soul behind. But even if this doctor could help, which I doubted, I wasn’t about to trust the secret of the sanctuary magic to a stranger.
Even if the stranger was Santa. The man actually produced a box of toys
from under the bed before he took his leave: puzzles, small hand-held video games, sketch books. To help keep me occupied, he said, since he wanted me to stay in bed as much as possible.
As Dr. Claus left the room he said to Cooper, “Don’t keep her long. She’ll need another nap soon.”
Cooper nodded, and coward that I was, I hoped that meant that he would go, too. But he came to sit at the foot of the bed. “What was that all about?”
“Nothing.” I picked up a small wooden puzzle box and began to fiddle with it, trying to work out how to open it. “Just doctor stuff, you know. Medical history and all that.”
I kept my gaze focused on the box, and let out an ostentatious yawn for good measure, to make sure he wouldn’t press the matter. He had been against me working soul magic from the start, and I knew it worried him still. Selfishly, I wasn’t feeling up to dealing with exasperation and I-told-you-so’s. I really did need another nap.
I doubted Cooper was any more fooled than Dr. Claus had been, but he just said, “I’ll let you rest, then. I need to get in touch with Arabella or Dalton to let them know what happened. And see if there’s any chatter about Talon. Maybe we got lucky and the fucker died.”
I glanced up then. “You think he was hurt that badly?”
Cooper shrugged. “Gut wounds are bad news. I’m hoping it was at least bad enough to keep him out of our business for a while.” He bent down to kiss me. “Sleep.”
I did sleep—a lot—and played with Dr. Claus’s toys, too, since he apparently had no books, and there was no television. But the time was short, even if it felt long; after another day and night, I was declared fit to travel again.
I gave Dr. Claus a parting hug, as well as a final payment of a few thousand dollars. It seemed discreet medical care didn’t come cheap. In return, he gave me the puzzle box I had finally, after many hours, figured out how to open.
“No one’s worked that one out before,” he said. “You’re a clever young woman, Verity.”
Not clever enough to duck when I know a bullet’s about to fly, or I’d never have had occasion to meet you.
Gathering Black (Devilborn Book 2) Page 3