Myra waves her hand in the air. “If they help you restore the city’s ambient magic, take as long as you like. In the meantime, watch your back, Fi. There aren’t as many dark magic users as there are light, but they make up for it by being brutal and vile.”
“Warning received. Thanks.”
“Oh, and thank your gran for thinking about my home tree. That was super thoughtful.”
“I’ll let her know you appreciated it. And you’ll have to tell me if you notice any difference.”
“Will do.”
“Sorry, Emmet.” I rush in from the back lane and beeline it into the trees of the grove. “We got waylaid by research rabbit holes at the shop. Where do you want me?”
He points at the bags and bags of lanterns leaning against the trunk of the cherry tree. “I ran the fairy lights around the line of the fence and plugged them in. I’m stringing some of the lanterns up on twine and hooking others on branches. Jump in wherever you want. Where’s Sloan? We’ll need to stretch for the higher branches.”
“He’s taking a stack of books into the house. He’ll be right out to help.” I look around the grove, amazed at how much it’s filling out. It’s growing so quickly—too quickly.
Last night when I saw the growth, I was excited.
Now I’m nervous.
As much as I want to tell Emmet about the ambient drain and the new target we now have on our heads, I don’t want our little fae family to hear it and feel bad or be scared.
I decide to keep that to myself until later.
“Where do ye want me?” Sloan joins me at the base of the cherry tree.
“Emmet voted you in for hooking these up on some of the higher branches. You likely have a better idea of what works than we do. Is your grove lit?”
“It is.” He grabs three lanterns and a few ‘S’ hooks and gets started. “But our grove is lit by tiny faery bugs called winnots. They sleep during the day and light up at night. The next time I come, I’ll see if any of them fancy the idea of relocating to the new world.”
“Thanks. That would be awesome.”
Emmet grins. “By the time they get here, this will be a full-fledged sacred grove. Can you feel the magic in the air?”
Sloan raises a brow at me, but no, I’m still not getting into it in front of our fae. They meant well. I’ll figure this out before danger darkens our doorstep—I hope.
“Sure do.” I send Sloan a look to stay quiet. “I feel it. It’s amazing what having a real grove can do.”
We work for an hour, hanging lanterns and spending time with the creatures who immigrated to our backyard last night. Pip and Nilm are happily chittering with Emmet, pointing out good spots, and eager to help.
The Ostara rabbits are hopping and flying around, quite content to spread their magical poop.
The Spriggans—the little hummingbird people—are busy flying back and forth into the Don Valley forest beside our house to find materials to build their nests. I worried about that at first, but then I remembered that regular Torontonians wouldn’t be able to see them.
The pointy-legged spider things are busy spinning gold and silver webs and running sparkly swags of webbing from tree to tree.
And the stag and doe have claimed an area in the back corner by the koi pond and are working on creating a lean-to of leaves and sticks. How they’re doing that without opposable thumbs, I have no idea. Must be magic, I suppose.
Busy, busy.
“What do ye think?” Sloan hangs the last lantern and takes an assessing look.
I step into the center of the trees and turn in a slow spin, checking out our beautiful grove. “It’s perfect.”
Emmet smiles at something Nilm says and nods, their attention on me. “You’re right, she does.”
“I do what?”
“Standing there with your arms out and the rays of the sunset coming in from behind, you look like a Celtic goddess. Or at least like my sister infused with the grace and power of a Celtic goddess.”
I chuckle and wag my finger at him and Nilm. “We have another charmer in our midst, do we? Pip’s a lucky lady.”
Emmet repeats my comment for them, and Pip giggles and covers her mouth with her little hands, her antennae bobbing as she nods.
“Hello, the house,” Da calls.
We hurry out of the trees and into the yard as he and Dillan drop their bags inside the fence. “By the grace of the goddess, what have we here?”
“Come see what you’ve missed.” I wave them forward. “It’s the grand beginnings of the Cumhaill family grove. What do you think?”
Da looks at me, and his brows are arched high on his forehead. “Well, I think it’s grand indeed. How did ye ever do it?”
Sloan holds out his hand, and Da meets him palm-to-palm without questioning why. When the sight kicks in, Da’s grin grows wide. “Well, hello there. Welcome to ye, one and all. I’m honored to have fae folk in our lives. Namaste.”
I order four large pizzas around seven o’clock, and after Aiden gets Kinu and the kids settled at home, he joins us for the family druid meeting I called. “Okay, since last night, we’ve got good news, bad news, and update news. Where would you like to start?”
“Och.” Da scrubs a rough hand over his face. “Why must there always be bad news when ye call us together, Fi?”
I shrug. “Just keeping things interesting, Da. Okay, let’s start with good news then. Our grove is up and running, we have thirteen Fae folk of five species living in it, and we’re now putting out a ton of juice and enough to keep us powered up for the foreseeable future.”
Da sighs. “And the bad news?”
“We’re siphoning the ambient magic from everyone else in the city. Myra figures we have two or three days before the drain on magic gets traced back to us, and we have every evil druid, pissed-off warlock, and demented were-shifter on our door demanding payback.”
“Fucking hell.” Dillan pauses mid-reach while going for his fourth slice. “You never go halfway, do you, Fi?”
“Sorry, boys. I’m an all or nothing kinda girl.”
Da swallows a good portion of his beer and pinches the bridge of his nose. “And the update news?”
“I told Kevin everything.”
Calum stands, looking shocked. “I was with him an hour ago, and he didn’t say a thing.”
“I asked him to let me be the one to fill you all in. I found him here in Calum’s room last night, and he was a wreck. Whether he let on or not, he’s been struggling with the secrets, and it was coming to an untenable head.”
“Ye shouldn’t have interfered in yer brother’s business,” Da says.
“Maybe. But I won’t let my decision to open the door to the druid world ruin their relationship. I told him everything. He understands the risks and why we kept silent, but he’s hurt and disillusioned that Liam, Shannon, and Kinu knew and we didn’t consider him ‘family’ enough. We have making up to do with him on that front.”
“Well, fuck.” Calum grabs his keys off the coffee table and rushes toward the hall. “Thanks for the fucking heads up on this one, Fi.”
The back door slams and the rumble vibrates in my chest. I meet the anger in Da’s gaze and shake my head. “You can be mad. I get that you are, but it’s done, and I refuse to regret it.”
“This wasn’t solely yer decision.”
“Maybe not, but what I didn’t say in front of Calum, and what none of you will ever mention, is that when I found him in Calum’s room last night, he was leaving him a letter explaining why they were done.”
“Shit.” Dillan grabs his pizza after all.
“Yeah, shit. I won’t have them break up over this, Da. Calum and Kevin are as much in love and have as much right to the future in front of them as Aiden and Kinu. He deserved to know.”
“Moot point now, isn’t it?” Da snaps. “Are ye done droppin’ bombs on us so we can get back to it?”
“I am. Now, I’m heading into the dining room for the brainstorming
part of this disaster. You can all be mad at me later. Our fae didn’t realize the magic in the city is finite. I won’t have them killed for their kindness or regretting their help. We need to figure out another power source, and we need to do it quickly.”
Da’s jaw flexes as he clenches his teeth. “Fine. Ye heard yer sister, boys. Unpacking has to wait. We need to dig ourselves out from under yet another massive hape of shite.”
I grab a can of ginger ale from the table and raise it to the room. “Oh, and welcome home.”
It’s close to ten that night when Calum returns. I leave the others in the dining room and rush out to meet him. “Is everything okay?”
He meets my gaze and dips his chin. “It will be. Thanks, Fi. I’m sorry I jumped down your throat. I know ye wouldn’t have made such an important decision unless you were forced into it. He didn’t say as much, but I know Kev was at the end of his tether.”
I hug him and hold on tight. “I couldn’t let my impulsiveness ruin you two. I need my brothers to be happy and healthy. You’re my touchstones.”
He kisses my head and squeezes me back. “Same.”
I ease back. “He loves you so much.”
Calum nods. “It’s mutual. He’s my one.”
“And you patched things up?”
“It was shaky for a bit, but then he said Emmet mentioned me being a badass archer and he wanted to see what that looked like. When I called my bow from my tattoo, and he got a load of me like that, the tides turned.”
I burst out laughing. “You mean he got hot seeing you like that, and you made your transgressions up to him by showing him your new athletic prowess.”
He flashes me his teeth and waggles his brows. “Something like that.”
I hug him again. “Good. I’m so relieved to hear that. It’ll fuel me through the mind-numbing task of sussing out a sustainable magic power source in the next forty-eight hours.”
I loop my arm around Calum’s elbow, and we make our way back to the dining room. He takes one look at all of us poring over textbooks and laptops and tosses his keys at the basket in the hall. “Okay, where are we and where do you need me?”
Da leans back and looks wiped. “Honestly, I don’t know anymore. I can’t see straight. If this were Ireland maybe we could find an untapped ley line and draw on it, but this is Canada. We don’t have them here.”
Sloan leans back in his chair and cracks his knuckles. “I asked Fiona about that earlier. Why is that? Why would ley lines be there and not here? Why in some parts of Canada but only pockets out west?”
“I suppose if we could answer that, we might have an answer.” Da pushes back from the table and heads out the front door for some fresh air.
Sloan stares up at the ceiling. “It seems to me that if ley lines are magical rivers veining the Earth’s surface, they wouldn’t only be in selected pockets. Rivers flow—even magical ones.”
Dillan stands, stretches, and pulls up his hood. “Could they be here but blocked or strangled somehow?”
I plunk back into my chair and frown. “You think someone’s blocking them? Could a powerful warlock or coven be holding the magic hostage for their private use?”
“I don’t think so.” Sloan sits up and rolls his shoulders. “If it were a person, I don’t think he or she would be able to contain the entire country under their power for centuries. It makes more sense that it is something about Canada itself that blocks the flow.”
Emmet chuffs. “Well, if that’s the case, two or three days from now it’s gonna suck to be us.”
Sloan glances over the texts stacked on the table. “Who has the geographical map that shows the ley lines?”
Dillan pushes the book toward him. “I’ve been studying them for an hour. There are lines of energy across Europe and Africa, and even in parts of Australia and South America. Then, in North America, they are there in the States but with a noticeable reduction from the southern states up to the Canadian border. It’s pretty much exactly by the border.”
I shift on my seat to get a better look. “And almost no detectable levels of magical flow in central or eastern Canada. Why?”
Emmet rubs his eyes and yawns. “So, unless we relocate to B.C, Alberta, Saskatchewan, or the Northwest Territories, we’re shit outta luck.”
“But why?” Sloan asks again. “Nature doesn’t pick and choose that way. As I said, ley lines are magical rivers veining beneath the Earth’s surface. Something’s either stopping the flow or masking the magic. It makes no sense to assume it simply isn’t here.”
“Okay.” Emmet shakes out his fingers over the keyboard. “So, what has the power to block or suppress the magic of ley lines?”
Sloan shrugs. “That’s the question we need to answer.”
Chapter Seventeen
The house is dark when I wake with a start. With bleary eyes, I roll to the side of my pillow, wake my cell, and groan at the time. Four-thirty-seven in the morning. Seriously?
“Bruin? Is that you, buddy?”
While my bear does come and go at all hours of the night and day, being able to travel in spirit form, he doesn’t usually jolt me out of a dead sleep. I blink and focus on his pallet beside my bed. No giant grizzly.
I’m not surprised. We were a week in Ireland, and with bears extinct there, he was eager to get home to his regular “bears with benefits” routine.
A clunk down the hall brings a round of hushed shushing and whispered laughter.
Good gawd. Who’s drunk and still up?
There’s a scuffle and shuffle of things against my bedroom wall, and I sigh. That’s the closet in Calum’s and Brendan’s room. When the shushing morphs into drunken snickering, I throw back my quilt and force my feet to carry me down the hall.
Calum’s and Brendan’s room is bigger than mine, but with two beds, two dressers, and a desk, it has always felt smaller. What is definitely smaller is their shared closet. I don’t mind having a smaller room because my closet space more than makes up for it.
“What are you nimrods doing?” I whisper-hiss at them. “It’s waaay too early to be fooling around in the closet.”
Calum straightens, and I’m surprised when it’s not Kevin rustling around in there with him. It’s Sloan.
It takes my sleepy hamster brain a minute to get back in his wheel on that one. “What’s going on? I thought Calum and Kevin were rocking cocks in the closet, but I take it that is not what’s happening.”
Calum laughs. “Sloan is drool-worthy—”
Sloan grins wide. “Nice of ye to notice.”
“—but Irish don’t swing that way, do you?”
“Nope.”
Calum shakes his head. “Didn’t think so. Anyway, that’s not what this is.”
Sloan tries to straighten, but he’s too tall and off-balance. He ends up cracking his head on the bottom of the shelf and almost knocking himself out.
Calum snorts and uses the frame of the closet door to keep from falling on top of him.
“What exactly are you two goons doing?” I step into the room fully and close the door. After flipping on the desk lamp, I point from Calum to his bed. When he obeys my unspoken order, I grip Sloan’s wrist and get him up on his feet.
Once he has some momentum, I shove him toward Brendan’s bed and let the chips fall where they may.
“First,” Calum says, “I thought Sloan would be comfier on Brenny’s bed than on the pull-out in the basement, so I invited him up to be my roomie.”
“And we brought a bottle of liquid with us,” Sloan adds.
“Two, actually.” Calum holds up fingers to punctuate his point. “Well, we brought one, then had to go get the second.”
“Cuz Georgie boy got lonely.” Sloan points.
Calum giggles while looking at the two empty bottles on Brendan’s dresser. There’s a Post-It cutout with what I guess is supposed to be a circle on each of them. ”So, we got him a friend and polished him off too.”
“And whose idea was it to g
ive them sad faces?”
“Mine,” Sloan says. “Yer brother had something far cruder in mind.”
Calum devolves into a fit of giggles. “Cruder but much funnier. Your boy here needs to learn to let loose a little.”
Sloan is not “my boy” but Calum’s right. Sloan is far too tightly wound. Ignoring that, I try to stay on track.
“And where does wrestling in the closet enter this drunk and disorderly tale?”
Calum’s eyes brighten as if he forgot all about that. “I had a thought. You know how you’re trying to think of something, and it’s at the edge of your memory and you can’t quite grasp it, then you’re doing something else entirely and it whacks you right in the balls?”
“I’m with you until the balls part, but yeah, I’ll take your word for it. I know what you’re saying.”
“Grade seven geography.” Calum points at the closet as if that explains everything.
“Once more from the top? Your recollection whacked you in the sack and… How’d we get from there to you in Mr. Vallin’s geography portable?”
He shakes his head. “You and Emmet had Vallin. I had Miss Robinson.” He looks at Sloan. “That’s when I was sure I was gay. All the guys in my class were in love with Miss Robinson’s boobs, and I couldn’t wait for the gym class change room. Kevin was in that class.”
Sloan nods. “It’s sweet you two have history. I love history. I majored in history at university. Did ye know that?”
I roll my eyes. “We’re not talking about history right now. We’re talking about geography. Calum, why are you two up at this unholy hour wrestling in your closet talking about grade seven geography?”
“The Canadian Shield.” He flips his hands in the air with an uncoordinated flourish. “Ta-da, I remembered.”
“Awesome. Now, tell me what the Canadian Shield has to do with—” It strikes me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue sky. “Dayam, Calum. You might be on to something.”
Calum flashes Sloan a shit-eating grin. “Told ya! Bam, drop the mic!”
A Sacred Grove (Chronicles of an Urban Druid Book 2) Page 16