by Robin Hale
Warmth spread out from my spine and my smile widened. My mom would definitely approve.
“Thanks!” I beamed up at Rhea and used the opportunity to pass the third cup into her empty hand. “This must be for you, then.”
“You brought me coffee?” Rhea asked, puzzled.
“All part of the experience here in the Book Wyrm,” I said breezily, affecting a kind of calm I definitely did not feel and trying to get through at least one interaction with Rhea without sounding like an idiot. “Unless there’s another person here. I only bought three.”
“Nope, just us. Now gimme.” Jean made grabby-hands toward me and I passed her drink to her with a laugh.
“How did you know I’d be here?” Rhea asked, still holding the door open. Obviously the gift of coffee had frozen her in the middle of whatever subroutine her brain had been running.
I could relate. Coffee often stopped me in my tracks.
“Oh,” I paused and looked down at my latte like it might hold the answer. “Jean must’ve mentioned it.”
There was a silence that was full of the desire to push harder on that idea, but I watched Rhea shutter some part of her mind and nod instead.
What would she say if she let herself speak instead of censoring herself?
“Well, I’ll take care of that pre-order, Jean.” Rhea lifted her coffee in a salute and an uncomfortable wave and left through the open door.
“I definitely didn’t mention she’d be here,” Jean remarked placidly.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It sounded less stupid than ‘had the impulse to buy another coffee!’”
Jean took a long sip of her caffeinated beverage and favored me with a considering look. “You’ve got impressive instincts,” she said at last. “I bet you’re never caught without an umbrella.” She followed the remark with a wink, but something in her voice caught at me.
I chuckled and took a drink of my latte but she was right. It only ever rained on days when I’d snagged the colorful umbrella from the back of my door and took it with me. I’d never been caught in a surprise downpour, never had to dart inside somewhere to hide from an unexpected shower.
What did that mean?
6
Rhea
The wind through the trees in Burnet Woods sounded exactly the same that night as it had when I’d gone with my mother and my aunts to collect night-blooming plants as a child. It was calming. Soft. And it did its best to make me the most relaxed I’d been in years, so far away from the familiar grounds and buildings of Barleywick.
It was almost enough to make me forget that I was there alone. If I let my mind wander, I could hear my mother humming while she worked outside of my field of vision. I could feel the presence of my aunts at my back. Almost.
The moon overhead was waxing and trailed silver through the trees, and the charm around my neck glowed the same, freeing my hands and keeping the plants safe from the harsh beam of a flashlight. My fingers moved rhythmically over the stalks and leaves and the silver of my knife glinted in the darkness while I worked.
It was a strange place. The ground beneath my boots was soft and full of the scent of decomposing leaves and maturing underbrush. It sat on veins of power that had run through Cincinnati since before its founding, coaxed magic into the roots and stalks of the plants that grew there. It all made uptown Cincinnati the right place to collect the reagents I needed to stock rather than the woods around Barleywick. The greenhouses did what they could and they did the job well, but some things needed to grow in the wildness outside. So I went where the magic called me.
I wrapped bundles of plants carefully and tucked them into my bag, fighting to keep my focus on the wind in the trees, the softness of the dirt, the compelling pattern of the work — but it didn’t work. I’d been alone for so long that I thought I’d come up with impenetrable defenses against intrusive thoughts. I couldn’t have survived so long without them. But I’d finally found something that broke through the simple satisfaction of moving the work along.
Laurel.
For days now, every spare moment had come back to Laurel.
So there I knelt among plants that were the stuff of my family’s legacy and I was fixated on remembering the feeling of a cup of coffee pressed into my hand. It was coffee. It didn’t mean anything. The Wyrm was a busy shop, she’d have given it to anyone who happened to be there. But it had felt like something more than that.
There was a cloying itch at the base of my skull that wouldn’t leave me in peace. It twisted around the reins I held leashing my power, but different. It was an awareness of something else. Something new.
I scowled in the darkness and focused on the moonlight amplified by the charm around my neck.
I didn’t need the chaos. It was stupid to let someone get under my skin — did I really want another lesson in how badly that could go? No, the last thing I needed was a romantic attachment. I’d proven pretty thoroughly that I couldn’t be trusted with one.
And Laurel wasn’t some random girl I’d met at a bar or bumped into on the street. She had power. Real power, despite whatever Greenhollow thought. And if Jean wasn’t willing to go against them to tell Laurel who she was — what she was, I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk the Council’s attention by breaking the silence myself.
I flexed my fingers around the handle of my knife and fought down the wave of parasitic dread that threatened to steal my composure. The breathing exercises that my mother had taught me as a small child, the ones that had become the closest thing to my religion since her death, barely scratched the surface of the tension created by my power pulling at my body.
In weakness, I relented.
I let myself remember.
I remembered the open way Laurel had smiled at me while bursting uninvited into the shed at Barleywick. How the hell did she manage to always look happy to see me? The amount of time I’d spoken to her could be measured in minutes, not hours, and I was far from being in the running for any popularity contests.
But her smiles were genuine.
Stalks separated cleanly, roots let go of the thick dirt at the plants’ bases and I felt something growing in my head. Something that promised the kind of power I hadn’t felt in more than ten years.
Laurel had moved through my space with the guilelessness of a bear cub. It was fascinating to watch her: the way her hips had redefined everything I knew about denim and the way it was supposed to move on a body. The way her lips had pursed and her long, graceful fingers had traced lip balm over their pink curves in a promise that if I would only lean forward I’d taste pomegranate and honey. She would taste like the summer winds that carried storms.
Maybe it was that storm that was so damn tempting. Maybe that was the piece that would fit right into my magic. Something had been missing and I hadn’t realized until she’d made me taste ozone.
But guileless or not, bear cubs meant danger and so did Laurel. She might not be a threat on her own but the Council wouldn’t overlook her for much longer. I didn’t need any more of their attention.
And worse: she’d already stretched the fraying threads of my self-control to the breaking point. I’d spent too long, worked too hard to adhere to my probation — to maintain the Barleywick legacy and fight my way out of the hole I’d fallen into — to give it all up because of a bright smile and a tempting shape.
The knife in my hand slipped and the edge of the blade bite my finger in rebuke.
“Fuck,” I hissed and sucked the digit into my mouth to try and stem the bleeding. It was then, with my pathetic brooding interrupted, that I heard it.
Leaves rustling, sticks breaking.
There was someone else in the park.
Still crouched, I froze and held my breath. After a moment my heartbeat slowed and the sound of its thudding left my ears. It was probably someone out hiking too late. The trails weren’t lit, but that didn’t keep people from tromping through the woods anyway.
“Ouch!” A warm, feminine voice
split the wind and rustling leaves and the tension in my shoulders melted away.
Laurel. As though my idiotic fixation had summoned her — an ability that I was damn sure I didn’t actually have — Laurel was barreling through the woods with a kind of single-minded determination that sank wariness through every inch of my body. Why was she there?
A spark kindled in the base of my skull and my skin woke to the currents in the night air like I’d stepped out of a sauna. Every sense was tuned into Laurel’s sudden appearance.
Then the noises stopped and the bouncing of a cellphone flashlight disappeared. I shifted slowly, easing my weight quietly so that I wouldn’t give away my presence — after all, how would I explain what I was doing there without telling her that the moon could have an effect on plants? Would she think that I’d followed her? There were no good outcomes.
As I peered around a tree, taking care to extinguish the light dangling from my neck well out of any potential line of sight, Laurel came to a stop in a clearing past the trees where I’d been working.
The moonlight painted shimmering ribbons over her hair, highlighted the slope of her nose and the way her jacket clung to her shoulders. She squinted into the darkness but she didn’t go again for her phone or a flashlight. Evidently, she wanted to see how the clearing looked in the moonlight.
I tasted summer and moss and the promise of rainfall and if I breathed through my mouth I thought I might taste a hint of that iris-sweetness that followed Laurel as helplessly as I did.
Why was she there?
I dismissed the idea that she might’ve been following me. It was ridiculous. There was no way she could’ve known that I would be there that night and she probably wouldn’t have come stomping through the woods if she were trying to track me.
There was a part of me that wanted to reveal myself to her. Wanted to chide her for using a flashlight and ruining her night vision, but in the end, it was better that she probably wouldn’t see me in the trees. The less time I spent around her the better.
Laurel jerked into a spin, turned to face to the left of my position and I bit back a low, vehement curse as she quietly called out, “Hello?”
The word raised my hackles more than I would have expected. She’d announced how vulnerable, how exposed she was. But Laurel didn’t know what went bump in the night.
The sound of a growl pierced through my frustration like the head of an arrow through a paper target.
I shifted as quickly as I could while still remaining quiet and craned my neck to search for the source of the noise.
Laurel’s spine went rigid. She’d heard the growl, too.
“Hello?” She tried again, a thready whisper that mixed with the wind and the rustling and wouldn’t do any good.
Damn it.
I crept along the tree line, stowing my supplies and moving with my hands free and ready. There, across the opening in the grove, was the source of the disturbance.
Animal eyeshine, curled lips, dripping fangs.
Somehow, Laurel had attracted the attention of a were.
Dread and panic fought in the back of my mind for dominance and I forced them both down as the crackle of power surging beneath my skin flooded my awareness. I wanted to lash out. I wanted to take that were to the ground, force him from his coyote guise and lay him bare, human and fragile in the moonlight.
I wanted to taste ozone and atmosphere. I wanted to feel the wind scream and respond to the pounding of my heart, the ferocity of feeling that was welling inside me. I wanted to unleash the crackling of lightning that hid inside my bones.
Tree bark rasped at my skin through my shirt as I sagged back and screwed my eyes shut. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I had to bottle it up, force it back down. Dragging lungfuls of air into my body ruined my silent vigil and cleared my head enough to see the only path that remained in front of me.
And then I threw myself from my hiding place among the trees and hurled my fists against the bastard’s furry face.
7
Laurel
Waiting to go back to the park until after I had closed up shop meant that the sun was already low behind the hills of the city before I even made it onto the same block. Tension built in my neck and shoulders while daylight drained from the sky, but I couldn’t keep thoughts of the park out of my head.
It was so familiar — I just couldn’t figure out why.
The trees grew denser as I moved away from the picnic areas and paved paths and onto the packed dirt trails that wound through most of the park. Even the smell was familiar. The sounds of the city, the passing cars, the laughter of pedestrians walking toward the shopping district down the hill — all of those fell away into haunting silence as the woods enveloped me.
It wasn’t too much longer before I needed to pull my phone out of my pocket and switch on the flashlight feature. I stumbled forward, trying to avoid large branches and protruding roots and followed the sense of familiarity further into the darkness. My heart trilled with the urgency of some sort of prey animal. It was insane. Wandering around the park at night was insane. But I wouldn’t turn back.
As the moonlight filtered through the breaking clouds overhead, I came upon a clearing.
The air was strange there. Almost…purple? It tasted thick and sweet and there were sounds that reverberated in memory more than anywhere else.
The ground, the trees themselves were stamped with the emotions of someone who had been there before. Jealousy, anger, fear…
I turned in a slow circle and switched off the light. There. The light mimicked the view from my dream at least a little bit closer, and I strained to peer into the darkness. Everything was so close to the surface. I was on the brink of some revelation, like if I could change my perspective the tiniest bit, I would experience a flood of memory that would explain why I was so drawn to the clearing.
Laurel…
A voice in the darkness whispered my name, hissed it between gusts of wind through the swaying, rustling trees. I spun on my heel, stumbled over the sticks that snared my ankles and froze with my feet planted. My heart pounded in my throat while I stared wide-eyed into the blackness.
“Hello?” I asked and I hated the way my voice sounded. It was too loud and too timid all at once and I swallowed hard, trying to keep control over my pounding heart.
They — whoever they had been I couldn’t bring myself to guess — didn’t speak again.
I held the stillness as long as I could stand it and drew in a breath to speak.
Before I could, so seamlessly with my own mouth opening that I could’ve believed it had come from me, I heard a growl. It was low and strange, not quite a dog or even the low rumbling from cougars I’d heard in Nebraska.
Every part of me froze and I went utterly, unnaturally still.
“Hello?” I tried again. The sound barely had enough body to vibrate the air it occupied.
The growl got louder and mingled with breaking twigs and the sound of something moving closer.
The movement broke a pale shaft of moonlight pouring down between the clouds — my eyes had finally adjusted enough that I was able to make out more detail than the oppressive blackness of the woods’ vast facade — and a long, canine face emerged from between the trees.
A coyote. Fear raced down my spine and settled around my hips, freezing the muscles, looking at the millennia-old reactions of ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ and instead opting to turn to stone.
Its teeth were bared, its gaping maw dripping with saliva that pooled on its lips in grotesque highlights turned silver by the moon. I tried to step back from it, tried to move away, but my feet refused to cooperate. Every part of my body had frozen when my eyes had locked onto the coyote. I was caught in its thrall and I couldn’t scream, couldn’t even draw breath.
I hadn’t realized there even were coyotes in Ohio.
The bunching of its muscles barely registered before the animal was leaping across the space between us, forelegs outstretched, mouth opened w
ide —
Then pain. Searing pain in a curve along my right thigh, blinding in its intensity. It didn’t make sense. It sank into my skin, my muscle like bubbling acid and my brain went staticy and blank. How the hell did it hurt so badly? I’d been bitten by animals before — it was nothing like that. The pain shocked me out of my locked limbs and I stumbled backward, fell to the forest floor when my feet found sliding rocks and branches rather than solid ground. The collision sent a shockwave of pain out from the bleeding wound in my leg.
The coyote crouched and prepared once more to pounce. I flung my forearms in front of my face and searched desperately for my phone. It’d fallen from my hand when I’d hit the ground — if I could call for help, call 911 I could —
Another sound rang through the night air.
“Get off her!” A human growl, a crash through the underbrush, and I was positive that I was losing it.
Rhea appeared from between the trees. She leaped forward, driving her fist across the snout of the animal that had attacked me and sending it skidding across the leaf-covered ground with a yelp and a spray of spittle and blood.
Rhea the Disapproving Hot Gardener had come out of nowhere and punched a coyote in the face.
The edges of my vision started to fade. The unimaginable pain in the meat of my thigh so overwhelmed my senses that the only plausible explanation was that I was bleeding to death and rather than let me die alone, my mind had conjured Rhea to defend me.
It was nice of my mind.
The coyote scrambled to its feet, whimpering and making a strange sort of hissing sound that I had never heard from an animal before, then loped off to disappear back into the trees.
A film descended over my vision and even the shades of purple and gray that had painted the air since I’d arrived began to mesh together into something unintelligible.
Rhea looked down at me, her dark brows drawing together in concern. Her mouth opened but the sound moved slowly, drifting through molasses and I couldn’t hear her.