12. The Ambush

After a day and a night of revelry in Lilydale, moving back into his human role felt cumbersome, frustrating, and unrewarding for Micah. In his office, he stood in front of the row of plants while he held the manager's phone to his ear. With his other hand, he caressed the unhappy leaves on the plant he'd killed earlier in the week. He'd given it a few drops of water to dampen the soil and kept apologizing to it in his head.

"I really don't think that's necessary." Micah willed the phone in his hand to "An occasional no-show doesn't warrant a house call, does it?"

"You and Diana both no-showed yesterday," remarked Christina.

Heat crept up Micah's neck. "Yeah. I won't make a habit out of it."

"And this is Diana's second."

Micah rolled his eyes slightly. He didn't know how to tell her how pleased he actually was that Diana had stopped coming to work. Let her disappear.

The aglaonema trembled under his touch. He scowled and took a breath, trying to get rid of his bitterness, but the plant kept shriveling.

Micah slumped heavily into his desk chair. Diana was really ruining his mood.

Christina continued, "I sent a text to your baristas yesterday. Most of them agreed things between you and Diana were pretty uncomfortable the day before. Anna told me something weird happened outside the shop when you left, but couldn't say what it was." Christina paused. "Micah, you have a practically perfect record since you took over the Randolph store. This isn't the end of the world, but it's very out of character for you to allow personal business to get in the way of your work."

"I'm only human," he muttered.

"Say again?"

"Never mind."

"I only ask you to do this since you also told me several months ago you had some concerns for Diana's wellbeing at home. If you say her boyfriend started an altercation with you, aren't you worried about her? I assumed you would be."

"Right." He silenced a sigh. Curse his obvious tendency toward altruism. "I'll go out and check on her." He set the phone back down on the cradle, pressing his thumb and forefinger hard enough into his eyes that phosphenes appeared in his vision.

He pulled out his cell phone to get the number Andrew had been calling from. Though he didn't expect much to come of the effort, he punched the number into the landline on his desk. It rang for about a minute before he hung up.

Micah stood up again, sighing at the aglaonema. "Sorry, buddy. It seems you're a victim of my lack of control. We'll keep working, okay?"

Shrugging back on his jacket, Micah shuffled out of his office. With a mumbled greeting to the baristas, he dropped a bag of peppermint tea into a cup of hot water, flipped his aviator sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose, and left the shop. The baristas watched him leave with whispers of gossip.

"He looks hungover," pink-haired Faith whispered to Colton.

"Peppermint tea is good for a hangover," said Colton.

Anna put a hand on her hip. "Aren't you seventeen?"

"I have an older sister."

Leaning over the counter with a frown of concern, Faith said as she watched Micah disappear down the street, "I've been here two years and I've never seen him that cranky."

"Is he going to Diana's house?" Anna asked them.

Colton shrugged. "If he is, I pity her."

With a swoon, Faith set her hand on her cheek and said, "Real talk, though. Pissed off Micah is hella sexy."

Micah couldn't hear them, but his ears tickled with the certainty they were talking about him as he marched west from the shop. He'd grabbed Diana's address from the employee roster and punched it into his phone GPS. It wasn't a very long walk, but it made him regret that he was hungover for the second time since Andrew had left on his trip. Andrew really needed to hurry up and finish whatever soul-searching he was doing up there.

Micah growled out something akin to a sigh as he scanned the houses coming up on his left. The neighborhood around Diana was cramped and littered, all short and steep front yards and broken down, dented cars parked along the street. Diana's house was small, but tidy compared to its neighbors.

"I do not want to do this," he muttered. "Do. Not. Want. To do this." He kicked the sidewalk with the toe of his boot a few times, glad Andrew had talked him into his own pair of Docs their first winter together. If for some reason their relationship fell apart, Micah suspected he was going to have to completely disappear from his current life. There were traces of Andrew everywhere now.

Grinding his teeth so hard his jaw hurt, Micah climbed the carefully salted stairs up to Diana's front door. There was a metal star in the center of a frosted glass window, so he couldn't see anything inside past the small three-season porch. Micah pressed the bronzed doorbell button and winced at the off-key tune that played. He flipped his sunglasses up onto his head, using them to pin his hair back from his forehead.

The door cracked open a moment later.

Diana peered through the crack and her eyes bugged wide. "Micah? What…shit, was I supposed to work today?"

"Yeah right," he intoned. "You really didn't know?"

Diana's expression shifted several times, from embarrassment into something more calculating. "You shouldn't have come here," she whispered.

"I was told to come here," he said with some bitterness.

"I'm fine," she said. "Bye."

"You don't sound—"

The door slammed.

Micah scowled briefly. Then he realized that was the end of it. She was alive, wasn't she? And, if he was lucky, she would no-call, no-show one more time and be automatically fired from To a Tea. He shrugged and turned on his heel to march back down the steps and proceed with his underwhelming day. He sipped the hot tea, but it only made him think of Andrew.

The door behind him creaked.

"Hey, pretty boy, why are you leaving so fast?"

"Kill me," he muttered, rolling his neck back, flipping on his sunglasses, and glaring into the white sky. He slowly turned around.

Tom stood on his front landing without a shirt on, speckled with small cheap-looking tattoos, arms crossed over his chest.

Curling his lip, Micah asked him, "Do you wanna fight, or something? Duke it out over ‘your girl.'" He put the term in air quotes. "'Cause I've got a lot of pent-up aggression. And you know, I'd have a lot fewer problems if your girlfriend hadn't kissed me."

He smiled slowly. "You don't know anything about her, do you?"

"Honestly?" Micah shrugged. "Can't say that I do."

"Diana runs with a bad crowd. You should've kept your hands off her."

"I literally didn't touch her!" Micah exclaimed. Then more loudly he called, "Hey, Diana, you should come back out! I'd like to settle this for good."

Tom's eyes glinted. The look on his face twisted Micah's stomach into a knot. For a man who had tried to deck him just this week, Tom looked much less bothered by him than before. He wished his words could crawl back into his mouth, but then Diana reappeared, arms across her chest, wearing a short black skater dress and knee-high socks. Tom sniffed before retreating into the house, pinching Diana's ass as he walked past her.

Her meek discomfort from the last time at the shop was gone. She gazed indifferently down at Micah, her breath pluming in a cloud in front of her lips.

Two wolves battled in Micah's chest for a moment. Was he going to be a manager, or the bitter and lonely man whose boyfriend ditched him because of this girl? Split the difference, he thought resolutely. "Why did you tell your boyfriend I kissed you? If you were trying to piss him off, you should have kept me out of it."

"It had nothing to do with him," said Diana calmly.

"Well then what the fuck?" So much for splitting the difference.

Raising her brow, she remarked, "I've never heard you swear."

"Diana," he growled, wishing she wasn't looming over him , "kissing me like that was a dick move. Even if my boyfriend hadn't caught us—and yes, that did royally screw me over, by the way—I didn't ask for it or encourage it. Wouldn't you say it was sexual assault?"

She drummed her black fingernails on her elbow for a moment. "I'm sorry. I had to confirm something."

"Confirm what?"

"That you're a faerie."

Micah's blood went cold. "The hell are you talking about?"

She smiled thinly. "Do you know what my Master's is in?"

"…No?"

"Folklore," she said. She moved partway into her door and stepped into a pair of scuffed up boots. Then she thumped down the steps and stood in front of him, inspecting his expression with her chin tilted back and no warmth in her features.

Micah stifled a snicker. "Good luck in the job market, I guess."

She curled her lip slightly. "I've seen a dozen woodcuts of the look on your face when you grabbed Tom. You were…feral."

"You sound like a crazy person," Micah said, hands up, heart noisily pounding in his ears. "All I was looking for was some accountability. I'm going to go." He started to turn his back on her.

"I can't let you leave," she said calmly. "I'd like to. I think you're lovely. But it's kind of like a sorority, and I'm the newest pledge."

Ominous nonsense, that. It made Micah's chest clench. A boot scuffed on his left, and a jacket rustled to his right. Slowly, dreadfully, he let his gaze slide off Diana and looked around. Two women flanked him, warmly dressed in layers of black, one with long blue hair, the other with a dark green pixie cut. The blue-haired woman smiled pleasantly, but the pixie-cut glowered at him like she thought he pulled off her hairstyle better than her.

"Have you heard the thing about unicorn blood granting immortality?" asked Diana.

Feeling nauseous but refusing to look as frightened as he felt, Micah asked brightly, "Dude, are you guys witches? Let me guess. Your name is Raven." He pointed to the woman with the pixie cut, and then to the blue-haired woman, "And your name is Midnight."

"No," said the blue-haired woman, "I'm Raven." She grinned.

Ignoring their aside, Diana said, "Faerie blood…we're thinking it might kinda be the same. Or if it's not quite the same, it might make us feel very good."

"Well, I'm not a faerie, so." He shrugged.

The two women exchanged a look.

Diana's eyes widened. She glanced at the two women, shifting her weight. "You are not a human," she insisted, voice cracking. "I thought you were gonna puke when I used that idiom. And sometimes your eyes do this weird color-changing thing. And also, there's no way you dye your hair so often that you can never see your roots."

Micah tilted his head and said dubiously, "All…right then."

"And anyway, kissing you confirmed it," said Diana.

"How's that exactly?"

"High emotions are said to smell different in the Folk," said Diana, back in control. "Something like a pheromone. Had to get your heart rate to spike. And as soon as I knew you weren't just into men, I gave it a shot. You smelled like…lilacs and spring grass."

Laughing bitterly, Micah scraped his hair back with his hands, screwing up his beanie. "Holy shit! Honestly, what a relief."

Diana stared blankly at him.

"This makes so much more sense! I didn't lead you on or anything. You're just insane."

The woman with the green pixie cut sneered at Micah. She spat, "Misogynist."

"I think we should take him inside," remarked Diana. "It's a bit obvious, blood all over the snow."

"Don't worry about that," said the blue-haired woman. "I'll clean up after him."

"I don't like where this is going," Micah muttered. If Andrew were around, he'd already have his sword out. Hell, if Andrew were around, he'd probably already be fighting.

"Diana," Micah said to her with eyebrows raised to make sure he didn't glare at her, "I know this isn't your speed. I believe you think it is, but I refuse to accept the fact that I've totally misread you ever since you started working with me." He scanned her barren yard. About all it had in his favor was a small pair of silver birch trees guarding the front door. Glancing back at Diana and—and comparing her to that girl Cirrus, actually, with the chokers and fishnets and amethyst moon, Micah said honestly, "And I did not expect you to be a witch. But listen. I still think you're cool, and if you tell these lovely ladies to stop trying to intimidate me, I'll forget all this ever happened, okay?"

The two women pulled out athames—sharp, shining ritual blades that hooked at the tips to improve the ability to rip.

"Cool." Micah's voice was a thin little gasp.

"I'm going to enjoy this," said the green-haired witch.

Like falling through ice that would soon freeze him to death, Micah sank into a cold sense of acceptance. These women were going to try to kill him.

The green-haired witch snatched his collar and then thrust the blade at his neck with savage confidence. With a yell, Micah jerked back, popping the lid off his tea and splashing the scalding contents in her face. The witch screamed, pawing at her quickly reddening face with her gloves.

He somersaulted forward, slamming into Diana's knee with his shoulder. She buckled and went down, and he let his remaining momentum carry him up to the slender trunk of the leftmost birch tree.

The blue-haired witch hefted Diana back to her feet as Diana swiped the snow off her dress. Diana pulled her own blade out of a pocket on her hip and unsheathed it. Her arm trembled visibly.

On his feet and matted with snow, Micah tuned them out for a brief moment, backed against the birch tree. He snapped off a branch the length of his forearm and gazed fondly down at it.

Trees in winter were just sleeping, right?

Micah twirled it between his fingers, inhaled deeply, and breathed out, "Wake up."

And it did.

The branch exploded just as the three women rushed him like a trio of ringwraiths. He spun the stick, now thick as his wrist and jagged with newborn offshoots. It disarmed the green-haired witch almost at once, her athame spinning away as Micah thrust the end into her stomach and jabbed. She went down heavily, grunting, spitting out a clot of blood into the snow.

Stepping back, Diana gawped at him as if she hadn't quite believed her own theory until this moment. Micah closed in on her and raised the staff as if to strike her. She cowered back, covering her face, forgetting she was holding a knife.

Micah lowered the staff and deadpanned to her, "You're so fired."

Her jaw dropped, and horror flooded her eyes. Her lips started to form his name. But—

Pain erupted in his shoulder and wrenched a guttural cry from his chest. He dropped heavily to his knees. Bending forward, Micah groaned while his vision tunneled beneath the lightning bolts of searing pain laced across his back. Diana's feet shuffled away from him. Instinctively taking her cue, Micah leaned onto his elbow and kicked his leg out behind him. He connected with one of the witches and felt them trip heavily over his calf.

Panting, Micah rolled onto his back and glared up at the green-haired witch as she righted herself and smiled down at him with cruel delight, his blood freckling her cheeks. Micah used the birchwood staff to struggle back to his feet, breaking into a sickly cold sweat, the strength in his muscles sapped by his wound.

The blue-haired witch reached to withdraw the blade, but he spun the staff like a propellor and it bit down into her arm with a loud and sickening crack. She screamed; her forearm snapped like a twig. Staggering back, tears springing into her eyes, she turned and fled down the street.

The other witch gave a feral yell, flinging herself at him with fingers curled into claws.

Micah jumped back, but his knees buckled.

As he started to fall, the air smelled of mulberries, and Ingrid thrust herself free of the streak of shadows between himself and the witch. Ingrid caught him by the waist, while he steadied himself with the birchwood staff. Then she wound back an arm and landed an exacting punch in the witch's face.

The green-haired witch dropped like a stone, blood gushing from her nose. She scrambled back on her ass, eyes widening, tongue lapping up her blood as it streamed over her lips.

Ingrid followed her into the snowy yard with bare white feet and vengeance in her arrow-straight back. Her tall, slender form coruscated bloody red light that reflected off the snow like tail lights in the dark. A breeze Micah didn't feel toyed with Ingrid's loose curls.

She gazed down at the witch and said calmly, "You must not know whose blood you shed."

The witch drew a cold iron dagger with hemlock berries wrapped around the pommel and lashed out at Ingrid. Ingrid kicked her leg back, the blade missing her. The green-haired witch wound her legs around Ingrid's other ankle and tried to stab again.

"Hey!" Micah leapt on top of the witch, his knee smashing into her groin and the birchwood staff falling against her throat like a lethal proclamation. The witch gagged, spittle flying from her lips.

"Don't fucking touch my sister," Micah snarled, bearing his weight down on the birchwood staff so corded muscles jumped in his forearms despite how his fingers tingled on his left hand.

The witch's eyes bugged. Her hands scrabbled at his wrist as the staff crushed her windpipe, so her gasping lungs no longer made a sound, no longer gathered air. She grabbed his pinky and bent it back to disarm him, but Ingrid's alabaster hands appeared on either side of Micah's, like interwoven threads on a vicious tapestry. Together they held her down as they watched the life drain from her face. Growing impatient, Ingrid gave the staff a savage downward thrust, the witch's throat emitting a wet and final crunch.

The green-haired witch spasmed and lay still. Her glassy eyes turned dull, staring heavenward. The smell of urine rose off her body.

Micah swallowed sour bile as he clambered off the dead witch and fell onto his uninjured elbow. He clutched the birchwood staff to his chest, trying to drag his eyes off the witch, but her death worked on him like a paralyzing curse. Ingrid moved over the body, her fingers under nostrils as if checking for breath while her eyes quickly roved over Micah's face, his back, as if trying to see through his chest to assess his injury.

A tiny sob captured both their attention. Micah looked over the snow to the walkway where Diana stood frozen. Horror wiped her expression blank; she seemed unaware of the tears leaking down her cheeks, as if she were too numb to notice. When she saw Micah looking at her, she dropped her athame. It clattered onto the salted pavement under her feet as she put her hands in the air, palms forward in surrender.

Ingrid turned toward Diana with the sharp grace of a predator, making the woman yelp. The scarlet-eyed faerie looked fearsome, terrifying, otherworldly. She was unbothered by her bare feet on the frozen ground, unbothered by the wind in just a wool dress that seemed to have turned blood-red after she killed the witch. She wore sprigs of winter berries behind her tall, pointed ears, but the red of the berries looked gruesome, like splatters of blood.

"Oh. Oh, no. M…madame, spare me," said Diana, eyes round and wide and dripping tears.

Ingrid walked on silent bare feet up to Diana, gazing disdainfully down at her before reaching out and grasping her chin in her hand. Her rings glinted like spirit lights bobbing on her bone-white fingers with sharp black nails dimpling Diana's cheeks.

"Madame, please," Diana begged, tears bright in her eyes and wet on her face.

"Ingrid," cautioned Micah, "don't kill her."

Ingrid cast her crimson gaze sidelong at Micah where he knelt on the ground. Her calm cruelty faltered. She blinked, irises like glinting garnets. Then she narrowed her eyes and looked back at Diana. She said evenly, "You will say your friend broke her neck from a slip on the ice. You will denounce this practice of black magic. And you can expect that if we meet again in similar circumstances, I will be merciless."

Diana trembled under Ingrid's grip. Her eyes became unfocused for a moment as the command settled into her bones. "Caty broke her neck," agreed Diana. "I don't do dark magic anymore."

Micah used the staff to try to get back to his feet. But he was too weak, too shaky, too numb to move his limbs. Blood leaked freely around the knife in his shoulder; he could feel the warmth spreading down his back, disturbingly hot in the winter air. Micah tried one more time to stand, but he slipped and hit his left elbow. He cried out as the impact ricocheted down to his palm and up to his spine, so intense that his vision spun momentarily into blackness.

"Ingrid," he moaned.

Ingrid yielded and turned away after giving Diana a sharp shove that knocked her down onto her ass in the snow.

The Ruby Daughter squatted in front of Micah. She inspected him in silence with her expression carefully blank—it told him more than he wanted to know about the state he was in. Then she held onto his hips and put him on his feet as if he were a child. He clutched the birchwood branch in one hand and leaned into Ingrid as he shuffled alongside her, barely able to breathe without the pain overwhelming him.

Diana watched in silence, shaking in the snow where Ingrid left her.

When they got down onto the sidewalk, Ingrid grasped Micah by the waist and then stepped them into the shadows. But he didn't see where they went. A comforting blanket of unconsciousness threw itself over him. He passed out.

Moments later, Ingrid lowered Micah onto his belly on her nest in her hut. She told the candles to burn hotter. As she pushed up the sleeves of her dress and knelt beside her brother, she touched the blackened iron handle of the athame protruding from his flesh, which was sliced into his trapezius muscle on the edge of his scapula.

Startling Ingrid with her sudden appearance, Chamomile arrived in her shelter and hurried over to the bed in the corner. When she leaned over Ingrid, Chamomile sucked in a sharp gasp. Gracelessly, she clattered through Ingrid's belongings by the door on a black shelf that held medicinal herbs. Chamomile returned with an armful of jars and stepped over Micah's prone body to kneel above his head. She poured steaming water from a pitcher into a large dish and dropped a terry cloth inside. Ingrid watched her, waiting, holding a linen kerchief in her palm, hovering over the handle.

Chamomile lifted her bright, serious gaze. Then she nodded.

Ingrid grasped the handle of the athame and yanked, tossing it toward her door with a hiss. Chamomile moved in at once with a compress and pressed it down with both hands as blood stained the cotton pad red immediately.

"What happened?" Chamomile demanded, a tremble in her voice. She held down the pad as she prepared another and then quickly switched them out.

"Witches," Ingrid told her. She picked up the bloodied pads and set them on the table over her shoulder.

Chamomile spat a complicated string of foreign words. "They were going to bleed him."

"He was handling them well, but the one I killed was old. I could feel it."

Chamomile grimaced and confirmed, "You killed a witch?"

"She would have killed him. I did what was necessary." She moved to help Chamomile as the smaller faerie struggled to free Micah's right arm from his jacket. Ingrid peeled it across his back and down his other arm while Chamomile reached inside and pressed another wad of cotton to his shoulder while they disrobed him. The sweatshirt was worse, more tedious than his jacket by far. Ingrid ended up holding the heavy dead weight of his torso against her chest while Chamomile pulled his arms free, working with one hand while still pressing on his wound. When the sweatshirt was just around his neck, they laid him gently back down on the pillows while Ingrid pulled it over his head.

Chamomile went to work silently. With the wet cloth she wiped away the blood coating his left side. She wrung it out into a bronze bowl. Blood pooled at the bottom; the sight made Ingrid light-headed. Then she wiped down his back once more while Ingrid maintained pressure. Finally, she gently moved Ingrid and her compress, quickly wiped the stab wound and then packed it with a small bunch of leaves. The leaves stymied the free flow of blood immediately.

It was then that Ingrid realized she'd been holding her breath.

Chamomile used a mortar and pestle to grind more stems into a creamy paste before coating the wound with it. Ingrid helped manipulate Micah's heavy form so Chamomile could wrap medical dressing under his armpit and across his chest so it wouldn't budge.

She taped down a large piece of gauze and then sat back on her heels. When she looked up at Ingrid, her eyes were shining. Swiping the back of her hand across her nose, Chamomile looked back down at him and ran her fingers through his pale green hair shining under the candlelight. "Should we tell Andrew?"

Ingrid sighed through her nose. "We can let Micah decide when he wakes up."