Chapter 1

Lilith

I suppose you could say the town had a little bit of "Southern Gothic" flair if you were being nice. But if I were completely honest, it kind of gave me the creeps.

I'd never been one for small towns, personally. Elvish people often preferred orderly cities with plenty of amenities, and my family was firmly entrenched in New Caelora. The bustling, busy metropolis of sky rises and one-way streets that made up my home city, the capital of the largest elvish province, enamored me in a way no quirky, empty village ever could. Even downtown Golden Laurel, just a stone's throw from this outer university district I'd moved to, had a couple of gleaming towers made of clean lines of metal and glass, and roving street sweepers that worked nightly to keep the roads pristine. But here? These ramshackle buildings in this little hamlet had never even seen a bucket of soap and water as far as I could tell, let alone a street sweeper. Weeds poked through cracks in the buckled sidewalk. The signs were all faded and peeling to the point of illegibility. Boarded-up windows hid shadowed interiors, and a thick coat of dust and grime covered every surface I could see. If it weren't for the cheerful chatter of college students coming and going, it would have felt like the setting for a ghost story.

I fought a shiver. The encroaching dusk and towering nearby trees probably added to the spooky feeling pervading the street in front of the dated apartment building that was to be my new home, but I also felt a bit… trapped. It had only taken a short search to find a little wyvern-drawn carriage to deliver me from the center of the college town, but out here the streets were vacant. Not a carriage or pull-cart in sight. Getting back into town would take more effort.

But this was fine. Really. It would be temporary, regardless of what my uncle thought. I would get the new garden center up and running for him, and then I could go back to managing Blossom and Bonsai—the most profitable, gorgeous nursery in New Caelora. People like me, who craved a touch of greenery while living in a crowded city, could pop in to peruse the cheerful, leafy offerings and take home a cute little succulent for their desk or a pot of draping vines to grace their windowsill. Just thinking about the adorable, tidy rows of rare and exotic houseplants that made up most of our stock made me wistful—pairing people with the perfect plant match was one of my favorite parts of the job. Since I also had some sylvan ancestry and a bit of plant magic in my veins, I couldn't imagine a more fulfilling career.

At least, until my uncle—who also happened to be my boss—had given me more and more responsibility, to the point that I was managing the nursery for him, and then had the audacity to give me puppy eyes when he acquired a new nursery that needed an overhaul out here in the middle of nowhere. Boylen had unfairly effective puppy eyes for an old man. The only reason I'd agreed was because I trusted my younger cousin Melantha to fill my role and keep the shop running in my absence. She'd been learning and growing so much since joining the family business as a teenager, and I knew I could count on our Uncle Boylen to help her if she ran into trouble.

The door banged behind me, and I startled, whirling to find that it was only the pair of college-aged boys whom Boylen had hired to help me move. "It's all in, miss," the biggest one, an orc, said sheepishly, as the much smaller goblin waved goodbye and blinked at me with his overly large eyes. I thanked them both profusely, tipping them extra, and then bid them goodnight. The apartment was already furnished, since I didn't plan on staying permanently, so the move had been easy and relatively swift. But I groaned internally as I watched the young men make their way up the street in the direction of the student housing block, knowing that I still had too much to do before I could sleep tonight—a bed to dress and toiletries to dig out of wherever they were buried in my boxes. I was already making a mental list of groceries I probably wouldn't even be able to find at the rundown little corner market we'd passed on the way in.

The odd sensation of being watched tickled at my periphery, and I hunched my shoulders in response. There was no one else on the quiet block that I could see as I cast my gaze around, looking for the source. It wasn't until I glanced up—several stories up—to the window just above my new third-floor walk-up, that I found two giant, glimmering red eyes reflecting at me out of the shadows. Just perfect. I lived beneath the boogeyman. I didn't even try to fight my full-body shudder.

If I hadn't been listening for it, I probably wouldn't have heard it at all, but the soft click, click, click of my creepy upstairs neighbor pacing around his apartment kept me awake far longer than I was used to. I didn't usually mind hearing my neighbors. I had been living cheek-by-jowl for most of my life, after all. But there was something sinister about the scratching noise, which I could only assume was my upstairs neighbor's claws tapping against the hardwood as he moved about his top floor unit. It reminded me of the sound of rats scurrying in a ceiling and put me on edge the entire night.

The result was a grumpy morning as I stopped by the local coffee shop before heading out to inspect Boylen's new nursery. The previous owners had really let it go, and since most of the staff had left when they retired, I had a lot of hiring and work to do to return it to its former glory. It wasn't the first time I'd seen it, and I already had some thoughts brewing about how to improve it, but I wanted to talk to the only staffer who'd stayed on—a grouchy old man named Artem, who looked to be at least half dryad. I was used to chatting with my younger cousin any time I needed company at work, or joking around with the guys in the warehouse, so the thought of getting to know a prickly new employee was uncomfortable.

He was tall, with a stalwart build, and smatterings of weathered bark on his skin and tattered leaves growing in his hair marked him as one of the ancient forest warriors. But what stuck out the most about Artem to me was his permanently dour expression. I found he had a hidden soft spot though. "I couldn't leave the plants," he'd muttered grumpily when I asked him why he hadn't left with the others when his former bosses retired. But I decided he was okay. I didn't really mind that he was crotchety as long as he was good at his job. Maybe we could just be crotchety together.

There weren't enough plants in stock to sustain the business, but what we did have was healthy and vibrant, happily thriving under Artem's care. The greenhouse windows were filthy, and weeds grew abundantly between the bricks of the front walk. The first thing I did was hire a stout, gregarious dwarvish man named Jereck to tackle the numerous maintenance needs, the first of which was to paint the front sign. He might have talked entirely too much while he worked, but he was pretty efficient, and within a few hours our new shop—aptly named "The Floral Dilemma"—sported a sign with a pretty cream background and gold letters surrounded by soft green and gold leaves. I was thrilled. The bright, cheerful sign was the first thing that had lifted my mood since I'd arrived in this weird little town. I promptly busied myself with the happy task of placing orders for seeds and succulents, fertilizers and fancy new gardening tools.

My good mood lasted until Artem sidled into my office with a mild sneer on his face.

I realized I'd been humming as I worked. "Sorry, I'll stop humming."

"You can hum," he said gruffly.

"Then what's wrong?" I asked, still on uneven footing with the older gentleman.

He cast a critical eye over my list of orders. "House plants and flowers are all well and good, but we need crop starts and bare root trees for the ones out here who like to grow food."

"Oh." I wilted a little at that. While I had plenty of experience coaching new gardeners through growing cherry tomatoes or dwarf peppers on a balcony garden, my knowledge of fruit trees or larger crop-producing plants was limited. I didn't even have any good suppliers.

"Go up to the university," he said, taking pity on me and gesturing vaguely toward the west. "They've got that horticultural research facility where they breed all kinds of new apples and pears. The last owners were too stubborn to work with them because they didn't like that persnickety head researcher, but he's got some real neat trees up there. They'll even let you try the fruit at one of their tasting events."

So that was how I found myself at a "tasting" one late afternoon, surrounded by baskets of apples and pears and stone fruits all laid out on tables on the edge of an experimental orchard. There were a dozen or so other people milling around, tramping across the mulched gathering area. This was exactly the kind of thing that I would have loved to attend with my friends or my mom back at home, I noted wistfully as I looked around the open space by myself, feeling the loneliness of a new place just a little more intensely.

Several people were moving with purpose to purchase boxes of fruit they'd already pre-ordered, others towing excited children as they marveled at all the different varieties of fruit, so I didn't pay much attention at first when I noticed a small child rampaging around amongst the nearby trees. She was young, with dark hair pulled up in tiny pigtails and light green skin like some of the sylvans and other forest fae. She was squatted down in the dirt, busily ripping mushrooms out of the soil and replanting them in another patch while talking animatedly to herself the entire time. It seemed like something she probably shouldn't be doing, especially because the little knees of her overalls were all stained with soil, but since she seemed safe enough and I wasn't a parent, I figured it wasn't my business.

I moseyed my way toward one of the tables, passing a large family of gnomes who were arguing about which fruit to take home. The baskets of apples on the tables had little plates laid out in front of them and an older, apron-wearing elvish woman was cutting pieces of fruit as samples for people to try. There were all the usual apple colors—yellows and reds and greens—but there were also interesting dark purple varieties and one basket full of snow-white apples with a pale pink hue around the stem. I drifted closer, entranced by the unique fruit, to find that there were jagged holes in each apple revealing light pink fruit flesh inside.

"Well, hello, miss. You want a bite of the Moon Blush, do you?"

I glanced up to find the elvish woman making her way toward me, before she made a choking sound and stopped in her tracks, fists suddenly clenched tight and the pink in her dark cheeks draining as she stared at the apples.

"Alistair!" she bellowed toward the tree line, startling me. It was shockingly brash behavior for an elf, especially an elderly one. "Alistair! That kid's gotten into your basket of Moon Blush apples!"

I had no time to ponder her shouting as a massive mothman—a creature straight out of my darkest cryptid nightmares—stepped out from the darkness of the trees. My jaw dropped at the sight of him. Nearly as tall as a dryad, with a thick, dove-gray lion's mane of fluff and four long, dark arms that seemed to stretch on forever, the creature snapped out a menacing limb with lightning speed and snatched up the little child I'd seen playing with the mushrooms just moments earlier. She screamed like a stuck pig as he hoisted her up, up, up into the air, clutched in his claws by the back of her overalls. My heart lurched into my throat at the sight of her captured by this monster . I was not prepared to watch this child die right here!

"Oh, no! Stop!" I barely choked out from across the table, my hands pressed to my cheeks. I felt weak in the knees as he turned to look at me with his lash-lined dark red eyes, frustration and confusion written on every feature. Not the predatory hunger I'd expected from his fearsome mien.

Also unexpected? The little girl's shrieks turning to hysterical, throaty giggles as she reached for one of the fluffy white antennae that arched forward from above his brow. Her dirty fist clutching his strange protuberance jerked his attention away from me, and he squawked at her indignantly.

"Let go," he told her, sounding oddly petulant. Almost whiny.

" You let go," she said stubbornly, her tiny voice not wavering in the slightest.

"You ate all my apples, Miela!" he insisted, trying to wrestle his antenna from her clutches with two of his many hands, the fourth one gesturing angrily at the box of ruined apples. My racing heart began to slow as I watched the interaction between them, the hammering in my chest easing from sprinting panic to concerned confusion as my hands dropped from my face.

The kid had an iron grip on him as she dangled a good six feet in the air, completely unconcerned about her situation. "I didn't eat all of dem!" she insisted. "I only tasted dem."

He finally managed to pry her hand free, but his antenna was bent oddly and all the little fluffy bits stood askew. "Now look what you've done," he grumbled at her in a low buzz, trying to smooth it back to rights and redirecting her attention to the apples. "Why did you taste every one? I'd have given you a whole apple if you'd asked!"

"I didn't wike dem," she stated matter-of-factly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"So you just kept tasting them? "

As he spoke, his long, thin tongue flickered between his fangs, protruding just enough for the tiny fist he wasn't grasping to dart out and snag it. The outraged yelp he gave as she yanked it toward herself was accompanied by the mothman's frantic buzzing sounds, causing the tiny tot to erupt with further peals of delighted laughter. Her husky giggles were contagious, and seeing that she was manhandling him instead of the other way around caused the relief in my chest to bubble out in my own disbelieving chuckles. I couldn't help it. It was just such an absurd sight, seeing this hulking, furry beast of a monster being worked over so skillfully by this fireball of a toddler. Given how comfortable she was bossing him about, I realized the child must have been his, and I felt silly now for having reacted in fear based on his size and fearsome appearance.

My laughter was a mistake, and I cringed internally as he followed the sound of it to stare at me glumly, his tongue still pulled taut from the side of his mouth by the child. "I'm so sorry," I stuttered out, suddenly horribly embarrassed by my earlier outburst when I'd thought he was going to harm her. "I didn't realize she was yours!" My cheeks were hot as I raised my hands again, this time holding them in front of me in a placating gesture in the hopes that he would disregard my previous panic. Even though I was still mildly panicking as he turned his focus on me. Those eyes made the prickling feeling on the back of my neck feel like pins and needles.

The mothman reached out to pry his tubular tongue from the toddler's grip, never taking his eyes off of me, all the while. She giggled again as his tongue was freed, but I couldn't remove my gaze from the dark-fringed, red eyes he had trained on me, wearing a decidedly unimpressed expression.

"Mine? Like my child?" he asked incredulously, his wings flaring dramatically as his voice moved from its buzzy rumble into a higher octave. Oh, no. "She might only be a quarter orc, but look at these tusks!" He wiggled her in the air with the hand that gripped her scruff, causing her to squeal with laughter again as her pigtails bounced to and fro. She did, indeed, have the tiniest of tusks peeking above her bottom lip. My eyes snapped back to the mothman. "Mothchildren haven't even got any bones ," he continued indignantly, "let alone teeth."

"I have teef!" the little one declared cheerfully, opening her mouth to show them to everyone as I glanced at her quickly.

But the mothman wasn't finished as he continued in a huff. "I know you elves must think every green child is a caterbaby, but she hasn't even got the right number of limbs!" He sounded positively perturbed, and I didn't know what to think, so I just apologized profusely for the assumption and started to retreat slowly from the table, my hands still held aloft. The child was clearly fine, and I needed to make an escape. I would just send Artem to buy whatever trees he thought would sell well.

"Sir, are these mushrooms for sale?" An oblivious old goblin man stepped up next to me with a ceramic pot full of the same mushrooms the tusked toddler had been digging up earlier.

"My mushwooms!" she squealed, darting her hands out toward the pot as if she could snatch them back from the man.

"The low-fae are not for sale," the mothman stated sternly. "They go wherever they want. Miela," he said, addressing his tiny captive, "you have to stop pulling them up or they'll bite you."

"They bite?" the old man asked in a bewildered tone, blinking down at the little red and white fungi.

"You, come with me," the mothman instructed, pointing one of his many long-clawed fingers at me.

I froze in my tracks, five steps away from the table already. So much for sneaking away. "Who, me?" I gestured at my chest, my eyes wide in panic. "Oh, no. No, sir. I'm good… I'm just gonna—" I started to gesture over my shoulder, indicating that I would head back the way I came, but he cut me off.

"You wanted to try a Moon Blush, didn't you? Come this way. These are my best apples, if I do say so myself. You'll never be the same once you try one. You simply haven't lived." He snapped his enormous gray wings together forcefully, leaving a shimmering mote of dust behind him as he ducked into his grove of trees. He shifted his hold on the little girl to carry her against his chest while she howled loudly about wanting her mushrooms back.

The little old man continued to stand next to me, staring at the little pot of strange fungus he held. "These are low-fae?" he asked aloud, though he sounded like he was speaking to himself.

Suddenly, the elderly elvish woman was there, gently taking the pot from him. "Best to put those down or that little girl's mother will have your hide, Arnold. Miss," she said, waving me toward the trees, "you go follow Alistair now, and he'll get you some of those pretty apples. They're our most popular," she said with pride.

I had just wanted to look at them! Augh! I practically stomped around the table and ducked into the first row of trees, immediately aware of how dim the light was under the low canopy of leaves. Hadn't my mother always warned me about stranger-danger? Wasn't it unsafe to go off into the woods? Granted, the tidy rows of neatly pruned apple trees could hardly be termed "woods," but I thought the same principle should apply. I was a city-girl through and through. I could just imagine myself getting lost in the orchard and wandering for hours. I'd never live it down if my uncle heard about it.

Fortunately, it wasn't hard to follow the arguing duo—Alistair and Miela, I reminded myself—as they bickered and squabbled on their way down the rows of trees. The toddler wanted down, and the mothman wasn't having any of it. "No! You lost your walking privileges," he stated when she squirmed in his many arms. "If you can't make good choices, then you have to stay with me." She quieted as he stopped at a tree laden with glossy white fruit, just beginning to show the pink hue at their tops, and reached clear into the upper branches to pluck one off.

"I want one," she squeaked.

"You've had plenty," he muttered, barely loud enough for me to hear as I tripped over my own feet in my effort to catch up to him. I tried to hide my stumbling misstep as he turned to face me, towering over me as I drew nearer. His large silhouette against the canopy above cut a menacing figure, but something about the copious tufts of soft-looking fluff covering his chest and body reminded me of a silk moth. His eyes had become a muted maroon color under the shadowed leaves, much less shocking than the brilliant crimson they'd projected in the late afternoon sun. The long dark fringes surrounding them—as well as the tiny child held carefully in his arms—softened him somehow. I was still unsure of him, but the absent way he rubbed circles between the girl's shoulder blades as she began to suck her thumb and snuggled into his fluff melted my anxiety clean away.

I raised my gaze to meet his when he hesitated with the apple in his hand, holding it carefully with the pads of his fingers so that his sharp, black claws didn't mar the perfect skin. His feathered antennae bobbled above his head, and his expression appeared uncertain. "These are my favorites," he said in his rumbling buzz. "But it's okay if you don't like it." He extended the apple to me slowly, as if he was aware of my nerves, and I took it carefully from him, marveling over the glossy texture. Alistair's head seemed to shrink into the mounds of fluff around it as he hitched his shoulders up to his ears. I didn't understand the gesture since there was no way a creature like this could be shy.

"Should we take it back to the tables so the lady can cut it up and share it?" I asked, glancing back to where the evening sun still played at the edges of the trees.

"I can get more," he answered quietly with a descending click, his fluff levitating even higher around his ears. "I want you to have it."