Chapter 19

We tookone car to Cedar Haven, the garden gnome not even bothering to hide her motives: I couldn't retreat to the sanctuary of my farmhouse, and Arthur Greenwood couldn't reject my help if he could easily send me away.

The big lumberjack shifter and the twiggy old carpenter were pacing back and forth in the parking lot when we arrived. Arthur's gaze roved over Flora climbing out the driver's side window, passed over Daphne and Shari still finishing the last of their scones—which hadn't molded or rotted, ha-cha!—landing on me last. They lingered a beat too long, his nostrils flaring, and I wasn't sure if it was because he could smell the lemons and blueberries on my breath from the delectable scones I'd just devoured, or if it was a predatory response. An urge to drive me away, to shun me as I had him.

I met his gaze with a determined expression; I wasn't going anywhere. The invisible pull between us remained, urging me forward to apologize or reconcile or any reason that would get me into the comfort of his arms, but I remained rooted. I was here for the thing that had infected me. There was very real chance it could spread.

"Morning," Flora greeted, her tone daring Arthur or Cody to protest my presence. The men kept their mouths shut. She withdrew a wand of beech wood from her pocket and gave it a flourish. A bead of green light illuminated at the tip. "What are we looking at?"

"Over here," Cody said, waving her to follow after him.

The lumberjack didn't move when Daphne and Shari trailed after the garden gnome, but when I went to take a step, his posture stiffened.

I sucked in a steeling breath. "Arthur," I began.

"What are you doing here?" he asked lowly. It wasn't a growl, but there was a warning in it all the same. He was still hurting, but so was I.

"Arthur," I whispered his name again. "Please, let me explain."

His throat bobbed as he swallowed thickly, a slight tremor in his broad shoulders. "Speak," he answered hoarsely.

That one word alone, that he was willing to give me a chance, unleashed a relief so strong within me it almost brought tears to my eyes.

"She got stung by a bee here yesterday and it nearly killed her," Flora said before I could open my mouth. She marched past us, wiggling whatever gunk she'd gotten on her wand from inspecting the rot off its tip. "She's here to make sure that doesn't happen to anyone else."

"What?" Arthur roared. His hazel eyes burned with an amber light, the intensity of his presence expanding like an approaching storm.

For a very frightening moment, I thought he was going to shift. I'd been burning to find out what his beast form was, but now I wasn't so sure I wanted to find out. The rage coursing through him was the kind that blinded a man's reason, and there were people here who couldn't defend themselves.

"Easy, boy," Cody cautioned. "She's just fine."

Stepping forward quickly, I took hold of his hand. His fingers tightened over mine like the jaws of a bear trap, and I winced at his strength. "Arthur," I murmured, searching his eyes. "Take a breath."

Despite the pain in my hand, I forced my thumb to stroke over his in slow reassuring circles. My other hand, hidden behind my back, contained roiling green magic, ready to blast this shifter clean across the parking lot if he didn't regain control, parasite ring be damned.

With a shuddering breath, the amber light faded from his eyes, the tension draining from his shoulders. With a gentle squeeze, I released him and stepped back, snuffing out the magic.

"Anyway…" The garden gnome brandished her glowing wand. "Let's take a look at your bees, shall we? My ears say they're this way?"

A much-calmer-looking Arthur looked one second from closing the distance between us and crushing me against his chest. Exactly what I'd yearned for last night. Actually, every night since the First of Fall Festival. But with the morning light and my fresh chance to attack the curse on the grimoire more boldly than I had before, my resolve had tightened. While I'd let Flora in on some of my secrets, my plans in Redbud had not changed.

Free my family of the curse.

Return home.

No attachments.

And yet, my heart ached to run towards the comfort he was seconds away from offering. Flora's news of my plight had shook him, had erased any record of grievances. I saw it in his hazel eyes, relief and hope and hunger—

With quick steps, I turned away to follow Flora up the path to Arthur's cottage. Now was not the time for forgiveness or ripping that flannel off his shoulders, anyway. It was time to find what was rotten in Redbud.

With my first step onto the forest path, I removed the parasite ring from my finger. Had I not been so timid, so afraid of discovery, my own magical immune system would have annihilated whatever had stung me like a moth at a bug zapper.

I'd told the Crafting Circle all about what I'd seen and heard between Jakob Tabrass and Codrin Alder, omitting the fact that Jakob was a warlock due to Ame's warning and why I'd been stalking him in the first place, but Flora insisted on a thorough examination of Cedar Haven. After inspecting the hive—half of which was dead—with her wand, she came to the same conclusion I had.

The source of the infection was not here, but deeper in the woods.

She turned to Daphne and Shari, but before she could open her mouth, the quiet crafter said, "We're coming too."

"Don't touch anything and don't let anything touch you," Flora huffed, pulling some seeds from her pocket and tapping them with her wand. They sprouted and twisted into twin bracelets. "Put these on. For protection."

The older women complied, Daphne adjusting her shawl so it draped over her head and Shari lifting her hood. I was the only one who seemed out of place in the silk tunic and leather sandals Daphne had lent me, but with the parasite ring off my finger, I was a force to be reckoned with.

Or so I hoped.

"Don't they need some?" Shari asked. "Misty was the one who got stung, after all. She could be stung again."

"No, she won't. The hive's queen has assured me," Flora said.

Arthur's hazel eyes went wide. "You can talk to my bees?"

"Of course. I'm a garden gnome." She returned to the topic at hand. "Bees are said to be the warden of the woods, indicative of an environment's health. If there are bees, pollinators, it's a good ecosystem. Well, this one was—is—in trouble. The bees knew it, knew they couldn't do anything about it, either. They had to find a champion, and ‘the good man'—that's you, Arthur—didn't have the necessary skill set." She pointed at me. "And who better than a green witch to understand their plight? I mean, a garden gnome would've been better, but I wasn't here."

"That sting almost killed me!" I exclaimed. "Some warning!"

"Well, that wasn't their intent. They were infected, after all. The queen is very sorry, you know."

I rubbed the scar where the blister had been not too long ago, grumbling.

"But the more we talk, the more the forest dies. Let's go."

"Stay here, old man," Arthur instructed Cody, clipping a radio onto his belt and handing another one to Daphne. "You're backup."

For once in his life, Cody didn't argue. "You better believe it, boy," the carpenter said instead, his joints popping as he eased down into his seat in front of the radio station.

With a few bottles of water divided up among us, we set out into the forest.

Despite this being Arthur's home, I led the way down the sawmill path to the river. Magic pricked at my fingertips, urging to be released, to fuel the iron cuffs and destroy the threat. Instead I sprinkled pink granules over a sickly piece of earth and cast my Seeking Spell, the same one I'd used to locate Brandi after she'd hexed my cider press. To my inner eye, the black tendrils of the infection were coming from the west.

Flora confirmed with her wand, and our little party followed the river towards the deep woods. And Alder Ranch.

We were as quiet as the forest, for all the birds and insects had gone. The trees were groaning or oppressively silent, leaves crunching loudly underfoot for there was even less moisture in the air, despite the spray from the rushing river. Even the moss was brittle, the ferns straw-colored and drooping. We didn't need our magic to follow the path of the blight, but it certainly helped confirming we were going in the right direction.

There were no more stings, no strange pressure differentials that might allude to hidden magical traps, and though I constantly looked through my periphery, there were no glamours. The only thing that stood out like a sore thumb in this otherwise somber landscape was the big elm tree by the river.

"Huh," Flora said, craning back to examine its whole height. A monumental task, for even a tall shifter like Arthur couldn't do it.

"Why's it so green while everything else is… not?" Daphne wondered.

Though Arthur pressed his hand against the trunk in wonder, he couldn't come up with an answer, and I was most certainly not going to tell them it was because of me. That elm was the one I'd magic-sucker-punched back to life not more than a month ago.

"Anomalies happen, even in the supernatural world," Flora said, pressing forward at a relentless pace. "Maybe this old grandfather is growing on an ancient cache deep in the earth."

"Is it getting darker?" Shari asked. Her hands, unoccupied by a crochet hook and yarn, had started to scratch at her arms over her sleeves.

It was not yet noon, but she was absolutely right. There was a gloom here, one thickening the closer we approached the border between Cedar Haven and Alder Ranch. It was also colder, though no wind blew.

"Dear," Daphne said calmly, extracting a pill bottle from her pocket. "Let's have some medicine, alright?"

Shari looked like she was on the verge of protesting, but she willingly took the pill Daphne offered her with a swallow from the water bottle. Her itching subsided as we walked, though her hands still kept themselves busy by fisting the cuffs of her hoodie into wadded balls.

"Careful up here," Arthur rumbled. "We'll run into barbed wire soon."

Daphne found it first, hissing as it snagged on the fringe of her shawl. Shari's nimble fingers were eager to do something other than dig into her cuffs or scratch at her arms; she had Daphne free in seconds.

"That's the property line," Arthur said. "Alder Ranch. Codrin won't like it if we come over uninvited."

"Open your eyes, big man," Flora. "He's the cause of all this. Or at least has something to do with it. Otherwise why would the blight be radiating from his property? Tallyho!"

While the gnome and her glowing wand could scramble under the lowest line of barbed wire, it was not so easy for the rest of us. The land was sloping upwards now, lines of barbed wire at shin, waist, and head height. Moving around us, Arthur pulled on his work gloves and lowered the top line until he could catch it with his boot, forcing all three down and their barbs into the leaf mold. Daphne took his extended hand and let him help her through the V in the wire, pitching forward to combat the slope. Shari was next, humming something like, "Nice, but not Charlie nice," and then I slipped my hand into his.

The jolt of even this innocent touch had my heart skipping, but I told it sharply to calm down. We weren't out the woods yet. Literally.

"What's really going on?" Arthur murmured as I passed through the fence. "My bees, the trees, this stink in the forest? Alder Ranch? Does this have anything to do with the carnival? And why do you smell like goat milk?"

"This has everything to do with the carnival," I said, ignoring the comment about my scent. Though, from the way he'd said it, he didn't find it unattractive. "It's also the reason for most of my… flightiness."

I didn't elaborate until I crested the steep slope, needing to concentrate so I wouldn't slip and find myself tangled in the barbed wire. The Crafting Circle was already picking a path through the beech trees, their pale gray bark far darker than it had any right to be.

When I was sure Shari couldn't hear me, I turned back to Arthur and whispered, "Jakob Tabrass isn't some mystical gypsy. He's not a vampire, either. He's a warlock, and I saw a—" I bit back the word shadowman and changed subjects. It was too close to the grimoire in my crawlspace.

"That night at the rodeo, I knew he was up to something," I said, massaging the truth. "I didn't know what, still don't, but he'd made a deal with Codrin Alder. Or he's the facilitator of it, and whatever you did at the Lumberjack Trials nullified it. Jakob took something out of Codrin—some sort of magic, I think—then the next day I get stung and—"

"Keep up," Flora called.

I didn't want to say it anyway. To admit aloud all that I'd gone through, all the terror and regret and pain, but my body said it for me. I was shaking.

And then I wasn't, enveloped in Arthur's arms and cradled against his chest.

I seized his back, fingers pressing, almost digging in, and inhaling the scent of old-growth forest like it was the last breath I would ever take. Thistle thorns, why did you have to touch me? Why do you feel so incredibly— Let go, Meadow. He's a shifter, you're a witch! Grandmother would—

Yet I leaned in closer, unable to get enough of him even though my arms and chest and face were full of him. By the Green Mother, he was so solid, so strong and warm, and in just a few seconds it would only be his arms keeping me upright, for my legs were on the fast track to becoming pudding.

His deep voice rumbled like an avalanche in my ears, "Had I known, I never would have let you step foot—"

"Misty," Flora hissed. It was half prompt, half reprimand, and wholly a battle cry to focus!

My body protested each inch I forced it to take away from the lumberjack shifter, and it seemed he was experiencing the same unwillingness at releasing me. The air felt suddenly cold now that I wasn't pressed against him, like a brisk slap to the face. It had me jogging to catch up to the others, ignoring Flora's glare as I bent down to sprinkle more pink granules of my Seeking Spell on the ground.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but you can play climb the redwood later," the gnome chastised. "My wand's getting overloaded. I can't distinguish anything anymore."

"It's because we're close." Quickly brushing the dirt from my fingers, for it was cold and slimy and more akin to sludge than soil, I pointed to the left. "In that glen."

We approached with long, quiet strides, avoiding twigs and the thickest of dried leaves.

"Misty," Flora whispered, this time not in admonishment, but in fear.

I'd sensed it too, a change in pressure, a hum of tension. Green magic sprang to my fingers, enveloping my hands and up to my shoulders in writhing green vines. Just a thought away from turning into the battle magic that could be amplified by my cuffs into something even deadlier than I could conjure alone. But my intent was to protect, not destroy.

For the moment.

Arthur matched my stride, shoulders tights, fingers in loose fists that could be tightened to punch or flared to claw. As one, we moved forward though the last of the dying trees and into the glen.

A sole tree, one that had to have been a mighty elm or beech in its prime, had become squat, stooped, its straight limbs now wizened and twisted, bare branches clawing at the air like it was trying to inflict its pain on the sky.

"Is that metal?" I whispered, my breath like a cloud of frosty mist. Thistle thorns, it was so cold here.

Pressed into the bark long ago, so long that the tree had nearly absorbed them as it grew, was ring upon ring of Celtic knotwork talismans.

"Dara knots," Arthur said lowly, his voice sounding more feral than I'd ever heard it before. He was recognizing something here I wasn't. "Represents the root structure of an oak tree. It's a symbol of strength."

Old magic obviously meant to keep something contained, but the ward had obviously broken. Ribbons of red mist encircled the trunk, twisting, writhing, a few worming their way into the ground at the base of the tree—clearly the source of whatever was poisoning the forest.

"Carefully now," I warned, circling tentatively. While I projected an aura of cautious confidence, I was a hair's breadth away from channeling my true Hawthorne heritage. I wasn't about to let this thing try to kill me again.

And there it was, a knot or a crack in the trunk revealing what was hidden within. A pulsing red ember the size of my fist. My stomach dropped as I recognized a familiar aura.

"What is that?" Flora demanded. Her tone was caught somewhere between outrage and horror, for this thing inside was killing the tree and everything else around it, something no garden gnome would stand for.

"I think—"

"Shari!" Daphne shrieked.

We whirled to find the quiet crafter had gone white, brown eyes impossibly wide, blood dripping down her fingers and splattering against the dry leaves from where her nails had dug through her sweater and into her skin from all her scratching.

"Demon," Shari whispered.