Chapter 20

Daphne criedout in surprise as her ward fainted, lurching forward to catch Shari before she fell to the contaminated earth. Flora hustled over as quick as her short legs could carry her, but Arthur and my attention remained riveted on the thing inside the tree. Clearly we'd both been trained to never take our eyes off our enemy.

"Arthur—"

"I got this."

I snorted. "I doubt superhuman strength and your beast can handle that."

"And you can?" There was more curiosity than snark in his tone.

I'd fought one Big Nasty before, though I'd barely escaped with my life. But I had survived, and must have wounded it to the point that it couldn't hunt me down since I was still alive weeks after the fact, so that definitely counted as win. "Yes," I replied firmly. "Now go check on Shari."

The lumberjack shifter gave me a sideways glance, no doubt searching my expression for bravado, but he wouldn't find it there. After a clipped, "Be careful," he backstepped until he was with the other women.

Meanwhile, one thought was racing around in my head like a dog chasing after its tail: Oh my Green Mother, what do we do?!

Clearly Flora was on the same wavelength, now that Shari was being tended to by Arthur and Daphne, and joined my side, resting her hand against my leg so I'd know where she was. "So… any ideas?"

I sucked in a breath, feeling the solid presence of the earth surge up through my feet and into my core. My racing thoughts were dispelled with an exhale, my mind settling back into the concentration patterns I'd trained in for the last month.

"Tests," I answered, wetting my lips. More confidently, I continued, "Spells are specific. We can test the dara knotwork to get an understanding of what its purpose is, perhaps of what it is inside the tree. We have to know what we're dealing with. Do you have any selenite? I left all of m—"

"What are you doing here?" a voice thundered. Codrin Alder marched into view from the opposite side of the glen, a double-barrel shotgun propped against one shoulder.

"Jumping hop-toads," Flora exclaimed, a second later lunging forward with her glowing wand. "Not another step, long-legs, or the whole of Redbud will know what you've done here. Daphne's got Ms. Charlotte Harris on speed dial, and the Talk of the Town hasn't had anything juicier than Olive McKatt getting busted for running that poker den in her basement, and that was a decade ago. We're due for a good story!"

"Codrin," Arthur greeted, though from the sound of his growl it was most definitely a warning. "We're here to help."

Codrin gritted his teeth, eyes glassy. The shotgun shook on his shoulder. "You can't help. In fact, you're the one who ruined it!"

"Mr. Alder," I said, "please, put the gun down."

The rancher, once hale with muscle built from years of riding and roping, despite the slight paunch that said he never missed the opportunity for slice of his wife's pound cake, was a waif of his old self. In all of a day, he'd dropped at least thirty pounds, lost his tan, and his proud chest seemed sunken, as if an invisible weight was crushing down on his shoulders. His wedding band was loose on his finger, and it winked in time to the tremors racing through his body.

"I know you don't know me," I said gently, "but you do know Flora. You know how good she is with plants, how strong her magic is. She kinda flaunts it, actually. I'm sure you noticed her hedgerow and topiaries at the First of Fall Festival?"

Recognition flashed in the Alder patriarch's eyes—Flora's garish booth had been impossible to miss, as had the garden gnome herself, despite being no taller than my knee.

"Cody called her because his forest was sick, and she called me to help." That was stretching the truth a little, but at least he was listening. "She wouldn't have asked me if I couldn't help."

Codrin shook his head, defeated. "This magic is beyond any of you."

"I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much," Flora said stoutly. Then she snapped her fingers. "Now let's hear it, long-legs. Chop-chop!"

We all stiffened as the shotgun shifted, but Codrin was just lowering it until the barrels indented the leaves at his feet. "I-it all started with my father." He dragged a trembling hand down his ashen face. "He was running the ranch into the ground, poor decisions coupled with drought and debt…"

He unshielded his eyes, that hand tightening into a fist. "I saw a chance to save our home and I took it. I knew what it was like to go hungry, to have the bank knocking at your door every minute of the day, of animals in your care suffering. And I'd be damned then let my children or their children experience the same thing!"

"So you made a deal," Arthur said, voice level, neither condemning nor condoning. Small towns always seemed to have an unfair share of folks scraping by, of doing whatever they needed to to survive, even if that pushed them into the morally gray or black spectrum.

Codrin nodded, then turned his gaze to the tree. "That thing in the trunk is fae. A fae heart, or at least part of one."

"Why you—!"

I snatched Flora before she could throw herself at the rancher, fists and wand swinging. Flora was fae, a fairy to be exact, though it was easy to forget with her very human mannerisms. This was her kin, after a fashion.

When Codrin was sure Flora wasn't going to claw his eyes out or grow a vine to string him up, he continued. "The fae heart was embedded and sealed away in that tree with the dara knots and a spell, and it would provide endless prosperity to the ranch, so long as the contract for its imprisonment was renewed every year. We had to be worthy of this, this—"

"Crime!" Flora bellowed. "Of its perpetual purgatory for your gain! You savage!"

Codrin wouldn't look at her, and for a moment, I didn't think he was going to continue, but then he said in a quiet voice, "The gypsy Jakob Tabrass was the facilitator, and on behalf of his master, the one who actually imprisoned the demon's heart," he said pointedly to Flora, as if those details would somehow absolve him, "he initiated three tests every year at the Carnival Cauchemar. Three tests to prove our strength and mental fortitude and intelligence. Our resolve. But the fine print… There had to be an opportunity for someone else—someone stronger, smarter, more worthy—to win."

"The Nightmare Rodeo, the Corn Maze Race, and the Lumberjack Trials," Arthur said grimly. "And I edged your family out of the last one." He shook his head. "I'm sorry; I didn't know."

"And then the thing in Jakob's cane took back the lock that kept the tree sealed," I concluded. "That about right?"

The rancher's eyes flashed, realizing I'd seen what had transpired in the warlock's wagon that last night. "You saw it?"

I didn't need to answer him.

Nodding, he gestured to the tree. "The spell's been unraveling ever since, poisoning everything. We moved the herds to the far pastures, but at the rate of its spread, it'll get them tomorrow. We'll be destroyed."

"Serves you right," Flora shouted.

Daphne abandoned Shari in Arthur's arms to march and pluck the gnome out of my grip, giving her a little shake. "You wanna yell or you wanna save Redbud? Get ahold of yourself, woman!"

Under the elder woman's glare, the garden gnome finally simmered down, muttering, "Save Redbud."

"That's what I thought." Daphne dropped the gnome unceremoniously to the ground and went back to Shari, now groggily regaining consciousness. "Now you chop-chop!"

Flora dusted herself off as I lowered into a crouch so we could converse quietly.

"Got any ideas?" I whispered.

The garden gnome gnawed fruitlessly on her bottom lip, eyes darting from the pulsing half-heart to the red tendrils penetrating the earth and back again. "I don't have the faintest idea where to begin. Gnomish magic isn't dark. It's life magic. I've never even seen a demon before. Have you?"

I let my silence answer for me.

"Jumping hop-toads," the gnome whisper. "Well, you're now the resident expert. What do we do?"

"Just because I fought one off doesn't mean—"

"Woah, you fought one? I thought you'd just seen one, like through binoculars on some demonic safari or something."

"What was that?" Arthur demanded from where he stood across the glen, hazel eyes bulging.

"Will you lower your voice?" I hissed at the gnome. "And stop saying that D word. It calls their attention." At least, that's what I'd been taught. Then, sucking in a deep breath, I said, "What do we know? Big Nasties are fae, twisted and dark, but fae nonetheless. Can we kill it?"

Codrin, having overheard our whisperings, said, "I've tried. Shot it, threw holy water on it. Even tried to stab it with iron but there's some sort of protection spell that deflects it. Nothing works. The… person who put it in there said it's only part of the heart, that so long as the main heart beats, this one will never cease."

"A battery," I murmured.

"What, so this creepy guy's got a room in his house with shelves full of jars with half-hearts in them just beating away and maintaining a bunch of curses?" Flora scoffed.

"From the way it sounded," Codrin said, "it seemed the bigger half was still in the chest of—"

"It was rhetorical!" Flora huffed a frustrated growl and smoothed back her curls. "Yo, shifter boy, you got any experience with this sorta thing?"

Arthur shook his head.

"All those muscles and for what?" the gnome grumbled. "Maybe you need to do more in your free time than bench press."

"I heard that."

"What about Shari?" I murmured. "She seems to know something."

The older woman was more alert now and getting squirmy. Frantic, even, pawing at Arthur to release her. To get away from it. "I won't go back," she babbled. "No, no, no. I won't go back. Let me go!"

"I'm taking her back to Cedar Haven," Daphne announced firmly. She fished around in her pocket and withdrew the small bottle of pills. "Shari, dear, I need you to take two of these, please."

Shari's lips clamped, still struggling against the immovable cage of Arthur's arms. The lumberjack seized her cheeks and pinched. She opened her mouth with a squeak, and Daphne popped the pills in and followed it with a splash of water. Shari wiggled like a fractious cat, but Daphne merely clamped her hand over the younger woman's mouth.

"I hate doing it this way," she muttered.

But Shari eventually swallowed and soon ceased her struggling. When her eyes had a kind of glazed look in them, she didn't resist when Daphne took her gently by the hand and started leading her away.

"Arthur, would you please go with them?" I asked. "Make sure they don't get hurt?"

He looked torn, glancing from the retreating women and back to me.

"Misty knows how to kick a little butt," Flora assured him. "Daph and Shari need you more than she does. Shoo!"

Arthur crossed the glen to press the radio into my hand, fingers melding over mine. "Do not hesitate to call. I'll be back as soon as I can. And here"—he shucked his coat and held it out for me to slip into—"you're starting to shiver."

I hadn't even noticed I'd started rubbing my arms. Maybe it was because of the cold, maybe it was a subconscious comforting mechanism, but as I ceased my rubbings to accept his coat, the silken sleeves of the tunic that had risen past my elbows slithered back into place, sliding over something else on my arm that glinted with the same silvery-white sheen as the fabric.

"The bee sting!" I exclaimed, lurching away from the coat and shoving my sleeve back over my elbow to reveal the puckered scar where the blister had once been.

"The what?" Flora and Arthur said together. Then Flora let out a sharp whistle. "Daph, hold up!"

"If none of us knows how to kill it," I continued, "we can do the next best thing. Contain it. Like we did me."

Flora shook her head. "But your infection burned through the crystals within hours. This is ten times that, if not more!"

"That's why we use the moonflowers." I grinned, pointing to the imbedded metal pendants in the trunk. "Codrin said iron had no affect. Well, those Celtic knots are iron. So why are they working? Because of their shape. Their intent. We grow the moonflower vine in the same shape around the base of the tree. It'll contain and cleanse. It might not burn out the badness in the heart like it did me, but it should surely weaken it! Enough that it has to focus on its own survival rather than contaminating everything around it."

"And moonflowers are replenished by the moonlight!" Flora exclaimed. "We cut down these surrounding trees to get some light in here, and they'll keep charging and cleansing on repeat!"

"W-will that really work?" Codrin asked, afraid to hope.

"Intent is nine-tenths of magic," Flora said, rolling up her sleeves.

"And do you have these moonflowers?"

"Yeah. Only thing is, moonflowers have a low viability and reproduction rate. They're like vanilla bean orchids that way." Her shoulders slumped. "What we have might not even work."

"Only one way to find out," I said, snapping my fingers. Green light shot to my fingertips, sparking with gold.

"Come on," Codrin urged. "We'll take my truck. It's faster than traipsing through the woods."