Chapter 26

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

My family collapsed. Six witches fell to the frozen earth, and Aunt Eranthis hurried to revive them. Grandmother bent down and retrieved the weakened hearth ember, snapping the censer shut and pressing it into my palm. Then she went to help her niece, cursing lowly as she discovered the state of her coven.

The matriarch of the Hawthorne coven set her glowing green hands first on one witch and then the next, sparing what magic she had left to replenish their strength. Aunt Eranthis did the same, and I would have aided them had not my cell phone started to buzz like it had a cicada trapped inside. Only four people would be texting me at this hour, and if it was any one of them, it was worth checking out.

With Dart the pixie astride his shoulders, Sawyer rose from his crouch at my feet and pricked his ears as I opened the text message from Arthur: He's here! Stay inside.

"Grandmother!" I rushed to the nearest family member—Otter—and hauled him upright. "The magic hunter's back. We have to get to the farmhouse."

"Don't let go of that hearth ember," she ordered. "Everyone, we're leaving the mirror here. Come on!"

Grunting, she strained to lift Mom and Aunt Peony to their feet. Dad was upright, shaking his head like he was trying to clear sweat out of his eyes and stumbling. Uncle Badger and Aunt Hyacinth were leaning against each other, arms linked around each other's waist. I was slinging Otter's arm around my shoulders when a familiar, "Yoohoo!" echoed through the empty forest.

No, not empty.

A mist had formed.

Otter grunted when I twisted around to find Daphne with her blackthorn shillelagh and Flora with her beechwood wand trudging through the mist-shrouded trees.

"We do not have time for this," Grandmother growled, pushing Mom and Aunt Peony towards the orchard. They staggered forward on weak legs, clutching each other for support. Aunt Peony moaned miserably as her ankle twisted with her next step.

"What are you doing here?" I asked my friends, barely sparing them a glance as I frantically looked past them for any sign of Antler Tattoo. My family was primed for an attack, and I wasn't sure Grandmother, Aunt Eranthis, and I could defend everyone from his strange and powerful magic.

"We saw the light through the trees," Daphne answered, stopping at the edge of the moonflowers.

"'Sup, Sawyer?" Flora greeted, smiling broadly.

The tomcat's ears lowered as he returned to his hunch.

The elegant older woman gave the clearing a wide-eyed look. "What's going on here?"

"She and Arcadis had a little chat," Otter slurred. "It was not fun."

"We can talk about that later," I said briskly, already turning away to help Otter back to the farmhouse. "Arthur says Antler Tattoo is close. We need to hurry inside." Pausing, I looked past Daphne, expecting to see the third Crafting Circle lady clinging to her buckskin skirt. "Where's Shari?"

"Back at the house, of course."

"But…" But you've never left her alone in your life. Even when the blight was spreading from the heart tree in Alder Ranch, Shari had been in Cody's care, never alone. And when Daphne and Flora had gone to St. Louis for the moonflowers, she'd been with me.

"Meadow," Sawyer whispered, pressing close. "Flora never calls me Sawyer. It's always ‘tomcat' or ‘Stripes.'"

It was then I truly looked at my friends. A second later, my eyes slid to the side.

The elegant older woman and the garden gnome had fuzzy edges. Thick fuzzy edges. Thick enough to fool my recently developed ability to see through glamours.

When my focus returned to Daphne's face, I realized her smile wasn't reaching her blue eyes. Blue eyes that weren't hers.

That smile vanished as I let Otter slump unceremoniously to the ground and called emerald green magic to my fists. The hearth ember flared like a green sun within its censer, rousing at my call and feeding what magic it had left into mine. "Who are you?" I demanded.

The Hawthorne witches halted their woozy retreat from the woods, half-turning around at the sound of the granite in my voice. At my feet, Sawyer's fur began to rise, and the pixie on his back lifted into the air with an angry chirp.

Quick as a hornet, it launched itself at Flora.

Flora shouted as Dart tore a huge chunk out of her nose, and when she snatched at the pixie, it wasn't her nimble fingers that clamped around its silver-green body, but a calloused hand with coarse black hair bristling around the knuckles. In his other hand, the wand had become a spiked club.

The pixie screeched a strangled flute-like sound as Wystan the hobgoblin flung it to the ground and stomped down on its slender spine with his boot. When his glamour vanished, the one on Daphne evaporated, leaving the magic hunter with the antler tattoo spreading across his neck standing there instead.

"Hello, Misty Fields." He flashed me a sickle of a white smile. "A pleasure to finally make your acquaintance."

I was momentarily stunned, but not about the released glamour and the presence of the Antler Tattoo Guy. Wystan? During my first few days in Redbud, I'd offended the hobgoblin, and he'd been so convinced I'd been malicious instead of ignorant and had refused my apology. The pixies had carted him off to whoever knew where, but there he had clearly nursed his grudge against me. Enough to rat me out to the magic hunters.

"…unusual green eyes, just like he said," the magic hunter had said outside the Magic Brewery just a few weeks ago. I'd wondered then who had told him I had such uniquely colored eyes, but I'd never thought it was the hobgoblin.

Hands fisted, I raked my cuffs against one another, activating the runes. Battle magic like angry ivy-green briars rippled up to my shoulders. "What did you do to my friends?" I shouted.

"Meadow, get back!" Grandmother shouted, sloughing Uncle Badger and Dad off on their spouses so she could rush to my side.

"Meadow, is it?" the magic hunter drawled.

"My friends," I snarled, keeping to the conversation at hand.

"They are unharmed," Antler Tattoo said, the fae-like markings on the backs of his hands glowing as he gestured to the nearest black walnut tree at the edge of the moonflower grove.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the tree shortened and the base of its trunk ballooned out until it resembled a nineteenth-century hoop skirt. But instead of a corseted Parisian aristocrat's torso emerging from the bulbous undercarriage, it was the upper half of a sylvan youth with pointy ears, closely cropped black hair, and eyes burning with blue faelight.

A mallaithe.

It bared black teeth as its roots unwound from their seamless trunk-like appearance to reveal my three friends clustered tightly inside. Shari was as pale and trembly as a quaking aspen, Daphne's brow was furrowed in righteous anger, and Flora's face was red from all her shouting. Her wand was nowhere in sight, so either another of the mallaithe's roots had it imprisoned beyond her grasp, or it'd been left behind when she'd been abducted.

"She left us," Shari whispered, her voice pitching with hysteria. "She left us!"

I saw no sign of Ame.

"And your friends will stay unharmed if you come with me now," Antler Tattoo said. "I'll even let your family go free."

There was a cry behind me—Aunt Hyacinth.

I risked a frantic glance over my shoulder to find my aunt crouched over her son, Otter convulsing on the ground. The mist had tightened around us, and a vaporish hand was receding from where the sluagh had touched my cousin. There was a shrill cry as my mother was affected next, just the lightest brush against her shoulder, and she collapsed unconscious against my father. Aunt Eranthis cut through the swirling mist with a supersized needle of green magic, but she was too weak from the summoning and the reviving for the attack to hold much weight.

"You're no match for me or my family," I snapped, only half-bluffing, since my family was dropping like flies from the sluagh's icy touch. "I'm not the same witch you tried to intimidate with your fiáin."

"I've evolved too, witch," Antler Tattoo sneered, shrugging out of his peacoat.

Gooseflesh rose along a wiry bare chest and arms ropey with muscle, the myriad bluish-green tattoos that covered his skin like ivy glowing brightly.

Blue eyes wild with fanatic delight, Antler Tattoo shot his hand out at me as he bellowed a command in the language of the fae. The ivy-like tattoos leapt off his skin, lashing through the air to entangle me, but I had already struck.

Ivy-green flames shot from the hand that held the censer in a line of fire that ripped across the clearing to engulf the mallaithe tree. The sylvan youth released a pained screech, rearing away from the flames. Daphne and Flora seized Shari and hurled themselves out of the way, rolling back to their feet and sprinting for the coven.

Behind me, Grandmother thrust her blazing hands out wide with a shout, encasing the family and my friends in a glittering green shield. The sluagh crashed upon it like storm-angered waves, a sound like cracking crystal accompanying each attack.

A roar split through the forest then, and the magic hunter's blue eyes slid towards a hulking shape barreling through the trees.

Antler Tattoo's arm was still outstretched, the malevolent ivy lashing towards me when the next three things happened faster than the eye could track: Wystan went after Sawyer with his club, the tabby tomcat attacking with tooth and claw; my battle magic briars shot after the magic hunter's ankles; and a grizzly bear's massive jaws clamped down on Antler Tattoo's extended forearm, severing it from his body.

As the magic hunter screamed and clutched his bloody stump of an arm to his bare chest, his glowing ivy attack dissipated into bluish-green smoke and my briars yanked him straight off his feet. The sluagh shrilled and screeched as they bombarded Grandmother's shield, dozens of them dissolving but weakening her shield with every sacrificial attack until it shattered. At its master's command, the black mallaithe tackled the bear, both of them crashing to the ground in a maelstrom of slashing claws and striking roots. Sawyer dodged the spikes of Wystan's club and sank his teeth into the hobgoblin's ankle, eliciting a howl, and then a loud voice boomed,

"Who dares spill blood in my forest?"

The bare trees shook and spindly elderberry shrubs shivered as the leaves sprang up and swirled upon a whirlwind. An impossibly tall figure stepped into the moonlit clearing on cloven feet. Soft, coppery hair covered his muscular legs, the knees jointed to resemble a deer's. The hair gave way at his hips to bronzed skin, taut over a sculpted set of abs and a broad chest that at any other time would've had me blushing with embarrassment as I ogled him.

The column of his neck was strong, the jaw sharp, a sprinkle of freckles across his nose and cheeks giving the illusion of a more youthful appearance, and those eyes… They were ageless green jewels that burned with an inner fire. Copper curls threatened to obscure those stunning eyes, and an impressive rack of antlers like those of a red deer sprouted from his head. Even in the darkness of night, a soft glow emanated from his skin reminiscent of afternoon sunbeams. He was… beautiful.

Not just handsome. Not just ravishing and alluring and majestic. Truly beautiful, and in the most dangerous of ways. This beauty lowered your inhibitions and enticed you to indulge your darkest, most secretive fantasies, for this beauty promised to satisfy them all.

With a wave of his hand, the stranger dispelled the sluagh.

I saw no magic, though I felt its power, and the vile creatures shrieked as the whirlwind of leaves sawed them apart. The sluagh had overwhelmed my family, leaving all but my grandmother sprawled unconscious on the ground shivering and twitching. But my family had defended my friends; the Crafting Circle ladies cowered, unscathed, next to Grandmother's legs like frightened children. The leaves settled, the night becoming so quiet that you could hear the fluttering of moth wings against the windowpanes of the farmhouse.

With the forest settled, the fae—for that was the only thing he could be—turned the full force of his attention on me. A wave of power washed over me, and something thrummed through my bones, either his own magic or mine rising in response. On an instinctive level, I recognized him, and it took only that infinitesimal moment when his eyes met mine for him to realize the same. That assessing expression on his beautiful face turned to one of victory as his gaze flicked from my eyes to something behind me and back again. Not something. Some one.

"Violet's daughters," he murmured, his voice as rich and luscious as melted chocolate.

And just like that, inevitability tolled.

This is that nexus , I realized, even as my thoughts turned a little sluggish, a little fuzzy, as the golden aura exuding from his skin brightened.

The prophecy was not just about Violet's heir. Mom's words from the attic not two days ago fought through the haze creeping into my mind. But the one who seeks her. And the choice she will make when he finds her.

"Green Mother help us," Grandmother whispered, terrified.

"Who—" Suddenly finding myself trembling with anticipation and more than a little brain fog, I had to swallow to again find my voice. "Who are you?"

"Why, I'm the one your grandmother warned you about," the Stag Man answered.