by Jane Kindred
“How do I know which is mine?”
“You’ll know.”
I studied her impassive face for a moment beneath her hooded anorak before proceeding on my own to the point she’d indicated. Unlike the surrounding trees, this cluster looked dark and overgrown, so dense that the ground was dry as if the rain rarely reached it. And then I saw my tree.
The bark of the trunk before me, which rose to an impressive thirty feet or more in height, was scarred down the side, blackened from some long-ago forest fire in a swath that rose from the base of the tree. Beside it stood a blackened stump. My mother’s tree.
I fell to my knees, heedless of the pine needles, staring in shock. It was like seeing her corpse laid out on an autopsy table. I hadn’t expected this. Signe had set a fire in the Grove, Clara had told me. But it hadn’t been just any fire. She’d torched my mother’s tree. “No, no, no, no, no.” The repeated single syllable whispered out of me like a stutter of fear while tears poured over my cheeks. Aunt Signe had taken her from me. Out of a spiteful, warped need for vengeance, she’d destroyed Beverly as surely as if she’d poured gasoline on her human form and thrown a lit match. “Mamma,” I keened, stunned by how deeply I felt her here, a mother I’d never even known.
Emilie. I heard it in the rustling of foliage in the wind. Surely I’d imagined it. My mother’s tree was an empty husk.
“Mamma?” I rose on my knees and stretched my fingers toward the tree, brushing the wet, damaged bark. A shock rushed through me as though I’d touched a live wire, and I couldn’t pull away.
Acrid smoke seemed to fill the air, and the incendiary heat of fire engulfed me just as in my dreams. I was in the Grove, and the Grove was burning. Heated air lifted my hair, my lungs burning as I breathed in the suffocating smoke, and all along my right side, my scars felt inflamed. Now I could see the flames in the trees before me, and in them, occupying the same space where the stump stood, I saw my mother.
“Emmy!” she cried, hand held out to me, and though she was just inches away, I couldn’t reach it.
“Mamma!”
“The ashes!” she gasped. “Find my ashes!” Fire licked up her side, and her scream of agony became my own.
“Millie!” Lumi was shaking me, pulling me back from the stump. The fire, and my mother, had vanished. “What happened? Are you all right?”
I stumbled back onto my ass. Though the vision had faded, ash was still falling from the sky like the remnants of a forest fire, a dark snowfall fluttering around me. “Ashes,” I said. I held up my palm, a child catching snowflakes. There was nothing there.
“Millie?”
“You didn’t tell me my mother was rådande.”
Lumi helped me to my feet. “I thought you understood that. How else would you be what you are?”
“Signe—” My breath caught at the knowledge she’d murdered my mother. She’d set the fire right here, deliberately taking Beverly’s life. “Signe wasn’t sure the Grove would speak to me. I thought that meant only my father was rådande.”
“Beverly’s tree was native. The Strands are purists. They regarded Beverly as having been from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak.”
I could still taste char on the air. “Where are her ashes?”
“Her ashes?”
“Her body’s ashes. Her human ashes. She wants me to find them.”
“You communed with her.”
I nodded, looking at the blackened husk of my mother’s immortal essence. “How can she still be here if her tree is dead?”
Lumi shrugged. “You’re here. A bit of her still remains.”
I finally remembered my tree, the reason I’d come here. I gazed up at it, dizzy at its height.
“Careful,” Lumi warned. “I admit I was more concerned about how you’d feel seeing Beverly’s tree, but it’s still risky to get too close to your own.”
It didn’t seem like my own. It seemed like a tree. Though I’d seen Lukas merge with a hollow, had the jarring experience of watching Ares “jump” hollows right in front of me, and seen my mother’s spirit in the burned-out sarcophagus beside me just moments ago, I still doubted, somehow, that this could be real. I pressed my hand to the bark as I’d done with my mother’s and heard Lumi say my name in an anxious tone. And then I was in.
Chapter Twenty
Quiet. So quiet. Air ebbing and flowing like blood to the heart. Safe. Safe earth. Peace. I am all that I am. Caress of sunlight. Drink. Breathe. Rest. Earth between my roots. My earth. My air. My sun. Beetle. Birdsong. Nests and comfort and oneness, rightness, timeless place earth turning beneath me and the stones are solid and joy and hush, hush. Calm. Hush. Heartbeat.
Heartbeat.
I feel, I feel, I feel. Roots entangling roots. Blood and bones and nerves and flesh, touch, need, scent of your skin against my lips, hold, touch, tangle, love, don’t leave, don’t leave— “Don’t leave me, Lukas!”
The ground rushed toward me, and I found myself prone against a muddy path. This wasn’t the Grove. Anxiety shot through my nervous system like a bolt of liquid lightning. This isn’t the Grove! Go back! I scrambled to my feet, swaying on them, expecting the solid steadiness of roots and connectedness.
“Lukas?” My heart was battering my chest. He’d been here. I’d felt him. He’d pulled me from my body. Not my body. My tree. Where the hell was I? I turned in a circle, trying to control my breathing, automatically feeling in my pockets for the metal tin I carried in my coat that held a few doses of my antianxiety meds. Sometimes just knowing they were there would loosen the winding spiral of mindless fear. My hand closed around the tin, and I recognized the path. I was between the lighthouse cottage and the manor. Had Lukas actually pulled me here? It seemed impossible.
My phone rang, and it was him. “Get back to the house,” he barked, and the line went dead. It hadn’t sounded like an order so much as an urgent warning, or I might have refused out of pique. I turned and ran for the house, clutching the pill tin through my pocket, my windpipe feeling as though it were closing up. If I could just get there, I’d be okay.
I reached the manor, somehow, my blood chilling at the sight of two SUVs from the sheriff’s department parked in the drive. They’d come for us. This was it. I staggered up the stairs to the door, pulling off my shoes before I’d even opened it. Inside, the scene was chaos, with servants who’d been almost invisible before in their efficiency now dashing in and out of rooms, talking in low tones. I found Lukas and his aunts in the salon, with the Apostolous and Basil clustered nearby.
“Millie.” Lukas came toward me swiftly, and then paused, taking in what must be my bloodless face as I gripped the edge of the doorframe. “Are you all right?”
Ares, standing near the buffet table, took one look at me and poured me a glass of water from the pitcher. “She needs a pill. Do you have them on you?” he asked with concern, handing me the water.
I nodded wordlessly and popped the pill out of the tin in my pocket and swallowed it, chasing it down with the water. When I felt like my throat was closing, I needed to swallow the pill, just to remind myself I could.
Lukas eyed Ares with venomous mistrust. “How did you know she needed a pill?”
Ares gave him a dismissive glance. “I’m observant.” To prove the point, he caught me by the elbow as I nearly went down.
“I’m okay,” I lied, not wanting them at each other’s throats, and drew away from him, forcing myself to stay upright. “What’s happened? Are they making an arrest?”
The set of Lukas’s jaw was tight. “No, not yet. That’s not why the sheriff’s department is here.”
My heart gave another frantic leap of alarm. “Why are they here?” Where’s Konstantin?
“Karolina has been killed,” said Lukas.
“Karolina?” I blinked at him, trying to take this in.
“Poisoned.”
Lukas took my arm and turned me around, leading me out of the salon, to Ares’s consternation. I was too dizzy to protest. “I’m sorry I had to do that—to pull you from your tree.”
“It was you. How did you even know I—?”
“Lumi called me. She said you’d stepped in against her advice, and she waited over an hour before she grew worried. I went looking for you.” He stopped and let go of my arm when we reached the garden.
“How did you… How did I get all the way here? I don’t remember jumping through any hollows. And why weren’t you there where I ended up?”
“I didn’t jump to you, I called you and drew you out. I thought you’d step out in the Grove where Lumi was still waiting. If you came at all. That wasn’t a wise thing you did, Millie.”
“I had to know.”
“And do you know, now?”
The certainty I’d felt within my tree, not only of myself but of Lukas and how my roots were entangled with his, was still fresh in my mind. “I know far more than I expected to,” I answered. We stared at each other, neither speaking. We were hopelessly intertwined, and blood made no difference. “So what happens now?”
Lukas concentrated on the planter in front of him, fingering one of the roses. “I think it’s a safe bet that Karolina was dosing Konstantin at someone else’s behest. And since she did the same to me when I was a child, it stands to reason that either one of my aunts or Roger was directing her.” He shook his head, cupping the rose with the stem between his fingers. “They’re my family. Even Roger has always been part of the family. I just can’t fathom…” His fingers curled around the rose. “Whoever it was discovered I’d questioned Karolina and realized they might be exposed if she confessed. If it was important enough to murder Karolina over, then the reason for drugging Konstantin has to be connected to Aravella’s murder as well.”
“And to the hit-and-run,” I added. “And possibly to pushing Koste down the stairs.”
Lukas looked up at me sharply. “Perhaps Konstantin has been the target all along. What if Aravella found out who it was?” His expression was pained. “She tried to talk to me that night, called me at the winery and said she had something important she needed to tell me. I hung up on her.”
“Don’t start blaming yourself for everything, Lukas. You couldn’t have known.”
“I could have believed in her. Every time she needed me, I shut her out.” He crushed the rose he held in his hand and let the petals fall. When he opened his hand, there was blood on his palm from where a thorn had pricked him. “I checked the car like you suggested. There’s damage to the front fender. Someone must have seen who drove it yesterday, and I intend to find out. In the meantime—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—you should probably stay close to Ares. At least I know the Apostolous have no reason to harm my son or anyone else here who isn’t me.”
Something twisted in my heart at Lukas sending me to Ares. Perversely, I wanted him to be wild with jealousy, to order me to stay away from him again, no matter how impossible it was between the two of us. Instead of saying any of this, I nodded.
* * * * *
The rest of the day passed in a haze of déjà vu as we were each questioned about our whereabouts at the time of Karolina’s death, and our relationships with “the deceased”. Initial examination of Karolina’s body indicated that she’d been dead for several hours, so until they discovered how the poison had been introduced, it was the previous night for which we needed alibis. Mine, embarrassingly, was Ares, but at least it kept me from suspicion. Lukas had no such corroboration for his alibi, and he’d been heard arguing with her the afternoon before. I feared it was only a matter of hours, not days, before the sheriff’s department would have no choice but to charge him with both murders.
Once they’d gone, the Apostolous headed out for a late dinner in Jerusalem, graciously inviting me to join them. Lukas’s eyes held a clear directive to me that I ought to go, and so I went.
The only other restaurant in Jerusalem was a charming gourmet vegetarian eatery that drew people in the know from as far as Eureka, Redding, and even Sacramento. Jerusalem itself might not be on the map, but it obviously had a certain reputation among dedicated gourmands.
As soon as we’d been seated and served, Alexis turned to me. “Ares says the cook was trying to poison Koste. Is that true?”
I paused with a bit of risotto on my fork. “I don’t think she was trying to poison him—not to hurt him, I mean—just keeping him sedated. For what purpose, I don’t know.”
“Maybe she got careless and ate her own food that she’d prepared for Koste. You can’t possibly know she meant him no harm.”
“Lukas had already put a stop to the ‘special meals’ she was making for Konstantin,” I assured her, finishing my bite.
“Lukas knew?” Ares turned sharply toward me.
“I told him my suspicions just as I told you.”
“And then someone poisoned Karolina.”
“It certainly wasn’t him, if that’s what you’re suggesting. We think it must have been whoever was behind her drugging Konstantin.”
“I don’t know how you can be so certain about Lukas Strand.” Ares stabbed at his dinner as if he didn’t know what to make of meatless grains. “He had every reason to murder our sister. Why not this woman too, to keep her quiet?”
“He may have had reason to hate her,” said Aristos, his soft insistence surprising everyone at the table. “But he had no reason to kill her. Not with the prenuptial agreement.”
Alexis pointed her fork at him across the table. “Since when are you on his side?”
“Do we need sides? Can’t we just let all this go, finally? Haven’t we had enough?”
“Aravella was murdered,” Ares snapped. “You want to let that go?” The rest of the argument was in Greek, and Basil gave me a look of commiseration across the table while we picked awkwardly at our food, waiting for them to finish.
“I apologize,” Ares said at last. “Perhaps a social dinner is beyond our abilities at the moment.” He waved to the waiter for the check. “If you don’t mind, Millie, we’ve decided to take the rest of the meal back to the Strand.”
* * * * *
When we returned to the manor, Ares apologized to me once more while the others headed for their rooms. “I’m sorry that descended into a sniping session. It’s not your loyalty to Lukas that I question. You can hardly be blamed for that. But he’s not who you think he is. He thinks only of himself.”
“He told me I should stay close to you,” I said.
Ares’s brow wrinkled with annoyance. “To watch me?”
“No. For protection. From whoever’s killing people at the Strand, since he knows it’s not you.”
Ares laughed in surprise and then grew serious, sliding his hand to the small of my back. “Then we mustn’t disappoint him.”
I knew I should say no, but my body was already eagerly responding and the antianxiety pill had left me with a pleasant buzz. To hell with it. I was in love with my own uncle. Might as well have a torrid affair with his sworn enemy before one of us went to prison.
When I didn’t resist Ares’s efforts to guide me toward his room, he looked amused and puzzled, closing the door and pressing me back against it, with his palms on the wood beside my shoulders. “I confess, I thought that would be a little more difficult.”
“What can I say? I’m easy.”
He laughed, moving one hand expertly through the buttons of my shirt. “You are anything but easy, Millie Lang.” Ares’s hand slipped into the opening he’d made and stroked across my stomach to rise up my side. “Such smooth skin,” he murmured, lowering his head toward me but not bringing his mouth close, just hovering, looking down with his dark curls hanging in his face.
“Not all of it,” I said, my breasts rising with my sudden intake of breath to meet his touch as
he nudged the bra down.
“Doesn’t matter. Celebrate your skin. It makes you unique. Like the rings of a tree, its marks chronicle your life.” He moved both hands to my hips and pulled me against him, letting me feel his desire in no uncertain terms. Ares’s lips dipped down to meet mine then, while his dexterous fingers divested me of my jeans. I closed my eyes, running my hands around his waist and clutching the taut muscles of his back through the silk of his shirt as I abandoned myself to his possessing mouth.
Just when I was nearly losing my wits at the warm prodding of his tongue, remembering where it had prodded before, he took his mouth away. “You’re on fire tonight,” he murmured and then winced. “Sorry. Poor choice of words.”
“Don’t worry,” I laughed breathlessly. “I can barely understand English at this point.”
Ares laughed and whispered something in Greek against my ear, kissing down my neck.
I shivered at the touch of his lips on my collarbone, pushing into his hips as they rocked to meet mine. “What was that?”
“I said, ‘I’m going to fuck you standing right here against this door.’”
Though I knew I should keep it quiet, I couldn’t help the moan that escaped as he flipped my shoulders about to face me toward the door. Hands flat against it and cheek to the wood, I breathed out slowly to stop the sound while he undressed behind me, but I moaned again when he grasped my panties in his fist and drew them down. Ares pressed himself against me, letting the rough heat of his cock stroke between my buttocks, teasing, taut against the soft curves of my flesh desperate to yield.
He dragged his tongue up the nape of my neck, and it was all I could do to keep in the loud, feral cry that wanted out. “Do you want me to fuck you against this door?” he whispered.
“God, yes. Please fuck me.” I whimpered the words, aching to have him inside me.
A low groan escaped him, and I heard the swift swish of a condom wrapper opening, and then he was pressing between my legs, tilting me toward him with a hand at my pelvis, opening me, my legs held fast apart with his fist twisted in my panties. God, yes. I braced myself against the wood to take him in.
