by Viv Daniels
As a teen, Ivy hadn’t cared about that. Archer was excitement and awakening. Loyalty and responsibility existed only in some distant, grown-up world.
She knew better now. Ivy unfolded the first of the blankets and got to work. The first step, unfortunately, would be his pants. The buckskin trousers were soaked and stiff with blood. They’d have to come off. She clenched her jaws and tugged at the fastenings, keeping her eyes averted as they popped free and his pants peeled away from his skin. She closed her eyes and pulled them down, but they caught.
Of course. She opened her eyes and tried to maneuver the pants around his butt and crotch, trying not to let her eyes linger too long on unfamiliar scars trailing down his torso and legs and the all-too-familiar other parts, which were shadowed by far more hair than she remembered him having at sixteen.
Cut it out, Ivy. He’s unconscious and wounded. Stop staring at his cock.
She washed the lingering dirt and debris from his body, but when her fingers brushed his skin, she felt nothing otherworldly at all. No whisper of dreams or glimpse of what might have transpired at the barrier to bring it down and him across. Maybe the magic had always been Archer’s alone, and he’d merely indulged her with tiny moments back when she was sharing his bed. After a few more minutes, she gave up trying to peer into his soul, applied antiseptic and bandages, then covered him head to foot in blankets warmed near the fire.
Was anyone else awake on this long, dark night? Did the others know the barrier was down? Again, she thought she should warn someone. They could post guards, perhaps, until the town council figured out how to reinstate the bells.
She shuddered at the thought. The silence had barely lasted half an hour, yet the idea of the bells now seemed the worst violation imaginable. Every cell in her body rebelled against the idea. For three years, she and her neighbors had suffered for the town’s safety. One night couldn’t hurt, could it?
Besides, if the cessation of sound had disturbed her, it must have woken everyone on this side of town. It must have shocked the night guards at the quarry. They would have heard it, though, not felt it, since quarry workers were always townie, born and bred. Ernest Beemer, the quarry owner, liked it that way, and besides, no one with forest blood wanted to work the cliffs so near the power station. But someone there must have contacted authorities. They were on it. They didn’t need help from a twenty-year-old florist. Her first duty was to help Archer.
As quietly as possible, she moved around her shop, warming broth and water in case Archer was hungry when he woke. He’d need pain relief, most certainly. Unthinking, she reached for her tin of bell tea, then almost laughed. No one would need a dose tonight.
Cocoa. The memory came back like the snap of a slingshot. As a child, Archer had been obsessed. To a forest boy, chocolate might as well have been the most exotic substance on Earth. He hadn’t cared for cars or video games, could barely remember the words for TV or telephone, but boy, had he loved candy.
She closed the tea cabinet and reached for her baking supplies. Cocoa powder, milk, sugar… a dash of vanilla, a pinch of cinnamon. She put a spoon to her lips and smiled. Gone were the days when the best she could provide for her friend was a packet of pre-mixed, chocolaty chemicals.
Mid-whisk, Ivy shook her head. The barrier of the bells was down and Archer was lying naked and wounded on her couch, and here she was thinking about the relative quality of instant versus homemade cocoa.
There was a groan from the vicinity of the couch. Ivy poured the frothy cocoa into two mugs, set them on a tray, and carried it back to where she’d left Archer.
His eyes were still closed, and his chest rose and fell evenly. She put down the tray and looked at him in the firelight. The straight, slashing line of his brows cut deep shadows across his face. His reddish brown hair tangled in waves on his forehead and down his neck, curling around ears which featured the slight point that often appeared on forest folk. His full lips were slightly parted in sleep, and a scruff of hair framed his wide mouth and hid the tiny cleft in his chin. She’d never seen Archer with a beard before. She doubted the teenage version could have grown one. His hair was redder there, as it had been near his groin.
Ivy bit her lip. She really shouldn’t be thinking about his groin.
He’d brought the smell of the forest with him. It filled her little shop with scents she hadn’t known in years—wood smoke and ancient pine, creek moss and loamy rot.
Beneath his lids, were his eyes the same cheery, gray-green of mossy stones, or had they been replaced by dark-hearted violets, like the men in the posters? Was he as quick to laugh, or had three years trapped in a forest full of evil magic squeezed the humor out of him? There were scars on his body—old scars she had no memory of, scars that spoke to battles and hardship he and his people could not escape. He was thinner than he’d been as a boy, but harder too, his adolescent softness giving way to sinew and bone.
His eyes began to flutter as he slipped into a dream. Ivy watched him in silence. It hadn’t worked last time, when she’d been cleaning him up, but maybe he’d been too deep in unconsciousness then. Maybe there’d been nothing to see. She reached a tentative hand toward his chest, her fingers spreading wide over the planes of his ribs and pectoral muscles, as if, through the layers of muscle and bone, she might hold his heart. She felt its thump beneath her palm, a firm, steady drumbeat. How she’d loved to do this on a summer night when they lay wound together, naked and sweaty, surrounded by leaves and the song of crickets and the sparkle of…
Moonlight.
Magic wrapped round her fingertips and pulled her into Archer’s visions.
Moonlight gleamed silver off the edge of the bells, which shone like knives hung in neat, unnatural rows. The trees nearest the abomination moaned and creaked, dead branches swaying on dead trunks, dead roots still clinging to dead earth. If there was anything to see on the other side, it was impossible to tell. Pain and death and terrible enchantments flowed from the bells in waves, pounding, ringing, clanging, shrieking.
Ever closer, ever larger, ever louder.
Ivy Ivy Ivy. Bells Bells Bells.
A hand closed tight around her wrist and she gasped, opening her eyes to find Archer staring right at her, his eyes a pure, unending black, his mouth a straight, unreadable line.
“Why,” he said roughly, “if it isn’t Ivy Potter, all grown up.” Then he yanked her close and pressed his mouth to hers.
CHAPTER FOUR
If Ivy actually had been waiting three years to feel Archer’s lips once more, she would have been vastly disappointed. For this was no tender, affectionate kiss, nor a passionate, crushing possession of her mouth. He neither caressed her nor devoured her, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about their lips or their history—it was about magic. A stampede of images trampled through Ivy’s head, obliterating every other sensation.
Abandoned forest villages, their simple huts collapsed in decay. Sickly children writhing on cots in dark corners, the sad, weary eyes of a young woman.
“The darkness is spreading, Archer.”
Dry creekbeds and blackened clearings. Redbell flowers crushed in mud, the sting of blood in eyes, the mangled head of a deer, strange symbols carved into its hide. A blood-soaked Archer lifting the head high by the antlers as viscera streamed like water from its severed neck… and the woman’s voice again.
“It must be stopped, or we’ll lose them all.”
Abruptly Archer pulled away from her and spat on the floor. “You taste of plastic,” he said with a grimace.
Ivy stumbled backward a step, and raised her hand to cover her lips, her senses still reeling with the memories he’d shared. Death and agony, and that strange forest woman. But she shouldn’t be surprised. There was no reason to think he’d been pining for her.
She hadn’t been waiting for him. She hadn’t. She never even thought she’d see him again. Ivy glanced down at the tray sitting on the coffee table, at those two pathetic mugs. Cocoa. How stupid co
uld she be? They weren’t children anymore.
Archer was sitting up now, the blankets fallen from his broad shoulders and sagging around his hips. Her gaze widened. His eyes were green and mossy again. Had it been nothing but a trick of the light?
“I see you wasted no time taking off my clothes.” He eyed her wryly. “Where are my pants, Ivy Potter?”
She sank to the chair opposite him without taking her eyes off her visitor, lest his face change again. “Drying. What are you doing here?”
He shook his head, that inscrutable smile still playing about his lips. “That isn’t the question you want to ask.”
It was one of the questions. One of a million. They rushed on her like an avalanche, threatening to bury them both alive. “How did you pass through the barrier? Are you the one who broke it, or was it broken by dark magic?”
He smirked at her and his eyes flashed from green to black in the flickering firelight. “Yes.”
A chill of horror flooded through her, and Ivy crossed her arms over her chest and shivered, despite the heat pouring out of the stove, despite Archer’s kiss. The truth of her situation was suddenly, perfectly, terrifyingly clear.
The barrier was down. The barrier erected to keep the town safe from dark magic. The barrier her father had insisted was necessary, absolutely necessary to their survival, though it would separate him from his life’s work, and her from her lover, forevermore. The barrier was down, and she’d taken the first thing to come from the forest in three years and put it in her house.
She opened her mouth to speak, but her throat had gone dry. Her mind reeled with every story the town council had reported of the darkness of the forest, of the children with no heartbeat and the men with eyes of stone and flowers. Always she’d thought it was real—that monsters looked like monsters. But what if the darkness burned from within, a fever you didn’t notice until it roasted you alive?
She swallowed, and dared to speak. “Archer?”
“Ivy?” was his only reply. Those pure black eyes were looking at her, his expression amused, but there was danger in it, too. When she’d pulled him inside, all she’d seen was Archer, the boy she’d trusted as long as she could remember. But this man in front of her was someone different. A stranger, like the faces on the posters, his eyes odd with enchantment. The man in the vision, the one nearly black with blood, the one who’d knifed runes into the head of a deer—who was that? What else had he done?
He looked like himself — or a twenty-one-year-old version, anyway. Everything she had once imagined he would grow into. What if it was a lie? What if brambles gnarled beneath those reddish curls, if icemelt flowed through his veins instead of blood? What if the being before her was never Archer at all?
She searched his face for answers, but there were none. With every breath, with every blink, he changed — the man she’d loved, a monster she’d never met. Her fear grew large, like a giant bubble within her, threatening to pop from her skin. Her gaze shot to the door and when she looked back, he gave her a nearly imperceptible shake of his head.
“I’m not so injured that I cannot stop you before you reach that door.”
She knew that truth well. Even the old Archer could beat her at a footrace, in forest or in town. He wasn’t a ranger like his brother or her mother, but he was faster than a botanist’s daughter. Whatever he was now, she knew he’d catch her. “And what if I scream?”
He cocked his head. “To whom? You have no man. I’d smell him on you.”
She blinked and hugged herself tighter. “You would not.”
“Have you forgotten so much?” His smile showed teeth now, and Ivy’s blood ran cold. “Apparently you have.”
Odd. Looking into the face of dark magic, Ivy felt like she’d forgotten way more than that. Her memories of the dangers of the forest had dimmed, and she’d cherished and replayed the ones that had remained, memories of light and happiness and love. But maybe everyone in town was right. The forest was deadly—and Archer was forest.
She dashed for the door, and he sprang into action, grabbing her from behind. His arms snaked about her waist, lifting her up off the floor. She kicked her legs in vain and felt his muscles bulging as he squeezed her tight enough to make her gasp.
“Stop squirming, you townie fool!” he hissed in her ear. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Her arms were trapped at her sides, and her hands brushed his bare thighs. Oh, right, he was still naked. Naked and pressed up against her, his skin hot enough to scorch through several layers of clothes. She had to get away now, before things got completely out of hand.
She closed her eyes. Just do it, Ivy. She reached back, found his balls, and squeezed… hard.
He dropped her.
And instead of running, she turned to look at him, standing there, his hands cupped protectively around his manhood as he glared at her. His eyes, thankfully, looked human again. Human, and filled with rage.
“I said,” he growled, “that I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I didn’t say anything.” She straightened, her stance a challenge.
“So you want me to leave?” He spread his hands and she averted her eyes, all too aware of the irony. She wouldn’t look at it, but she’d crush it with her bare hands. “Bring me in, patch me up, kick me out into the snow?”
“When I carried you in, I didn’t know you’d torn down the barrier with dark magic,” she replied. She’d thought he was the man she’d been holding a torch for all these years, not some kind of evil sorcerer with a crop of forest children.
He threw back his head and laughed. “You are a fool. What can fight dark magic but more of the same?”
And what was that supposed to mean? Ivy could hardly think with him standing there, magnificently naked and completely uncaring. She grabbed his still-clammy pants off the radiator and threw them at him. He flinched as if she’d lobbed a weapon in his face, instead of damp and dirty clothes.
“I don’t know what you are.” Ivy hated the unmistakable catch in her voice.
“I’m not surprised.”
He snatched the pants off the floor and considered them for a moment, as if they were alien. He looked at her and she kept her gaze at chest level and above, and then, with an expression of amused concession, he slipped them back on without taking his eyes off her. She couldn’t tell if that was to ensure she wouldn’t run or simply to unnerve her.
Once he looked proper again, he straightened, spreading his arms in a shrug. “I hardly know anymore either.”
Her eyes narrowed. Would dark magic say something like that? “I mean, are you Archer, or are you some dreadful thing made to look like him?”
“I ask myself that every day.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Is it not?”
A sob strangled in her throat. She would not relent. Not until she knew what she was dealing with.
“Where is your father?” he asked.
“What,” she tossed at him, mockingly, “you can’t smell him?”
Archer said nothing and after a moment where his gaze seemed to worm through her skull, she lowered her eyes.
“He’s dead. Two years ago this week.” What might her father be able to glean from Archer, or not-Archer?
“I’m sorry.” He bowed his head for a moment, then looked back up at her. “But someone continues his work. You know the way to withstand the barrier’s curse. I tasted redbell on you.”
“Really?” she snapped, almost angry that he assumed she had nothing to do with her tea. “Beneath the plastic?”
“Oh, I tasted all kinds of things beneath the plastic, Ivy Potter.” The smile played across his lips again, and this time, it wasn’t quite so scary. “There was also cocoa.”
She rolled her eyes and pointed at the table. “It’s right there.”
“You made hot cocoa for me? And you thought I was a—how do you townies put it?”
“Soulless monster,” she intoned. “And, like I said, not when I ma
de it. Drink your chocolate and leave.” Did monsters like hot cocoa?
“Always a gracious host.” He strode over to the tray and lifted the mug. “You made two. Shall we share?”
The words sounded inviting, but Ivy knew better, even as her heart ached. He didn’t mean it, no matter how much he sounded like the boy she’d known.
“Have both,” Ivy said stiffly. “I’m a very gracious host.”
He put the mug to his lips, and as he began to drink, Ivy felt like she could taste it, too, the rich, creamy froth flowing over his tongue and down his throat, warming him up from the inside out. He was wearing pants now, but he might as well still be naked for all the difference it made to Ivy’s imagination. She couldn’t take her eyes off the line of his spine, at the way his muscles slid beneath his skin as he downed his cocoa.
But now was her chance. His back was to her, his attention diverted. She took a single step backwards.
“Ivy,” Archer warned. “Don’t. I have eyes in the back of my head.”
“Real ones?”
He swept his hand through his ruddy hair. “Come and see.”
Gross. “No, thank you.”
Archer chuckled and started in on the second cup, and this time, when Ivy caught the taste of cocoa on her tongue, she knew what it was. Magic. Archer—or whoever this was—didn’t even have to touch her now to make her feel what he wanted her to. What had he done to steep such strong enchantments? Was this what happened when a forest man’s magic went dark?
She should really call the council.
