by Viv Daniels
What if she just said no? This was her house, her world, and they didn’t even care.
But instead she opened the door wider, her focus on the floor.
“I have had your greenhouse examined thoroughly.”
Ugh. Just stay away.
“The perimeter seems to be holding for now, so I’ve no fear that you are safe tonight.”
“Tonight,” she echoed, while thinking that she didn’t need his fear. She’d been safe for three years, and miserable. Screw safe.
“But you can see that the events of today prove what a precarious position we are in. We must resurrect the barrier, as soon as humanly possible.”
“Has anyone tried to contact the forest folk?” she asked abruptly.
“What?”
“This whole day,” Ivy said, “when the barrier has been down. Has anyone tried to go into the forest to contact the folk living there?”
He blinked at her. “Why? Why would we do that? The forest is dangerous.”
“Then the forest folk are in danger.”
“It’s the same danger they’ve been in for years.” Ryder waved his hand, as if dismissing them. “Ivy, I know you think they are your family, but you don’t know them. You certainly don’t know what might have become of them now, locked away and subject every day to all the forest’s corrupting forces.” He came closer and petted her shoulder, as if it might give her comfort. “Trust me, child, if you were to meet someone from the forest, they would not have your best interests at heart. You cannot live so long in Hell without turning into a devil.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Archer had warned her using very similar words. Warned her that he’d become something other than himself, that he’d dabbled in dark magic enough to stain his very soul. And she’d thrown caution to the wind.
“This is a hard truth, but a vital one. It took your own father ages to reach this conclusion as well. But when he realized the truth of his ways, and the danger that his permissiveness toward the forest folk posed to you, his precious daughter… well, he knew it wasn’t safe.”
Ivy looked at him. “Are you saying that my father turned against the forest because of my relationship with Archer?”
“Your father did not want you in any danger,” Ryder replied. “And you were in very great danger from that forest boy. Thankfully, George Potter was not so far gone that he couldn’t help you, where he had failed to help himself.”
Ivy stepped back, shaking her head in disbelief. “But Dad spoke in the town square about enchantments he’d seen, dark things coming out of the deep parts of the forest.”
“Indeed.” The deacon nodded. “What better advocate than someone who knew the breadth and depth of the dangers we faced? What more passionate warrior than a convert?”
Ivy’s head began to hurt, and this time, there were no bells to blame. Her father had always known of forest dangers. She’d thought he’d started to fear a great, dark magic. But what if his fear was much more personal?
It wasn’t the corruption of the forest Dad hated. It was Archer, and the way he’d corrupted Ivy.
All those months, she’d thought her father was so cool, so understanding. She’d told him things her friends would never dream of confessing to their parents.
And he’d told her to be careful, of course, to take precautions with her birth control and to remember that forest folk weren’t the type to commit. But he’d never forbidden her from seeing Archer, even as the talk in town grew frantic. He knew it would have come across as hypocritical, after his own affair with Ivy’s mother.
Archer had sworn this morning that George Potter had never warned the forest folk about the barrier. And maybe he hadn’t, because to him the bells had been a way to keep Archer away from Ivy for good. His guilt in the months following, when the bells drove Ivy and the other forest-blooded townsfolk half-mad…
I’m so sorry, Ivy. I was only trying to protect you.
Her father had lied to her. Her father had lied to the whole town, then died on the first solstice after the bells began to ring.
How many others would need to die for this false protection?
She looked at the old man before her, the one who so feared the forest that he’d warped a father’s love to help destroy it. “What do you want from me, Deacon Ryder?”
“There were three of us who made the bell barrier, my dear. Me, Beemer, and your father. Beemer brought the metal, I sanctified the bells, and your father crafted the design. Based on the greenhouse or something.”
Ivy supposed that made sense. The lattice from which the bells hung did share that same tessellated shape as the Potter greenhouse. But the lattice of the bells remained intact, save for that one spot where Archer had broken through. It was the magic, and the sound, that had ceased. She must have still looked confused, as the deacon went on.
“But that was just construction. Construction was easy. It was the miracle which proved tricky.”
“The miracle?”
The deacon coughed. “Yes. The seal we created between forest and town. The song of the bells. The hum of power. You’ve got forest blood—you know what I mean.”
Did she ever. Time was, she thought her skull would split open, it was so miraculous. “The magic,” she said. “You mean the magic.”
“Not magic!” he snapped at her. “Miracles.”
Yesterday, she’d stood in this shop and told some skeptical tourist that it depended on who told the story whether her tea was medicine or magic. Apparently the same conditions applied when it came to miracles.
Archer had been right. The bells were a curse, same as the kind he’d used to break it. He said there’d been sacrifices—pain, anger, power. Dark magic needed to overcome the dark magic those three men must have wrought.
“We needed three to make the miracle work,” the deacon went on. “Me, Beemer, and your father, again. Three of us to perform the miracle.”
Magic, Ivy silently corrected. Dark magic.
“I wanted to protect the soul of this town. Beemer wanted to protect its future. And your father…” Ryder gave her a weak smile. “He wanted to protect you.”
And instead he ruined her. Ruined everything that was good about their lives, and their friends, and his very livelihood.
“He loved you so much.”
Perhaps. But it was a wretched kind of love that would destroy something to protect itself. A weak love, like a forest plant transferred into a plastic pot. Ivy crossed her arms over her chest and squeezed, but the shiver had started up again, bone-deep and chilling.
“And now I need your help, Ivy. We can’t let your father’s work be in vain.”
It was already in vain. For separating her from Archer hadn’t worked. She loved him still, no matter what he might have become, locked away in the forest.
“Beemer and I—we believe we can perform the miracle again, but only if it’s still the three of us.”
Ivy looked at him, confused. “My father’s dead.”
“Beemer thinks you’ll do. You have your father’s blood.”
“You want my blood?” she asked, gaping. “You are standing in my shop and asking me for my blood?” She shook her head, slowly. “How can you lie to yourself like that, Deacon Ryder? You must know what it is you are really doing.”
His expression turned hard. “Listen, Ivy…”
“No.” She straightened. “I do not do dark magic. I want to protect the town as much as you, but I have seen what dark magic does to a person’s soul. My father was haunted by the harm he caused. I saw it every day on his face after the bells began to ring, and now I know why.”
She saw it on Archer, too, but the deacon didn’t need to know that.
The deacon opened his mouth as if to speak again, but she was saved from hearing his lecture by another knock on the door.
Jeb stood on the threshold, the dying light of the afternoon casting his face in shadow. “Ivy, I saw the deacon’s car out front. I’ve got his dog…”
“It’s s
till alive?” the deacon whined from behind her.
Jeb gave Ivy a look, as if to say there was a reason he’d brought the creature to her house instead of Ryder’s.
“Yes,” she fairly hissed at him. “He is still alive, thanks to surgery.”
Ryder shook his head. “I don’t want it. I won’t have it in my house.”
Ivy bit her lip. This man had shot his dog this morning, and he deigned to talk to her of love and protection. “Then you’d better leave my house, Deacon, as I’m about to have Jeb bring Trapper in here.”
Deacon Ryder looked like he wanted to say more, but Ivy took off, pulling old blankets and towels out of the closet. He stood there for several minutes, so Ivy took her own sweet time making up Trapper’s bed. The most pitiful of all the creatures in their town would find a place to stay with her tonight. She didn’t care what Deacon Ryder thought—what anyone in town did. To her she was a forest thing, contaminated like this dog. She could obey their evil laws and recite their evil rules and listen to their evil bells, but it wouldn’t change the way they saw her. And perhaps they were right, too. For she’d spent three years pretending she was one of them, and it clearly wasn’t true.
“I’ll be back in the morning, Ivy,” he said at last. “Think it over.”
She did not respond, nor did she breathe easy until she heard his car start up on the street. How odd, that she could hear things like car engines now. It had been years since she could hear anything but the bells.
But tonight, she heard everything clearly—the thoughts in her head, the beating of her heart. The Ivy she’d been trying so hard to be peeled away like onion skin, and she heard, for the first time, the Ivy she had been meant to be.
Jeb carried the beast inside and lay it down on Ivy’s makeshift dog bed near the stove. “I’d take him home with me, but you know my old cat, Midnight, won’t suffer the presence of canines,” Jeb explained.
“Poor Midnight,” Ivy replied. “We certainly can’t invade her home so close to Christmas.”
“What did the deacon want with you?” Jeb asked. “And what’s with all that yellow tape around the greenhouse?”
Questions without answers. “It’s been a long day, Jeb. A long, strange day.”
Jeb studied her, and she recalled what he’d said at the vet’s. It had been joking then, but Ivy didn’t feel so lighthearted now. She knew what lived inside her greenhouse. She knew who was responsible for the horror of the bells.
And she couldn’t tell this old man any of it.
Instead, she heated up some soup and some tea—not redbell, thank heaven—and sat with Jeb while he went over the vet’s discharge papers. Trapper was still out cold from the sedatives, and probably wouldn’t want to get up all night.
And he certainly wouldn’t be able to protect her if whatever was in the greenhouse decided to come out. Ivy shivered and wrapped her hands around her mug. She seriously thought about asking Jeb to stay the night.
But what good would it do? A retired woodsman was no match for enchanted bramble vines and forest evil. And Ivy would never forgive herself if her actions hurt anyone else in town.
After dinner, when the darkness had settled over forest and town, Jeb left. She locked up behind him, pulling her drapes against the night and the silence beyond. All that quiet beyond. It made her head roar. At last, Ivy put on some soft music and puttered about the shop, keeping her hands and feet busy in hopes that it might quiet her mind.
It didn’t.
In the absence of the bells, her thoughts roared—her father and the bells, Archer and his enchantments, the townspeople and their fear, and the choices that lay ahead of her. The rest of the town would stop at nothing to fix the barrier—that much was certain. All they’d have to do would be to point at the danger in her own greenhouse.
And what was she going to do about her greenhouse? If the barrier was fixed, she’d need her redbell, which means they’d need to do something to destroy…whatever it was growing from the bed. Though she’d promised the redbell to Archer to take back into the forest.
Archer, who had vanished into thin air.
Ivy put her hands on the sink, letting her head drop as the breath whooshed out of her. The cuts on her arms and face stung, her head ached, and her heart felt sore inside her chest. Twenty-four hours ago, she’d promised herself she would leave this town and this forest behind. Maybe she should keep that promise, now more than ever.
Behind her, Trapper let out a little whimper. Even without a bullet wound, she knew exactly how the poor dog felt.
Ivy… Something breathed ice at her back. At last… She spun around.
The man who stood in front of the stove was Archer, but not Archer. He wore no clothes, and his eyes were swallowed up in black. His muscles were drawn tight beneath his skin, and his reddish hair stood wild on his head, like he’d been struck by lightning.
“That,” said a voice that cut the air to ribbons and sounded just enough like Archer to freeze the blood in her veins, “Took longer than I would have liked.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The counter was cool and solid against Ivy’s back. She gripped it with all her strength, as everything else tumbled away. The very floor of her shop seemed to tip toward the apparition before her, the terrifying not-Archer thing who stared at her like a ravenous beast.
She swallowed. “Archer.”
“Did you miss me, my love?” There was a coldness there. Something alien, inhuman.
“So we are playing questions again.” She kept her tone neutral.
This brought him up short. “I am not here to talk, Ivy Potter.” And then suddenly, he was only inches away, and his hands were twined in her hair, and his lips hovered over hers. She froze, terrified, trapped under his awful, endless, black gaze.
I am Puss in Boots. I am Jack the Giant-Killer.
It did no good. “What do you want, then?”
“I want to kiss you,” he said, quite reasonably, and then, “I want to eat you alive.”
She wrenched her head away. “Stop! Let go of me!”
His hands fell to his sides and he stared at them, unblinking, his brow furrowed as if they did not quite belong to him. “We are alone at last,” he said flatly. “It took all day.”
She backed up a single, precious step, replaying the many hours since he’d disappeared. “Wait — are you saying you were stuck inside Trapper… all day?”
He looked at the dog, the poor, wretched thing. “You didn’t seem to want to let him die. I had no choice.”
“You possessed him,” she said, as if saying the words made it any less bizarre. “You made him attack.”
He chuckled then, and raised his hands in surrender. “It is hard to remember what one should or should not do in the thrall of dark magic. Won’t you kiss me, Ivy Potter? I seem to want you to very badly.”
She shook her head, to convince herself. She couldn’t kiss this black-eyed thing. “What happened to your clothes?”
“Why do you care?” The corner of his mouth turned up, but the smirk didn’t look the same on his face. “You like my body bare.”
She flushed all over. “I…”
“Can’t deny it,” he finished, triumphant. “Come and kiss me. It was good for you last night.”
Last night. Last night he had kissed her before he’d said a word, almost out of instinct, and his eyes had turned normal again. The more he’d touched her, the freer he’d grown from the darkness wrapped around his soul. And when they’d made love in the greenhouse, he’d been released entirely.
Of course, her greenhouse had been the one to pay the price. What would have happened if he had come inside her?
But he wasn’t nearly so dark then as this wild thing that stood before her. Every time Archer let himself be overwhelmed by his own dark magic, it seemed to consume him more. If she let him touch her, it might choose her instead.
But even if it did, she couldn’t leave him here, suffering, crying out for her in this od
d, twisted way.
“What do you mean, you had no choice about Trapper?” she asked him.
Archer turned to look at the sleeping animal. “We were shot. I could have left, but without my magic, he would die. You were there—so sad, so sad.” He turned back and cocked his head at her. “You didn’t want him to die. I huddled in close and kept him alive. The time passed very quickly, I must admit.”
“That would be the anesthesia.” She crossed her arms over her chest and tried to find a place to look at Archer that didn’t either freak her out or turn her on. Below the waist was totally off limits, and bare chests and hands were causing problems, too. But his face—it scared her, not least because it didn’t scare her as much as it should have. “You are telling me you possessed the dog to keep it from dying.”
“No,” he replied. “I possessed the dog because it was causing problems. I remained inside to keep it alive.”
“I think possessing an animal is generally a bad idea, Archer.”
“You only say that because you’ve never tried it.” He grinned at her. “You have never torn out the throat of a hare with the bite of a wolf. You’ve never soared through the night on an eagle’s wings, or unhinged your snake jaw to swallow a rat whole.”
Bile rose in her throat. Had Archer done all those things, in training to tackle the bells? Was this what her town had driven him to? “That sounds terrible.”
“Even the eagle?” He raised his eyebrows over coal-black eyes. “How can you lie like that? Every man ever born wished that he could fly.”
“I’ll take a plane,” Ivy said. “It costs less than the price you pay.”
“But then you’re trapped inside a metal tube.”
She lifted her chin. “And what are you trapped inside of?”
Archer fell silent for a moment, and looked down.
Ivy already knew the answer. He was trapped in himself, a web of dark magic that twisted every thought, every word, that made him insult and frighten her even as he knew she was his only salvation.
“Come and kiss me, Ivy Potter,” he repeated, staring at his hands. “Please.”
It was the “please” that did her in, that broke her resistance like a twig snapped in the wind. She came a step closer, then another. He reached for her, and she stilled.
