Chapter Two
Wilder
Oliver Creek lived up to the online hype. Above and beyond the standard, actually.
When I moved here, I was drawn in by the modern amenities built into a small-town vibe that fit what I wanted out of life. Slow living but with the twists of the city.
When my mom died a few years back, she didn’t leave me a trust fund or any monetary inheritance.
Instead, she’d taught me a lifetime of knowledge of herbal remedies and folk medicine that couldn’t be contained in a book.
I tried. I had journal after journal that began when I was ten and came to her crying about a stinging caterpillar who had defended himself against my palm in the dead of summer.
That was the first day of my schooling in herbology and healing.
Now that she was gone, I didn’t want to keep that knowledge hoarded in a tiny town. I wanted to share it with the world.
Oliver Creek had been on my bucket list for a couple of months. What better way to experience such a town than to move there.
Open a business. Put down roots.
“Good morning,” I announced to the shop as I walked down the stairs connecting the apartment upstairs to my new place of business.
It had taken me a long time to move everything over, redecorate the shop, get the things I needed.
Plus, I had to curate remedies. Some took months.
Other things, like teas, could be whipped up in a minute.
The shop didn’t answer my sunrise greeting, of course, but it was something my mother always did.
Greet the house when she got up in the morning or when she came back from helping others.
She also said good night to it each night.
If you were kind and good to the place you lived and worked in, then it would be good to you.
My ex thought it was silly, but I didn’t care. He was silly. And had the emotional depth of a dollar-store kiddie pool.
“Everything is going to go so well today. We are going to help people the best we can and contribute to the people around us.”
There. I’d set the intention for the day. Another thing she taught me.
I’d been in Oliver Creek for a few months and expected business to slowly build up, especially since the town was full of shifters who didn’t get many diseases or sicknesses, but I found that the draw of Oliver Creek’s other businesses trickled into mine as well.
On the weekends especially, humans came in by the truckload and often I was sold out of basic remedies and teas by Sunday afternoon.
I wasn’t complaining in the least.
I flipped the sign on the front door telling the public I was open that morning and got caught up on some salves and teas.
The population of Oliver Creek was growing by the second. When I went on my lunch break, I saw at least two new couples who were talking about expecting. The school, library, and parks were expanding and had plans for more. Everyone I met either had children or was expecting soon.
The couples made something twinge inside me. I wanted an alpha. Not just any alpha, the one Fate had chosen for me. It was the one subject on which my mother and I didn’t agree. She and my dad met and three weeks before I was born, he passed away in a car accident.
She was never the same, the townspeople told me.
If Fate had any moral compass, my mother whispered to me once, then she wouldn’t have taken my father so soon. They’d had less than a year together.
I ate my sticky honey-garlic ribs in the park, not liking the smells of food to mix with the scents from my products.
The honey on the ribs was so complex. Notes of local flowers burst in my mouth along with the garlic and slight heat of chili peppers.
It was so profound, I asked the owner of the food truck where he got it.
“There’s a beekeeper on the edge of town. North. I get all my honey there. Works wonders for my kid’s allergies as well. He sells everything in his shop, or you can place bulk orders. Here.”
He pulled a business card from the fridge. “This is where you find him. His name is Wilder.”
“Thank you.”
I went back to the store and found a human woman with her son waiting. He had an upper respiratory infection but, after a round of antibiotics from the doctor, the cough lingered.
“I’ve got just the thing.”
A tincture of mullein, thyme, and marshmallow root. As I explained the ingredients and how they worked together, the little one’s eyes lit up at the word marshmallow.
That night, I put the business card for the beekeeper on my fridge and made a note to contact them the next day. Maybe go over there on the weekend after my shop closed.
I used local products as much as possible and would bet his honey tasted amazing on a stack of piping-hot pancakes.