CHAPTER 11 #3
Boots on gravel. Marcus heard them at thirty yards. The crunch of someone walking with purpose on loose stone, not hurrying, not dawdling, the cadence of a person who knew exactly how long the path was and had calibrated their stride accordingly. He was at the door before the knock came.
Delphine Marchetti stood on the step with a paper bag folded at the top.
Brown eyes, dark curls, short and solid in boots that had seen more weather than polish.
She handed him the bag without preamble.
Her fingers were cool. Dry. The kind of hands that worked with plants and knew what dryness cost.
“Three jars,” she said. “Wormwood extract, concentrated. Black salt, hand-ground. Yarrow tincture, the strong batch from last autumn.” Each component named with the precision of someone reading from a list they’d memorized rather than assembled.
“The wax seals are fresh. They’ll hold if you keep them cool. ”
Marcus took the bag. The weight was modest, glass and contents, nothing that suggested urgency or extravagance.
He’d put the request out through the one channel he had in town.
The night clinic saw people. People talked.
Word reached places, and some of those places reached back with things that couldn’t be ordered through conventional channels.
He hadn’t expected a response this fast, or this complete, or delivered by the woman who ran Nightshade he stopped being somewhere they were.
In Ashton Grove, where geography was narrative and narrative was fate, that was its own kind of statement.
He took the ring off before he left. Set it on the side table beside the bag of components. The stone was dark. The silver band caught the gray light from the windows and threw it back dull, and nobody in the carriage house mentioned it again.