Chapter 28
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Splice sat in the armchair by the apartment’s picture window.
He did not sleep. Instead, he spent hours cataloging the mundane magic of Goldie’s apartment: the grumpy purr of Maeve from her post at the foot of her mistress’s bed.
The faint shimmer of wards on the windows.
The soft, near-silent thump of Oberon leaping from a bookshelf.
Then, as a clock chimed midnight, something changed. The low, rhythmic hum of the apartment's latent magic didn't stop, but it thinned, stretching into a keening note that slid under the bedroom door and coiled into the living room.
Splice was on his feet before a conscious thought could form. The air had gone cold, charged with the scent of damp moss and something coppery and ancient.
He moved to the doorway of her bedroom and eased open the door.
His breath caught. Goldie was standing, her back to him, silhouetted against the city glow filtering through her window.
When she moved, it was not the stumbling gait of a sleepwalker waking from a dream.
She flowed with the serene, unnerving grace of a tide being pulled by the moon.
Each step was deliberate, silent, and purposeful.
Splice’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. The vines beneath the skin of his forearms coiled and uncoiled, a restless, physical manifestation of the war raging inside him. A part of him screamed to act. Wake her. Shake her out of it. Protect her from this.
But the Assistant, the part of him built for observation and duty, held him fast. He had promised her he would watch. He had promised Mycor he would learn. To interfere would be to fail them both.
She drifted past him, so close he could feel the unnatural chill radiating from her skin.
Her eyes were open but utterly vacant, focused on a point in space he could not perceive.
Her usual scent of cinnamon and bergamot was gone, replaced by something far more elemental: the smell of freshly turned earth after a hard rain, and underneath it, the sharp, metallic tang of blood.
Without a sound, she opened the apartment door and stepped into the hallway.
Splice hesitated for only a heartbeat. Then, with a quiet resignation that felt like defeat, he followed.
The streets of Bellwether lay wrapped in a midnight hush, the air cool and still. Splice shadowed her, maintaining a careful distance—too far to touch, but close enough to intervene.
Goldie moved with an unwavering, fluid purpose, her sneakered feet making no sound on the pavement. Her fingers trailed along a crumbling brick wall as she passed, leaving a faint, phosphorescent trail of light that pulsed once before fading away.
A few blocks later, she stooped to pluck a broad-leafed weed from a sidewalk crack, which she crushed between her palms. The scent that bloomed on the night air was peppery and wild, a key and a password, a ward and a calling all at once.
He recognized the perimeter of the Green Holdings by the shimmer of police wards layered over mundane caution tape. To Goldie, they might as well have been morning mist. She passed through without hesitation, the magical barriers parting for her as if she were a long-lost daughter returning home.
Splice followed a breath behind. The wards prickled against his own essence, a crackle of static electricity that recognized him as kin to the land, although foreign to its current purpose.
The path was a twisting, shadowed maze, its air thick and heavy with the scent of rot and loam. The trees themselves seemed to lean in, their branches parting to clear a path for Goldie. The land was drawing her inward, not with brute force but with reverence. Each step she took was welcomed.
At last, the trees opened into the heart of the Grove Core.
The air here was thicker, humming with a pressure that made Splice’s head ache.
As Goldie crossed the threshold, her movements changed, the drift of a sleepwalker sharpening into the focus of a ritual.
She bent, tugged off her shoes and socks, and pressed her bare feet into the damp earth.
The ground seemed to exhale beneath her touch.
With unnerving precision, she began to pace slow, deliberate patterns into the soil, toes carving shallow grooves that glimmered faintly. The gnarled hawthorns that ringed the circle leaned inward, their thorned branches creaking, as if bearing witness.
A low, melodic hum slipped from her throat that was nothing like Goldie’s bright, sparkling, normal cadence.
Her hands lifted, moving with eerie precision, and hovered over the patch of earth where Marlow Truckenham’s body had lain.
The soil itself seemed to flinch, darkening, recoiling as if remembering pain.
The hum cut off. Goldie’s body went unnaturally still. Splice stepped forward, vines rippling under his skin as if ready to lash out and drag her away.
With slow, deliberate grace, she turned to face him.
Her eyes, once the warm brown of fertile earth, now glowed with a cold green-gold light. The ancient, vast, and hungry Grove Core now looked at Splice with a piercing gaze.
“The Thornfather’s graft,” it intoned, the voice resonant and velvety, vibrating deep in Splice’s chest. “I am pleased you followed.”
The ground answered with a subtle tremor, a green pulse rippling through leaf and root as the Grove Core echoed its avatar’s voice.
“There are bones in me,” the voice continued, a layered melody of sorrow and patience. “A wound I share with your god.”
The avatar took a step toward him, closing the distance with that same unnerving, fluid grace. Its hand rose, and its fingers, cool and gentle, traced the line of his jaw.
“An unusual binding,” the voice whispered, the chorus of sounds dropping to a single, seductive murmur. “Your god’s pain sings in my soil. But your presence is a different song. It stirs me.”
The glow in its eyes deepened with an ancient, terrifying hunger. The very air in the clearing grew thick, heavy with the cloying scent of pollen.
He could feel a distant, echoing thrum through his bond with Mycor as his god stirred. It was a feeling of approval, of urging, and it warred violently with the new, fragile, human part of Splice that was screaming in silent horror.
“The rot must be excised,” the Grove Core said. “A new seal is required to mend what death has broken.”
Its touch was not Goldie’s. It lacked her hesitant warmth, the bright spark of human curiosity he’d felt in her apartment only hours before. This was an appraising pressure, like a gardener weighing the worth of a tool.
And yet it was still Goldie’s skin, Goldie’s form. A traitorous heat bloomed low in his belly.
“You were grown for this work,” the Grove Core whispered. “A conduit for the Thornfather’s strength. Potent and ready.”
With a slow, hypnotic grace, the avatar unzipped Goldie’s hoodie, shrugging it off and letting it fall to the mossy ground like a shed skin. Then, with the same deliberate, mesmerizing slowness, the avatar grasped the shirt’s hem and pulled it off.
Splice’s breath hitched. In the pale moonlight, Goldie’s skin was luminous. The avatar’s hands went to the clasp of the bra bra. There was a soft click, and the lace fell away, revealing full, round breasts freed to the cool night air.
A wave of primal lust, so powerful it was almost painful, crashed through him. It was an imperative, a biological command that his body was built to obey.
“This vessel is open and fertile.”
As the Grove Core spoke, its hands hooked into the waistband of Goldie’s leggings.
It peeled them down over the gentle curve of her stomach and the dark, enticing shadow at the apex of her thighs.
It stepped out of them with the same fluid grace, standing before him, utterly bare in the moonlight; a magnificent, perfect, living altar.
The ancient, purpose-driven part of him, the cultivar, roared to life. He could feel Mycor stirring in the depths of their bond, a distant, yet pained, thrum of approval.
The thing wearing Goldie’s body stretched, a slow, languid movement like a predator waking from a nap. A smile touched its lips that was all ancient hunger and without a single spark of Goldie's humor.
He wanted to close the distance between them.
He wanted to feel the softness of Goldie’s skin against the rough texture of his own.
He wanted to bury himself in her warmth, to plant the seed the Grove Core demanded, to fulfill the purpose for which he was made and feel the glorious, world-shaking release of it.
His mind flashed with the memory of her writhing on his vines, the raw, broken sounds she had made—
—the sounds she had made.
Splice stilled, looked past the glowing, possessive eyes, and saw the face he was beginning to know.
He saw the woman who doted on her cats and flicked popcorn at him.
The woman whose laughter was sharp and bright and wholly her own.
He remembered the feeling of her fragile, shockingly human weight in his arms. He saw the curve of her lips now, parted slightly, not in breathless invitation, but in vacant possession.
Marigold. The woman who was not choosing this. Who was a passenger in her own body.
He took a step back, and the cool night air rushed into the space between them.
"No."
The avatar tilted its head as if trying to process a paradox. “But… the vessel is here,” it reasoned, its voice laced with genuine bewilderment.
“This is not her choice,” Splice said, the words feeling clumsy but certain on his tongue.
He took another half-step back, putting more of the night air between his body and the one that looked like hers but wasn't.
"She is not a tool,” he repeated flatly. “I will not use her without her consent. I won’t.”
The green-gold light in the avatar's eyes wavered as the ancient consciousness radiated a profound, resonant frustration that made the leaves on the surrounding hawthorns tremble.
"The wound must be purged," it insisted, its voice losing its melodic quality and taking on a hard, mineral edge. It took another step forward, raising both hands. Fine tendrils began to seep from its fingertips, coalescing in the air and drifting toward Splice.
Splice stood his ground, anchoring his newfound will against the siren song of his core programming. “Then we will find another way.”
For a breathless moment, silence rippled outward, strange and waiting. The Grove Core studied Splice as if he were a riddle carved in flesh.
“Fascinating,” it murmured, its voice shedding the weight of command. “You resist your own design. This is… unexpected.”
The words curled through him, and the avatar’s gaze lingered, intrigued, as if testing the shape of him. Then, as though satisfied with the taste, the presence began to ebb.
“When you are ready to choose, Thornfather’s graft,” it whispered, “the path will be open.”
The green-gold light guttered away as the avatar withdrew from Goldie’s body, leaving the human woman suddenly limp and swaying. Splice caught her before she fell, folding her into his arms as he sank to his knees on the damp earth.
For a heartbeat, he still felt the Grove Core’s hunger thrumming through his veins—a raw ache that left him trembling.
Beneath it, steadier and more insistent, came the living heat of Goldie in his arms: the subtle rise and fall of her chest, her soft exhalations, the way her copper curls brushed his jaw.
He pressed her closer, one hand sliding up her back to cradle her head. His fingers threaded through her hair and he inhaled the faint scent of cinnamon and bergamot lingering on her skin. Each breath she took was a promise, a tether that grounded him more firmly than any rhizome could.
“We’ll find another way,” he whispered, words meant as much for himself as for her.