Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
The festival had been running for hours, and Willow's feet were staging a revolt.
She'd been up since four, pulling trays of lavender honey scones and croissants from the oven, boxing orders, restocking the bakery booth twice when the morning crowd wiped her out.
Then vendor coordination. Then a frantic call from Faith about a missing extension cord at the ice sculpture station.
Then a tourist who wanted to know if the croissants were "organic and locally sourced" as if the island had a Whole Foods tucked behind the marina.
She was cutting behind the vendor tents toward the supply cart for napkins when she heard Ryker’s voice on the other side of the canvas.
Low. Hard. The kind of tone that made people step back without knowing why.
"Say it again." It didn’t sound like a real request, but more like a threat.
She stopped, her hand still on the canvas flap, napkins forgotten.
"I'm just saying what everyone's still thinking—" That came from Marcus. She recognized his voice.
"No. That’s bullshit. You're saying what I used to say. And I was wrong." Ryker's voice didn't waver. "So either you come up with your own opinions and facts or you shut your mouth about the witches. I made my position clear. We're done with that."
There were no other words exchanged and then boots moved heavy on the gravel as one of them stormed away. She stood on the other side with her pulse in her throat, unsure what to do next.
He hadn't known she was there.
Good Goddess. She needed to get out of here before he saw her and made a big deal out of this. There had to be somewhere else she could escape for five minutes and clear her head. Maybe grab a cold drink too.
The Ice Bar dome beckoned from across the festival grounds, its clear curved walls fogged where the chill inside met the outside dampness.
Through the panels she could see tourists perched on fur-draped stools, drinks glowing amber in carved ice glasses, fairy lights strung along the frame turning the whole structure into an oversized snow globe.
She pushed through the heavy flap at the entrance and the temperature dropped, sharper and drier than outside, the manufactured kind that kept the carved bar from melting into a puddle.
One of Damien's cousins was tending bar.
She ordered a sparkling cider because she needed her head clear, and her fingers went numb against the ice glass before she'd taken her first sip.
The stool felt good under her aching legs.
Five minutes. That was all she needed, and then she'd get back out there and keep smiling at tourists and pretending everything was fine.
Fine. Her favorite lie.
The exile talk had quieted since yesterday. She'd heard about Ryker's retraction from Lily, delivered over tea with the careful neutrality of someone trying not to editorialize. He'd stood up at the meeting and called his own evidence circumstantial, admitted he'd let fear cloud his judgment.
And she’d heard from Neve that he'd helped with her crates at the booth too. He’d just shown up, moved them, and then left without a word.
The retraction she could explain away — guilt, politics, self-preservation.
The crates…she wasn’t sure. He seemed to be going out of his way.
But the thing behind the vendor tents, the way his voice had sounded when he'd said we're done with that, she didn't have an explanation for that at all.
Part of her hated that she cared. A smaller and more stubborn part, filed it away and refused to let the rest of her examine why.
She wasn't here to think about Ryker. She was here to rest her feet and drink overpriced cider in a fancy freezer.
A burst of laughter erupted from the table behind her. A woman in a fleece headband was swatting her husband's arm, cheeks flushed from whatever was in her glass.
"I'm telling you, I saw a face in the water. Right there near the rocks at the cove." She held her hands up, framing an invisible portrait. "Beautiful. Like, eerily beautiful. Mike said it was a seal."
Mike shrugged. "It was dark."
"Seals don't have cheekbones, Mike."
The table laughed. Willow didn't.
A face in the water near the north rocks.
Beautiful. Her mind pulled at the thread, and everything she'd been carrying since the investigation unspooled with it.
The incidents clustered around the hidden cove.
The defensive pattern she'd flagged in her report, the one Sawyer's team had filed away and ignored.
The magic she'd sensed at the generator and the pump station that felt less like an attack and more like a warning.
The prowler outside the cabin that had watched her through the fog and then vanished.
It was a lot like a guard dog standing its ground, she'd told Ryker.
She'd been right all along, and nobody had listened, and now a tourist was joking about seeing a face in the water two days before the Plunge would put hundreds of people in that same stretch of beach.
She set the glass down on the bar, the cider untouched.
She could take this to Sawyer. Lay it out, ask permission, go through the appropriate channels.
And Sawyer would thank her and tell her the security team had it handled and suggest she go back to the bakery where she belonged.
They'd send another squad of wolves to stomp around the shoreline looking for tracks, and whatever was in that cove would hide the way it hid from Cal's team, because wolves couldn't sense what she could sense.
Willow slid off the stool and pushed through the dome's entrance flap. The festival spread before her, bright and busy, tourists clutching drinks and posing for photos, the scent of chocolate and woodsmoke drifting from the vendor carts.
The bakery booth was thirty feet away, Sage behind the counter ladling samples of lavender honey cocoa into paper cups. The line stretched halfway down the block. Willow angled toward her.
"Hey." She leaned against the side of the booth, keeping her voice easy. "You good here for a while? I need to check on something."
Sage handed a cup to a grinning teenager and turned to face her. She had that look, the one she got when she was reading a face the way other people read palms.
"Check on something where?"
"North shore. Won't be long."
"Alone? Is that safe?"
Willow gave her the smile she'd been practicing all morning, the one that said everything is under control without any of the conviction to back it up. "It’s just a walk. I'll be back before the vendor meeting."
Sage didn't buy it. Willow could tell by the way her mouth pressed flat and her hands stilled on the ladle.
But she didn't push. That was the thing about Sage. When they’d arrived at Devils Point she'd trembled at everything.
Now she measured people the way she measured lavender, careful and precise, and she knew when pushing would close a door instead of opening it.
She was really starting to bloom in her magic here.
"Be careful," was all she said.
Willow squeezed her arm once and walked north.
The noise thinned within minutes. Festival lights and laughter fell behind her, and the path along the shoreline narrowed as the village dropped away. Wind off the ocean hit her full in the face, sharp with salt and the wet green smell of a winter coastline. She pulled her coat tighter.
She passed the turnoff to the witches' cabin and didn't stop.
If she stopped, she'd think better of this.
She'd sit down and weigh the risks like a sensible person and talk herself out of going alone, and meanwhile the Plunge would arrive and hundreds of people would charge into freezing water next to whatever was hiding in that cove.
The path turned to packed earth and exposed roots. Driftwood collected in pale tangles along the shore, and the trees thinned to wind-bent firs leaning inland like the coast had bullied them into submission. Her boots crunched over broken shells and stiff kelp.
The air shifted. She pulled it toward her the way her grandmother had taught her, drawing the atmosphere through her senses the way other witches drew from earth or flame.
She studied the temperature, the pressure, and the movement of particles too small to see.
The air carried information if you knew how to read it, and right now it carried a warning.
The same dense, territorial pressure she'd felt at the generator and the pump station, but stronger here.
Closer to the source. Whatever lived in that cove knew she was coming.
She bit the inside of her cheek and didn't slow down.
Fog rolled in from the water, first in wisps, then in thick bands that swallowed the shoreline and muffled her footsteps.
She was reckless, and she knew it. Out here alone, with no backup, and heading toward whatever had been disrupting the island with nothing but her magic and a stubbornness she'd inherited from her grandmother.
But hundreds of tourists would be in that water for the Plunge, her witches were still one bad meeting away from exile, and nobody else was doing a damn thing about it. So she kept walking.
The sound found her before she found the cove.
It threaded beneath the wind and waves like a harmony hiding inside a chord, a voice that wasn't quite a voice, low and mournful and aching.
She'd heard grief sound like that. In the months after her grandmother died, before Iris had dried her tears and told her mourning was self-indulgent, Willow had made that sound into her pillow at night.