Chapter 28 Isobel
Isobel
It had been eight years since Isobel last saw her father like this, his pallor bleached to a stark bone white, smeared in red-green blood that smelled strangely more like sap.
It was just past dawn. After the cottage had stopped sinking into the ground, Dane had taken Isobel and her father back to his farmhouse, where the three of them now sat at his kitchen table.
Isobel still felt shaken, and her father’s hands trembled as he raised a glass of chocolate milk to his lips, a bit of liquid sloshing up the side.
“Please, Dad,” Isobel said when he put down the milk. “Let us take you to the hospital.” It scared her to see him like this, half rotted, more forest than man with every breath he took.
Her father shook his head and took off his glasses, eyes on the box of ashes in the center of the table as he rubbed the lenses clean, then replaced the glasses on his nose. “How long has Eva been gone?”
“About thirty-six hours,” Dane clipped.
Isobel felt the heat of her father’s gaze and looked away, knowing he’d puzzled out that she’d lied to him when she told him Eva and Arthur were safe.
“Do you know where?”
Isobel fought to remember what Lenny had said when he’d shown up at the farmhouse only hours before, but the headache brimming behind her eyes made it hard to focus. She took a sip of water.
“They were last spotted on the north road,” Dane said evenly. “We have reason to believe both Eva and Arthur abandoned their vehicle and pursued a trail up the mountain on foot.”
“How far up the north road?” Dad pressed.
Dane clicked his tongue. “A few miles?”
“I need to see it.” He made as though to rise.
“Dad, stop.” Isobel tugged his arm back down. “What you need to see is Dr. Rosen!”
“And just what is she going to do with all this?” He gestured to the aspen stump in his chest. “A dead man, rotting in his own skin?” His laugh was humorless. “Dr. Rosen has already tried everything.”
“But maybe—”
“She can’t fix this,” he snapped.
Izzy paled. It didn’t feel like they were talking just about his injury. “You don’t know that,” she whispered softly.
The fight seemed to leave her father then, and he slumped back into his chair. “Now you sound like your sister.”
The sting in those words was worse than an outright accusation.
She’d messed up.
“You recognize that location?” Dane asked.
Her father grimaced. “Maybe.” He tried to take another sip of his milk, only to realize the glass was empty. Isobel popped to her feet and dashed to the fridge. Colorful magnets held Esther’s crayon drawings to the steel surface.
She returned with a new, full glass, which Dad drained all in one go. Little scales of bark flaked off his cheek, and his eyes were shot with green veins when he met her gaze. “What did your sister say, exactly, before she left?”
Isobel chewed her lip as she thought back. “You were badly hurt. She was upset that you kept asking her for honey.”
“Honey?” Dad let out a low curse.
Dane looked between them. “What does that mean?”
A feeling of unease stirred in Isobel’s stomach as she watched her father’s face lose a bit more color. “It means we need to hurry.” His chair legs squeaked against the tiles as he pushed back and rose. “Sheriff, you drive.”
“But—”
“Izzy, please.” Dad’s expression softened into need. “I can do this. I have to do this. And after… I’ll go wherever you want me to go.”
She straightened. “To the hospital?”
He sighed. “Yes. Fine.”
It was the best she was going to get. Isobel stood and plucked Dane’s keys off the hook on the wall. “Then let’s go.”
Even with the branches of his saplings snapped off, Dad was almost too big to fit inside the back of Dane’s patrol car.
He didn’t complain, though. When they turned onto the north road, he started speaking, so softly that it could have just been for himself.
“The Appalachian mountain range is one of the oldest on Earth, you know.”
Dane shot him a quick, inquiring look but didn’t interrupt.
“Ancient places are something of a breeding ground for the unusual, but I didn’t believe the impossible stories I’d grown up on until I stumbled into one myself.
” As he spoke, Dad’s voice fell into a cadence she remembered from the many nights he’d spent weaving bedtime stories for her and Eva when they were little.
“It was my first summer out of college, and a buddy and I were meant to go camping. When he bailed, I went up this road alone, until I hit a stand of aspens.”
The car rattled and bounced over a muddy pothole.
“There was something strange about those trees. They felt more alive than the forest surrounding my family’s farm.
I couldn’t help the feeling that they were…
watching me. And there was this voice,” Dad said, his words slowing.
“It knew my name. I could hear it, not in the wind but from the roots beneath me. I followed it for miles, until I found her.”
“Her?” Isobel said, twisting to face her father in the back seat.
Dad nodded. “The spirit of the wood. She was a woman, once, given the gift of everlasting life so long as she remained in the meadow where I found her.”
“I don’t understand,” Dane said.
Outside, the wall of trees began to change from pine and poplar to the pale, chalky white hues of aspens. Isobel sifted through her father’s words with a frown. “What did you do next?”
Dad’s voice turned wistful. “I freed her.”
Isobel wanted to ask more questions, but around the next bend, Arthur’s Volkswagen came into view.
Dane sucked in an audible breath and pulled onto the shoulder of the road.
His keys clicked together, the only sound to break up the silence in the car as the three of them got out and walked to the sagging vehicle.
Dane knelt and ran a hand over the tread of a flattened tire. “Slashed,” he muttered.
Lenny’s face flashed through Isobel’s mind. He’d come up this road. That had to have been done by him and Avi Dawson.
Dane straightened and tipped his chin toward her father. “So, Jack. Where did they go?”
Her father stepped past both of them. His movements were slow, his breaths still too shallow, but he wore a grim determination as he lifted a finger to the trees. “There.”
At first, Isobel didn’t understand. Then her eyes fixed on a trail of wildflowers starting at the edge of the road and stretching deep into the trees. Where the rest of the undergrowth was sprinkled only with occasional goldenrod, the wending line of flowers was lush with the sunny blooms.
A trail not of breadcrumbs but of seeds coaxed to life. Isobel’s heart gave a jolt.
Eva.
“There is a flower that only grows in a meadow up this way,” Jack said, falling back into his story.
“For years after I freed the spirit of the wood, I ignored her warnings and utilized its healing properties by drying it into a tea, as I had for so many other herbs I collected. I even cultivated a few hives up the mountain that pollinated a field of the blooms, concentrating its life-giving power into—”
“Honey,” Isobel said in a hush, the pieces clicking into place.
Her father nodded, his eyes still fixed on the trail his youngest daughter had left behind her in the grass.
Isobel’s mind whirred. So that’s what he must have been doing every time he took a solo trip up the mountain. He’d never permitted her and Eva to tag along on those particular hikes like he did on others.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Isobel said softly.
The question made her feel like a hypocrite.
Dad’s brows drew into a slow frown. “Because this story doesn’t have a happy ending.”
Most of his stories didn’t. Isobel opened her mouth to respond when a voice called out roughly.
“Is someone there?”
Instantly, Isobel’s body went on high alert.
“Please,” the voice choked out, anguished. “Help me.”
Dane swore and jogged forward into the trees. “Avi, is that you?”
Isobel followed behind, her eyes sweeping the brush.
“Lenny!” Dane bellowed, but his brother didn’t reply.
Avi let another sob slip free, an anguished moan drawing their attention. When she saw him, Isobel gasped.
Avi was face down, one hand clutching a clump of grass as he tried to haul himself forward. A depression the width of his body carved a clear path behind him. How far had he dragged himself? What had happened?
Why was there blood caking his face?
A burgundy stain smeared down his cheek, mixing with the soil beneath. But that’s not where Isobel’s focus landed. Her breath stalled in her throat at the sight of his left eye, gouged of its ball and the fluids inside it. Flowers spilled out of the empty, bloody socket.
“The hell?” Dane muttered as he rushed to the injured man’s side. There had to be other wounds too, Isobel realized, that prevented Avi from rising. His pants were ripped, and though one of his legs was scrambling to thrust himself forward, the other lay flat behind him.
Bile rose in her throat.
“Dane?” Avi cried out.
“I’m here,” Dane said, taking the man’s hand in his own and briefly squeezing. “We’re going to help you, Avi, all right? Can you tell me what happened?”
Avi let out a sob. “She came out of nowhere!”
Isobel stiffened.
“Who did?” Dane pressed as Dad knelt beside the pair of them.
Don’t you dare say her name.
“I don’t know.” Avi dug his fingernails into the already-damaged skin beneath his eye. When one of the flower stems popped free, he screamed in agony.
Dane pulled Avi’s hands away from his face. “Was it Eva?” he harshed out, breathless.
“No,” Isobel snapped, stunned at both the question and his coldness. He doesn’t get to say that. He couldn’t think that, after all they’d done to protect her from suspicion. Dane couldn’t… He couldn’t think…
Avi moaned. “She was made of trees, a-and roots…” he sobbed.
“Right,” Dane muttered, flicking a look to Isobel. She’d spent years learning his tells, and yet she couldn’t parse that expression. Her chest squeezed, the smell of mangled flesh and blood and flowers making her sick.
Dane shifted his focus to the wound on Avi’s leg. Unhooking his belt, he wrapped a makeshift tourniquet around Avi’s upper thigh. “There’s a medical kit in the glove box,” he said to Isobel.
She raced back to the patrol car and yanked the passenger door wide, crouching as she dug through the contents of the glove box, tearing out item after item.
The car manual and registration. A notebook, pens, and…
Isobel slowed, and lifted a small jam jar filled with a familiar shade of deep blue petals.
She knew this tea. It was the same blend Lenny had been sent to fetch from their house the day he and Arthur got into that fight.
“Isobel!”
Shaking herself, Isobel located a mini first aid kit from the depths of the glove box and raced back to the men just as Dane rolled Avi onto his back.
“Where is my brother?”
Avi let out a sob. “I-I don’t know!”
“That’s okay,” Dad cut in, taking Avi’s wrists and gently folding the man’s arms across his chest. “Don’t scratch now, son.”
Isobel’s heart pounded as she passed over the first aid kit.
“Lenny left me there to die,” Avi moaned. “She-she came out of nowhere and”—his voice took on more volume and energy, his one good, bloodshot eye popping open—“he left me!”