Chapter 26 The Map #2
The cluster near The Hare and Hound is bothering me.
Three of my supernatural cases originated within two hundred metres of the pub.
A cat with accelerated healing. A dog with behavioural anomalies.
A bird, of all things, that a customer brought in after it flew into the café window and that, when I examined it, had a bone density that shouldn’t exist in any avian species I know of.
I assumed the cluster was coincidental. The Wren is a social hub. People gather there. Animals belonging to those people get brought to the vet who drinks coffee there. Confirmation bias. Clustering illusion. The kind of statistical noise that looks like a pattern if you stare at it long enough.
But the green zone. The hum in the ground. I can feel it when I sit in the café, faint but present, the same charged quality I feel at Geoff’s farm and in the forest clearings. And The Hare and Hound sits directly above one of the underground water channels I’ve mapped.
I need to talk to Maggie.
Not today. Today I have a full afternoon, and the questions I want to ask her require the kind of conversation that happens over damson gin rather than over a fence.
But soon. Because the map is telling me something about Mistwood that goes deeper than wolves and bonds and a vet with senses she didn’t ask for.
Roan arrives at six with dinner supplies.
This has become our pattern. He cooks. I watch him cook and ask questions.
We eat. We talk. Sometimes we don’t talk, and the silence is full rather than empty.
Sometimes we end up in bed before the food is finished, and the reheated leftovers are always better than they should be.
Tonight he’s brought steak. The smell of it hits me the moment he opens the bag, and my body responds with an intensity that still catches me off guard.
Red meat. Protein. The post-emergence cravings are specific and relentless, and they have strong opinions about what I should be eating.
Roan noticed before I did. He started bringing red meat three days in and hasn’t stopped.
“I mapped the underground water channels,” I say, while he seasons the steak with the casual precision that characterises everything he does in my kitchen.
“You did what?”
“The green zones. The places where the land feels charged. They follow the underground water. Springs, seeps, subterranean streams. I’ve mapped seven of them, and every one sits directly above a water source.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The steak sizzles as it hits the pan. “How did you map them?”
“I walked. I felt. I cross-referenced with geological survey data.” I pull the map from my bag and spread it on the kitchen table. “Look. The forest clearing where the bonfire was held. Geoff’s lower field. The spot behind the church. The café. All on the water.”
He leans over the map. Studies it. I watch his face for the thing I’ve learned to look for: the slight tightening around his eyes that means I’ve found something he already knew but didn’t expect me to find.
There it is.
“You knew,” I say.
“I knew some of it. The clearing, the farm. My mother mentioned them once. She said certain places in Mistwood were louder than others.”
“Louder how?”
“She didn’t explain. I was eight. She was telling me a bedtime story, and I thought she was making it up.” He straightens. Turns the steak. Doesn’t look at me. “The journal my father mentioned. I think this might be in it.”
“Will you read it?”
“I said I would.”
“I know. I’m asking if you will.”
He looks at me then. Not the guarded look. The real one, the one that lets me see the full scope of what he’s carrying. The grief. The guilt. The tentative, terrifying hope that his mother left something behind that might help the woman he loves.
“Yes,” he says. “I’ll read it.”
I take the steak plates to the table. He brings the salad. We sit down across from each other, the map between us, and eat.
“The cluster near The Hare and Hound,” I say. “Three supernatural cases in two hundred metres. And it sits on one of the water channels.”
“You think the water is causing the incidents?”
“I think the water is marking something. A boundary, maybe. Or a source. The energy I feel at those sites isn’t random. It’s concentrated. Focused.” I spear a piece of steak. Chew. Think. “Maggie would know.”
“Maggie knows everything. Getting her to share it is the challenge.”
“I’m patient.”
“You’re relentless. It’s different.”
“It’s effective.”
He smiles. The real one. I smile back, and the evening settles around us, warm and ordinary and full of the things we’re building together. A relationship. A home. A shared project of understanding this place that chose us, or that we chose, or both.
After dinner, I pin the map to the wall above my desk in the surgery. Step back. Look at it.
It’s incomplete. There are gaps where I haven’t walked yet, areas of the territory I haven’t sensed. The ridge is blank. The deeper forest is blank. The picture is forming, but slowly, the way any good research project forms. Data first. Pattern second. Theory third.
I’m not there yet. But I will be.
Roan comes up behind me. Wraps his arms around my waist. Rests his chin on the top of my head. We look at the map together.
“You’re going to figure this place out,” he says. It’s not a question.
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“Then I’ll know what I’m protecting. Then I’ll know what we’re protecting.”
His arms tighten. He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. The bond hums between us, steady, certain. Outside, the November dark presses against the windows. The village sleeps. The patrols run the ridge.
I stand in my surgery with my mate’s arms around me and my map on the wall and the growing, unshakeable conviction that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Maggie was right. She’s always bloody right.