Chapter 21
“What are you up to?”I muttered to myself, trailing after Bruce. I made sure to stay far enough behind him that he wouldn’t see me if he happened to glance backward, or at least I did until I realized that I could just cast an invisibility spell.
I blushed.
I was too used to using that spell to hide when having sex, not when I was tailing people.
Bruce led me to the back door of the kitchen and then slipped outside.
I had to navigate the chefs in the kitchen carefully. I didn’t want to cause an accident.
By the time I left the academy, Bruce was nowhere to be seen.
I closed my eyes and whispered the spell enabling me to see when magic was used, this time remembering to account for the overpower of the ley lines.
There he is.
I chuffed in satisfaction. My spot of power was bright on the back of his arm, just out of his sight. His outline shimmered, and I frowned.
That’s an interaction between two powerful spells.
What...
It was subtle, but I could see that he was shrinking the closer he got to the forest.
My stomach felt sick and I regretted eating today. “It has to be him,” I whispered. “I have to stop him.”
I waited until Bruce was truly out of sight before I activated that spot of power I’d left on him, calling it back to me through his footsteps.
Bright blue power lit up the forest floor, and then the clearing, all the way to my feet. It took the form of his footprints.
I said a prayer to every god I could think of, and took the first step, careful to remain inside the outline of his shoe print.
My mind raced as I thought about what might be waiting for me when I got to his secret hideout.
Worst case, he’s been draining the beasts he kidnapped in order to bring his wife back to life. I won’t find anyone, or I’ll find dried shells who used to be people.
I swallowed hard and paused, wobbling slightly. Bruce’s stride was quite a bit bigger than mine, which made tracking him difficult.
The next footprint was closer, though, so I pulled out my grimoire and recited the spell I had lifted from Jim’s ancestor’s journal. Hopefully, the spell would recognize itself and let me pass through.
I took the next step and was delighted to find that I was a little shorter than I had been before.
Best case, I thought, trying to come up with one to stay optimistic.
Best case, he needed additional power?
But why include Hazel?
I had entered the forest now, only half my usual height. The trees loomed over me, even more intimidating when I was alone. I swallowed my fear and pushed onward, Bruce’s trail veering toward the right.
“This is the same trail we followed with that spell that tracked the flow of magic!” I fumed. I paused for a moment, changing the spell on my vision. All the little threads of magic were firmly attached now, pulsing with energy. “He cut them!” I gasped. “He didn’t want me to find his hideout, so he cut them on purpose so that they wouldn’t lead me anywhere!”
I shook my head. “He must have come back after Aiden and I left him, and reattached them. What an asshole!”
Even more careful now, I took my time following his path. I was worried that if I misstepped, the spell would ricochet off of me. I wasn’t sure of the end result if that happened, but magic was unpredictable. I could end up staying small, or I might explode.
I was no taller than the plants at this point, and I was starting to worry about what might happen if I met any animals.
Would they see me as predator or prey?
Fortunately, I didn’t need to worry too much about that, as the footsteps led me up to the base of a giant tree. I could still see the academy when I looked to the right; I was only about five steps into the forest.
I stood in Bruce’s footprints and examined the tree in front of me. “If I was a doorknob, where would I be?” I murmured to myself, reaching out with my right hand. It went right through the bark and I scowled. “Illusioned or a portal?” I took a deep breath, set my shoulders, and walked through.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the bright lighting inside the tree. There was a staircase to my left, winding up around the inside edge of the tree and to the level above me. Right in front of me, though, was the statue of Clarissa Blackthorn.
I walked up to her, able to examine her face up close for the first time. What I had always thought was a noble expression was actually fear. I could see it in her eyes. She had known what was coming for her, and although she looked outwardly calm, she had still been afraid.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her. “But I can’t let Bruce go through with this.”
“Siobhan!” exclaimed a voice, and I whirled, casting a defensive spell as I did.
It was Aiden.
“Oh my God,” I choked out. “You’re all right!” I dismissed the shield and threw myself at him, crying with relief.
Aiden caught me. “Of course I’m all right. What are you doing here? I thought—”
“I’m here to rescue you before Bruce drains your soul to bring his wife back to life!” I blurted out. “Is Hazel here? And the others? We’ve got to go before Bruce knows I’m here!”
“Too late for that,” Bruce said, exiting a door behind the statue that I had missed on my first glance around the room. He crossed his arms across his chest. “You shouldn’t have followed me. You shouldn’t have been able to follow me.”
Aiden let out an exasperated snort. “You don’t know her as well as I do. I’m impressed it took her this long to put the pieces together.”
“You knew?” I gasped, pulling away from him.
Aiden pulled me back to him. “He told me last night when he asked for my help.”
“You’re willing to give up everything to bring his wife back?” I asked, slapping his chest for emphasis. “Don’t I get a say in this?”
Aiden looked confused. “I’m supposed to only be gone for a day. We’re going to cure her tonight when the full moon rises.”
“Gone for a day?” I gaped at him. Then I took a deep breath. “How, exactly, are you going to cure her?”
“That’s the real question,” Bruce said, stepping forward. His eyes were glinting with mischief. “Did you really think that I would drain a single soul, let alone thirteen souls, to save one person?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I exclaimed, exasperated. “You shouldn’t even be here! How are you here?”
Bruce checked his watch. “We’ve got plenty of time for a story. Why don’t you come up to the common room and I’ll tell you all about it. You can also see for yourself that everyone else is safe, including Hazel.”
I brightened at the mention of her name. “She’s here?”
“Of course she is,” Bruce said. “She’s been helping me from the beginning. I needed a plant witch who really knew their stuff. She’s brilliant, you know.”
“I know!” I preened on behalf of my friend. “Okay, I’m ready to hear your story.”
Bruce gestured to the staircase, and Aiden led the way up.
As I climbed, I thought about the misconceptions I had developed based on my fears.
Was Bruce really innocent of all wrongdoing?
“How did you get the students out of the academy without triggering any of the traps?” I asked over my shoulder.
Bruce chuckled. “You’re not starting at the beginning, but I understand why you’d ask that. The traps are only for unwilling people. Every person is here because they agreed to help me. If anyone said no, I didn’t take them.” He sobered. “I know we’ve only gotten to know each other over the past few days, but I had hoped you’d know me better than that.”
“Why did it take so long for the ones who didn’t want to help to return then?” I demanded.
Bruce shrugged. “Some had agreed and then changed their minds. Others took a little longer to return because I didn’t want to be seen. They were all safe in my study room in the library while they were ‘missing’.”
“And their memories?”
“In jars in my room here. I’ll return them after Clarissa is cured,” he said. “They all agreed to that. Taking an unwilling person’s memories is very painful for them. But I needed to work in secret. I wasn’t sure who I could trust.”
“Surely any of the teachers would understand and help you! Professor Dunlop would have!” I exclaimed.
“Are you one hundred percent certain of that?” he asked mildly. “You still don’t know how I intend to cure her.”
“Are you going to drain any souls?” I snapped back.
“Not exactly.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Let me tell you the story from the beginning,” Bruce said with a sigh. “Then you can make an informed decision about whether you want to stop me or not.”
“You trust me, though, don’t you?” Aiden asked from the top of the stairs. “I wouldn’t do anything that would hurt me.”
I sighed. “I do trust you. I’m not so sure I trust him.” I indicated Bruce over my shoulder with my thumb.
“Understandable,” Bruce agreed.
“Siobhan?” shrieked a voice from above.
“Hazel?” I called back. Even though Bruce had said she was all right, I hadn’t quite believed him until that moment.
I ran up the rest of the stairs, brushing past Aiden, to crash into Hazel’s arms. “Are you okay?” I asked, pulling back to look her over.
“I’m fine,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry I didn’t meet you at the ferry.”
“I’m more concerned about the fact that you didn’t leave a note!”
Hazel looked the same as ever, her greenish-brown skin smooth like the inside of a fresh cutting of a tree. Her hair reminded me of a weeping willow’s leafy branches, except brown. She had a blush of color on her cheeks from excitement.
“Sorry,” Hazel said. “I tried to convince Bruce that you could be trusted, but he was paranoid. He thought he could trust the people of Wellspring, too.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, but it hurt.
Hazel frowned at Bruce. “I didn’t have time to leave any notes, even just to tell you not to worry.”
“I was worried that it was already too late,” he said. “I knew that there were a lot of tests that you’d want to run.”
“You’ve been busy with them every waking moment,” Aiden agreed. “That’s what you told me this morning when I got here.”
“Five days of intense plant magic.” Hazel snorted. “I barely finished on time.”
“You were the best person for the job,” I said. “Although I’m certain a professor or two might have helped.” I rolled my eyes at Bruce.
“I should start explaining,” he said sheepishly. “Have a seat.”
The common room was nicely furnished with large couches and tables. There were doors around the exterior that led to bedrooms, based on what I could see through a doorway. I took a seat on one couch and Aiden sat next to me. Bruce and Hazel sat opposite us.
“I was born in 1644,” Bruce began. “I met the love of my life, my soulmate, in school in France. We were married after our second year, about four months after we met. Her parents performed the joining ceremony. They were so happy that their daughter had found her soulmate like they had. It brought Clarissa and I even closer together. I could feel her every emotion...” He trailed off and took a deep breath.
“I knew that we would face some dissidents when I brought her home, although my family was fairly open-minded. Unfortunately, I didn’t anticipate just how intensely she would be hated. Someone hired a roc to turn my Clarissa to stone. I felt it, you know.” He bit his lip. “Her fear rising, and then nothing, as if someone had ripped my heart out.”
“Hey man, it’s okay,” Aiden said, reaching out to offer support to Bruce across the table between them.
Bruce took a deep breath and said, “I reached out to all my teachers, desperate to find a cure. There were rumors... My Herbology teacher found a reference to a fairy tale where a roc had turned a human to stone. It was the only copy, and it was incredibly old. The scroll frayed even when handled with delicacy. I’ll skip the full tale, but the cure was to grow a golden spirit tree from seed for the lifetime of five men and then harvest the golden fruit when it ripens on a night of a full moon. The fruit is to be given to twelve willing siblings, who will give the gift of life to the person encased in stone.”
My eyebrow rose. “Give the gift of life? What does that mean?”
“My teachers and Clarissa’s parents studied that part intently. They think that each of the twelve need to encase the statue in fire and breathe on it.”
I shook my head. “What if they were wrong? What if the fruit takes their life to give it to Clarissa? Are you really willing to kill twelve people?”
“Of course not,” Bruce snapped. “I won’t let it come to that. That’s where Hazel comes in.”
“You haven’t finished explaining the riddle,” Hazel said gently. “Or how you got here. The order is important.” She glared at me for interrupting.
I nodded sheepishly. “Please go on.”
Bruce smiled faintly. “It took a while to find a seed of a golden spirit tree. They’re not exactly common.”
Aiden snorted a laugh. “Understatement,” he muttered under his breath.
“I finally heard a rumor of one in the south of China.”
“There’s a nexus point there,” I said suddenly. “One of the big ones!”
“Right,” Bruce grinned. “I wish you had been there with me back in 1665. It would have been a lot easier with your brain. I won’t go into detail about my adventure to retrieve the seed now, but I got it and brought it back. I planted it under the best conditions that my teacher and I could manage. The timing was a little more difficult to figure out. Based on when the fairy tale was written, the best guess we had was that people usually lived around seventy years at a maximum. So I took a time travel portal—”
“A what?” I interrupted.
“You heard him,” Aiden said with a chuckle. “How else would he have gotten to this time?”
“I thought maybe he took an immortality potion or something.”
“Those are illegal,” Bruce said with a frown. “The portal isn’t common knowledge, and for very good reason. I won’t be traveling back to my time. I said goodbye to my family, left the academy in the capable hands of my cousin, and came here. The first thing I did was check on the tree.” A proud smile graced his face. “I was only early by two years. I enrolled in classes, got assigned Aiden as my roommate, and you know the rest of my history.”
“Except I don’t. Not really,” I said. I leaned over and slapped his knee, the closest part of him that I could reach. “Why didn’t you trust any of us?”