Chapter 9
Chapter
That night, I dreamed I was drowning. At first I thought it was the pond again, but this was different.
There was no icy, nebulous weight of water, no expansive dark stretching away from me on all sides; instead, this blackness closed me in, crushed me, lay thick and hot over my face.
My arms were pinned down by my sides, and my heart climbed into my throat. I couldn’t breathe.
The smell of death was all around me, the scent of shit and iron and deep-body organs pervading my nostrils, inescapable.
I retched, gasped, but there was no air.
I tasted blood, or something like it. I could feel it sliding down my face, creeping into my mouth, running into my eyes.
I fought to move my arms again, make some attempt to free myself, but I couldn’t.
The slick, heaving darkness pressed me down.
I opened my mouth to scream, somehow still expecting the rush of water that accompanied every other dream of drowning. There was none; instead, my teeth grazed a humid, pulsing form in the black, and my tongue tasted it.
I bit down.
The instinct was not my own, not even human.
And yet I closed my teeth around it until I felt something give, felt a hot rush of liquid in my mouth.
I yanked, ripped, my neck straining. I swallowed down a shred of flesh—because that was what it was, flesh.
There was still no air, but there was a pocket of space, a sense that perhaps air was not so far away, if only I could get to it.
I bit down again, teeth grinding, liquid running down my throat.
I did not have a predator’s teeth, and the stuff of life did not want to give between them, but I made it give.
I tore away the flesh, gulped it down; there was nowhere else for it to go.
I forgot about my arms entirely, stopped trying to move them.
Perhaps I didn’t have arms. Perhaps my body was something else now.
At last, my teeth tore through to the outside. There was fur in this bite, and animal musk, and I spit it out. I pushed my face through and gasped the clean, beautiful air. My hands came up alongside, startling me; they tore the hole open farther, and I spilled out onto the grass.
I was red all over, slippery, steaming. My hair hung in sticky strings around me as I heaved in oxygen. My vision swam watery pink, and my eyelashes were a clotted veil.
I pushed myself up, my limbs trembling and weak.
I collapsed back down again at first, and lay there simply breathing, seeking the scent of the warm grass and earth through the overwhelming metallic tang.
Finally, I gathered my strength, heaved myself up, got my knees underneath me.
The clover cushioned my bare feet and the wind blew strong, drying the blood on my naked body.
Before me stretched a long, narrow corridor of road, trees on either side.
I turned. Behind me stretched a trail of slime and viscera through the tall grass. At the end of it lay the doe, her neck broken, the hole gaping in her stomach.
Strangely, I didn’t wake up then. From there, I fell into a black, dreamless sleep. When I did wake, it was with heavy eyes, a film of sweat dried on my skin, and the same feeling of wrongness I experienced when I first found the doe.
I sat up carefully, trying to get my bearings.
Glancing around my room, nothing seemed out of place; my jeans and flannel were slung over the wingback chair where I left them, my wallet and phone undisturbed on the nightstand, the bouquet of sunflowers and dahlias on my dresser still fresh and colorful, and yet I couldn’t shake the sensation of precariousness.
It was still almost completely dark outside, my internal clock not yet aligned with shorter daylight hours.
The fawn, who I could’ve moved to the barn a few days ago, was awake in her little pen, anticipating breakfast. I stumbled through my morning routine, staring out the window as I filled the kettle, giving bottles and eyedroppers and sponge baths on clumsy autopilot.
I was apprehensive as I went to the barn, the now-fed fawn on my heels.
Normally, I would only turn on the bare bulb in the feed room rather than disturbing the animals with the aisle light, but today I flicked it on and went carefully down the row, checking on everyone.
They were all awake and waiting impatiently for food, no signs of harm other than the injuries or illnesses they came in with, so I hurried through the preparation of their meals and doled them out.
With the raccoon I released the other day and not counting the squirrels in the house, I was down to ten animals, which was a number most rehabilitators could only dream of seeing.
Even the small, suburban ones were juggling thirty or forty at a time, their yards and garages overtaken by a maze of crates.
There were always more, more, more—hit by cars, attacked by dogs, poisoned by lawn fertilizer, caught in power lines, evicted from the holes and nests they’d used for generations, trapped in smaller and smaller areas until disease ran rampant and competition for resources became vicious.
I knew that I was soft by comparison, luxuriating in time and resources thanks to—
I froze, my hand poised on the door of the fridge, my arms laden with tubs of berries and mealworms and greens. For a moment I didn’t move, couldn’t move, my heart racing frantically in the constricting iron cage of my chest, knowing now what was wrong but too afraid to confront it.
I forced a deep breath into my lungs, then another.
I shoved the containers back into the fridge before I dropped them, shut the door, and leaned back against the cool, solid surface.
The facing wall was hung with drying herbs: St. John’s wort, goldenseal, milk thistle, valerian, echinacea, all familiar healing friends through whom I’d worked my magic.
But it was my magic that was wrong, wounded, a shell of itself. The wards in the immediate sanctuary were still strong and thrumming with life, which was perhaps why I didn’t notice right away, but the rest…
I closed my eyes, reached for the web—that beautiful, glistening web of protection and balance and abundance that took decades to build—and found only a few forlorn strands.
The rest had been sheared away, leaving nothing but hollow space in their wake.
The flood of power I’d drawn on just the night before had been reduced to a trickle.
The sensation that took hold of me was something deeper and colder than panic. It was as though someone had died; I simply couldn’t believe it was true, that something so intrinsic to who I was could be ripped away without me even realizing it was happening.
I ran from the barn to the truck, fumbling the keys in a shaking hand.
It was only when I almost hit her with the door that I realized the fawn was still with me, gamboling at my side as if this were a game.
I scooped her into the back seat and leaped into the front, gunning the truck down the driveway and heading south.
The drive was a scant two minutes; there had been many times when I walked here, to this abandoned little corner of the town at the back edge of a cornfield.
The awkward slice of land was one the farmer probably intended to clear and plant, but stopped when he found the four pioneer graves in the middle of it, headstones worn down to illegibility and leaning like a row of crooked teeth.
There were thick, dual tire tracks through the grass, narrowly avoiding the graves.
They went straight from the road to the lone pine, whose boughs were decorated in white even though the first snow was still two months off.
There were deep, fresh ruts too, places where the grass had been spun down to mud.
I could almost see him, the once-strong shoulders tense under the weight of a tow chain, the stone blue eyes invisible behind the glare of the headlights in his glasses.
I got out of the truck, one hand rising unconsciously to rub at the ache beneath my breastbone.
The white drifts of petals were the only remnant of the rose.
They were gathered in the tree, collected in the furrows of the grass like folds of a bridal veil, tumbling away down the road on a breeze.
Few people knew the scale of a truly ancient rose, although the scars here bore witness; the hole he’d ripped it from was as deep as a grave, and the pine boughs were ragged from where the canes clung to it.
The tree was stunted and old when I discovered this place, but the rose had embraced rather than smothered it, the magic within its roots shared with the tree to make it strong. It wouldn’t last the winter now.
I sank to my knees at the edge of the hole, tears blurring my vision.
This rose and its sisters had been my companions since my mother died, my magic strengthening each year as they grew, their presence a constant, reassuring touch at the edge of my consciousness.
I had not imagined they could be lost, and my breath came in a sob as I thought of Zeke hacking them down and tearing them apart as I slept.
I should have known. I should’ve been here to stop him.
Footsteps rustled in the dry, rough grass. I jerked to my feet and whipped around, and the devil came to a halt. In the strange, gray light of predawn, he looked less human, the planes of his face more like salt than skin, the facsimile of sorrow less convincing.
“I’m sorry, Tess,” he said. “I know how important they were to you.”
So why didn’t you stop him? I wanted to ask, but I knew the answer: This place was my responsibility, mine to protect, not his. I had made that very clear.
I resisted the childish urge to swipe my sleeve across my eyes and instead focused on keeping the tremble out of my voice. “I thought I told you to leave me alone.”
“You did.” He paused, and then, gently: “But your power doesn’t extend here anymore.”
A sudden spike of fear pierced my grief.
Burrsville, with its serene, rolling hills and old forests, was ripe for plunder, and now every greedy eye my magic had kept turned away would find it.
They would strip the limestone out of the earth and the timber from the ridges, and the creeks would go black with the runoff.
It wouldn’t matter that the sanctuary’s wards were still standing; once the locusts descended, there wouldn’t be anything my little charms and spells could do to maintain the balance of nature.
I turned away from him and clamped my hand over my mouth, trying and failing to keep a sob of despair from escaping.
I heard him approach, and after a beat of hesitation, his hand found my shoulder.
He would take me in his arms if I allowed it, would gather me up and tuck my head beneath his chin, and part of me wanted desperately to allow it.
I wanted to not be alone in this moment, to simply have another person, even if he wasn’t quite human.
“I’m sorry, Tess,” he said again, his voice rough with emotion. “This is what I was afraid would happen.”
His forefinger brushed my neck, and from that small place a wave of terrible certainty washed over my entire body.
The devil had been at my door for years, offering, reminding, cajoling, extending the forbidden fruit with an open hand and simply waiting for me to take it, but more recently his patience seemed to have worn thin.
Perhaps he finally got tired of waiting.
Perhaps it was simply easier to set this trap, to watch me fall into this pit, thinking I would take his hand as the only way out.
Rage and terror warred inside me. You cannot trust him, no matter what he says, my mother had told me, and yet I had trusted him.
Even if I had not taken his gifts—not since that first one—I’d expected fairness from him, a level playing field, not treachery.
The urge to hurt him had worked my hands into fists, but I had nothing that could hurt him.
He could only hurt me, and now he’d shown that he would.
“How did he know?” I whispered, hiding my fury beneath my grief.
“You underestimated him. He’s a zealot, and they have their own power. These would’ve lit up like beacons to anyone with a touch of awareness, and he has far more than a touch. When you drew on them last night, it was like giving a scent to a bloodhound.”
Liar, I wanted to spit. Zeke had shown even less sensitivity to the magic than any of my friends or his sour little wife.
There was no way he could’ve followed the trail back to my roses—not on his own.
The devil wanted to corner me, wanted to force me into taking his deal to save my sanctuary, and he thought I would fall for it because Zeke was our common enemy.
“He’s dangerous, Tess,” the devil said. “You have more yet left to lose, and he will take it.”
“I’ll rebuild,” I said, stupid in my defiance. “I have cuttings. I knew they wouldn’t last forever. They can be replaced.”
“They can’t—not in time, and you know it.”
I turned and walked away, and his hand slid from my shoulder. I didn’t want him to see my face, to know I knew what he had done. Men were vicious when caught out, and even if the devil was not quite a man, he was close enough.
“Am I so repulsive to you?” he called as I walked away. “You would rather let him destroy everything than let me help you?”
I didn’t trust myself to answer. I put my hand on the door, and there was the sudden sound of feet rushing through the grass, bearing down on me. I jerked my head up, fear clogging my throat, just in time for a strong northeasterly wind to buffet me, carrying the petals with it. The devil was gone.
Breathing hard, I slid into the truck, and it was only then I remembered I’d brought the fawn with me. She was standing in the back seat, her nose leaving a smudge on the window as she stared northeast.
“He’s gone,” I told her. “For now.”