3. The Moth
CHAPTER THREE
The Moth
I pulled up to the property and killed the engine, letting the sudden silence settle over me.
Without its roar, I could hear the peaceful rustling of trees swaying behind the large, dark Victorian manor house before me.
Like everything in Pumpkin Hollow, it was unnecessarily spooky, painted entirely black from the front stairs to the spires rising from the eastern tower.
We get it, you’re a witch.
I flipped open my phone, looking for the delivery instructions. Before I could check them, a new message popped up.
A picture of my youngest brother, Motthew, holding up a calculus test with a 95% score and giving the camera a proud thumbs-up.
I grinned, typing back.
Me:
Great job!
Three little dots bounced before his answer appeared.
Motthew:
Thanks, this one was a doozy.
Do you know where the vacuum is?
I ran my hand down my face. My youngest brother was a whiz in school, but he would lose his head if it wasn’t attached to his shoulders.
Me:
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Mom?
Motthew:
She hasn’t been home in a few days.
My stomach dropped.
Me:
You have food?
Motthew:
Yeah, she always sets me up, but I made a huge mess snacking on her new recipe of pollen crackers and wanted to clean up. Hence the vacuum.
Me:
Left wall, closet under the stairs.
Motthew:
Thanks bro!
No more dots popped up, but my hand was clamped around the phone. He was fine. He was nearly eighteen and a genius and…I’d watched him burn soup once.
Twice.
Just finish up the job. Then you can head home. He’ll be fine.
Fine. He’d be fine. I flipped to the delivery instructions.
Please deliver to the greenhouse in the back of the property between 11:30 p.m. and midnight.
I groaned, climbing off my bike. I pushed my red motorcycle goggles up onto my forehead. My night vision was good, but not good enough to see with no moonlight and my goggles on. I didn’t want to get tangled up in something and make this delivery take any longer than it needed to.
My boots crunched against the path that led around the house until I rounded the corner and my breath caught.
A greenhouse blazed with light, orange and warm against the black sky painted with stars. Every window glowed like a beacon, illuminating the skeletal shapes of plants inside. It was so beautiful, so perfectly inviting…
I blinked, shaking my head to clear the spell of the light. Being a moth had its disadvantages—this being one of the biggest.
I wiggled my goggles back down over my eyes, and the skin scraped raw by hours of wearing them protested.
I had no choice. The red lenses were designed to filter out the part of the spectrum that affected me most, and I needed this delivery done.
Everything took on a deep crimson hue, but my head cleared.
The order form had been annoyingly specific.
But then again, most witches I’d met were type-A lunatics.
This order had been type A-plus. I’d had the weird bundle of leaves in my pack for days, as I was required to carry them across at least three boundaries before delivery.
I hoped state lines counted as boundaries, and I’d crossed more than three this week, so maybe I’d even get a bonus.
The closer I got, the brighter the light became. Gods, it was so perfect. When was the last time I saw light like that?
My steps slowed. I should’ve been watching the path, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from those windows.
The light clearly wasn’t from electric bulbs.
It wavered as if it were alive, the candles fueling it dancing with their own ecstatic joy.
It called out to me in a voice I couldn’t ignore, my wings starting to unfurl without my permission.
Just make the delivery. Drop and go.
But that light…
I was ten feet from the glass when I saw her.
She stood inside a casting circle surrounded by a dozen black candles.
Their flames swayed in unison like they were all breathing together.
The woman—the witch—had her hands raised, her orange-red hair catching the candlelight like embers, spilling over her shoulders as she spoke words I couldn’t hear through the glass.
It floated around her face like living flames. Like she was the flame.
She was stunning.
This woman looked as if she’d grown from the same soil as the deadly plants surrounding her.
Sharp cheekbones, full lips moving through an incantation, and an expression of absolute concentration that made my stomach flip.
I’d known dozens of witches in my life, but the way the surrounding plants all bent toward her like they were listening told me something.
Plants were rarely wrong about people—magical or otherwise.
As I watched, a dark vine unfurled toward her, curling against her cheek and wiping away…a tear.
She was crying, and it made my antennae twitch. They tasted her on the air, and I recognized that sadness. A sadness that staying busy could mostly hide. I knew better than most how depression couldn’t hit a moving target.
Fuck, I needed to get laid instead of standing around psychoanalyzing pretty girls by candlelight. I was staring like a creep. Just knock and—
The candles flared brighter. All of them, all at once.
The light exploded outward, and even my goggles weren’t enough to fight its overwhelming power. My brain just—snapped.
Every rational thought evaporated. My body moved without permission, pulled forward by nothing but primal instinct. The light was everything. I needed to reach it, to touch it, to be it.
My boots pounded against the gravel.
Get to the light get to the light get to the light—
Some distant part of my mind screamed at me to stop, but my body wouldn’t listen. The moth in me had taken over completely, drowning out everything human and rational. There was only the light and the desperate, overwhelming need to have it.
I was running full speed when I hit the glass.
The impact was catastrophic.
Glass exploded inward with a horrible splintering sound. It shattered against my leather jacket as I flew forward, arms up to protect my face. I slammed into a table, and then I was on the ground in a cascade of soil and ceramic shards and the perfume-like smell of crushed flora.
Pain bloomed across my shoulders and face. Something hot and wet—blood, probably mine—trickled down my temple.
But the light. Oh gods, the light. Even sprawled on the ground, bleeding and covered in dirt, I wanted to crawl toward it.
My fingers actually twitched, reaching. I lifted my head looking for the candles, the light, but they were scattered all over the cobblestone floor, extinguished.
I rolled and my eyes were flooded again with that perfect, radiant light. It was all coming from her.
Her magic, her aura, I didn’t fucking know. It had never been the candles. All I knew was she was glowing and perfect and it had overridden every single thought I had except that I needed to get to her.
Great fucking time to be a mothman.
“No. No, no no no no no—”
The light was immediately extinguished.
The desperation in her voice cut through my lingering haze. I blinked, trying to focus. The witch stood over me, and up close she was even more striking—and absolutely devastated. Her hazel eyes flashed, her chest heaving.
“I—” I tried to form words, but my brain was still swimming. Get to the light. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” She gestured wildly at the surrounding destruction.
I looked around to see shattered glass glittering everywhere, pots lying broken with their contents spilled, and an entire shelf of sprouts collapsed.
“You just ran full speed through my greenhouse window like a fucking battering ram!”
I pushed myself up to sitting, wincing as glass tinkled off my jacket. My head was clearing, the compulsion fading, replaced by a sharp pain on my forehead and what felt like needles raking over my antennae.
Above me, the purple eyes of a furry, fanged creature peered down from the table. It toyed with my antennae as they twitched instinctively out of its reach.
I scrambled away and planted my palm on another shard of broken glass. Pain lanced through my hand.
A groan escaped me.
“Well, are you going to explain yourself?” came her very unsympathetic response.
She wasn’t even looking at me. She was hunched over something I couldn’t see.
“The light,” I managed. “Your candles.” Yeah, definitely just the candles. “I couldn’t… I didn’t have control.”
She finally looked at me, and her face was soft, her eyes studying my antennae. It didn’t match the anger in what she said next. “Let me guess. A fucking mothman?”
Heat crawled up my neck, and an involuntary squeak escaped me. “Yeah.”
She laughed, and it was cruel, until I was practically burning with embarrassment. “And you thought it was a good idea to make deliveries at night to witches? Who are known to use candle magic?”
“I make deliveries at night because I’m nocturnal,” I shot back, my embarrassment curdling into defensiveness. “And I’ve been doing this for years without incident. It’s not my fault that—” That you called to me on a primordial level and now you are yelling at me.
But she wasn’t listening. “I made those candles for tonight’s ritual, which you just completely destroyed!” Her voice broke. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been…”
She trailed off, turning away from me, back to the thing on the floor, trying to cradle whatever had been inside it.
My gaze swept over the carnage as dread set in. Easily five grand in damage, maybe more. I saw dozens of rare plant species trampled, and I’d taken out what I could see now was clearly an antique window. My insurance was going to love this.
Idiot. Fucking idiot. No wonder she was mad.
“Look, I’m sorry.” I climbed to my feet carefully but still managed to crunch more glass beneath my boots. “I’ll pay for everything. I’ve got insurance, and I’ll cover whatever they don’t—”
“It doesn’t matter! I’ve been—” She cut herself off, jaw clenching. Her fingers curled around what looked like a white—and destroyed—flower.
“You’ve what?” I asked, then immediately regretted it when her glare intensified. But I couldn’t help it. Even if her light had gone out, it was like I could still feel its pull—and I wanted her to look at me.
She didn’t answer or look at me, just surveyed the damage, and I saw her shoulders slump slightly. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter—exhausted. “Just…get out.”
Something wasn’t right. She sounded angry, but as my antennae twitched, that wasn’t what it tasted like. All they sensed was the sadness from before, but magnified tenfold. Through the illusion of anger, I felt her devastation when she looked at that crushed flower.
This wasn’t just about money or inconvenience. I’d destroyed something important.
Get to the light. Stay by her side.
“I can help fix this,” I said. That’s what I’d done my whole life: fix other people’s problems.
She laughed, and it was humorless. “Unless you can turn back time or resurrect dead plants, I don’t think—”
A strange tingling sensation crawled across my skin. It started at my hands and spread up my arms until my antennae stuck straight out.
The crushed flower was…glowing. Faintly, probably not visible to human eyes, but definitely glowing. Silver light pulsed from its broken stem and between its petals.
“What are you looking at?” The witch scowled.
The glow intensified. The tingling was in my chest now too, warm and building, almost like a sneeze that couldn’t get out. The broken flower began to vibrate.
Then the glow exploded outward in a cloud of shimmering pollen.
My hands flew to my face, trying to block it.
Who knew what kind of weird powers something in this greenhouse of toxic treasures had?
But the pollen was everywhere. I felt it coat the inside of my nose and lungs, along with my antennae, which were twitching like crazy.
The witch gasped as it settled over her too, her eyes wide with shock.
For a moment, nothing happened. We just stared at each other, her skin covered in silver, glowing dust.
Then I felt her.
Not physically—emotionally. A rush of exhaustion and frustration and bone-deep loneliness that definitely wasn’t mine slammed into me so hard I staggered. Beneath that, a thread of warmth, of connection, that felt like coming home after a long journey. An echo of the light I’d seen in her.
What the fuck?
“No,” the witch whispered, gaping at me in horror. “No, no, no—”
And then I felt that too. Her panic flooded through me like we were sharing the same nervous system. I certainly hadn’t signed up for that.
“What did you do?” I demanded, even though I could feel that she was just as confused as I was.
“What did I do?” She whirled on me. “You’re the one who crashed through my greenhouse and crushed my Moon Queen flower!”
“A what?”
“A Moon Queen flower! It’s—” She pressed her hands to her temples. “Can you feel that? Can you feel me?”
I could. Gods help me, I could. Her anger was still there, but underneath it was fear and sadness that she was trying desperately to hide. And beneath that…an echo of what I was feeling.
She could feel me too.
“This is bad,” she muttered, pacing now, glass crunching under her boots. “This is really, really bad.”
“What is it? What’s happening?”
She stopped pacing and looked at me. It was an assessment, and I suddenly felt pinned to a spreading board. She was noting my height, my tattoos, my piercings, the blood still dripping down my face. Cataloging me.
Then something slipped through her analysis.
Attraction.
It was hot and slid down my spine, and I felt my cheeks flush at the same time hers did. Then her eyes went wide, and she shoved it down. She’d thought I was attractive for exactly half a second before remembering I’d destroyed her precious ritual, and her annoyance flared at the impulse.
Could she feel that I’d noticed? Could she feel that I thought she was radiant? That I kinda had a thing for women who yelled at me?
She went very still, and her freckled cheeks turned just a bit redder.
Oh gods, this was a nightmare.
“The Moon Queen flower, its pollen was used to create bonds,” she said flatly.
“Emotional connections between people who breathe it in simultaneously. We’re going to be able to feel each other’s emotions until—” She glanced at her scattered plants, at the broken pots, and I felt her despair spike.
“I don’t know why I’m saying any of this. You won’t hear it anyway.”
Her sadness settled over me like a weighted blanket, so heavy I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to shake it off.
“But it will wear off, right? It’s not permanent?” I asked.
“With the way my life is going? No. Not unless I can make the counter-spell.”
“Well, what do you need to do that?”
She let out a low sigh. “I need to call Gertrude.”