Chapter 15 Arden #2
She was stirring something on top of the stove. It sizzled and smelled good. Next to the stove, Declan was toweling his hair dry, as if he’d just come in from outside.
“Here,” Declan said. He tossed Baz a dry towel.
Baz handed it off to Arden. “Where’s Fern? How is she?”
Lexie pointed with her spatula. Fern was lying on a sleeping bag, wrapped in blankets. Her damp hair straggled across someone’s rolled-up shirt that had been pressed into service as a pillow.
“She’s all right,” Lexie said. “She keeps drifting in and out. We’re getting her warmed up. Do you guys want some hot coffee?”
Arden thought wistfully of their abandoned, unmade cocoa. Still, coffee sounded wonderful. Or anything hot. “Yes, please.”
Lexie offered a spare set of her own clothes to change into and gestured Arden into the back, where Arden found that there were attached living quarters, chilly but private.
It looked like Lexie had started setting it up and unpacking.
She had a surprisingly amount of stuff, tossed around without much concern for niceties like “folding.” A piece of rusty equipment (a lathe?
Arden had no idea what that thing was) seemed to have been pressed into use as a nightstand.
Arden realized she was still carrying the toy horse, and set it carefully on the makeshift nightstand beside a toothbrush cup and an e-book reader.
The clothes Lexie had given her, a hoodie and a pair of jeans, were too large in some places and too tight in others; she had to roll up the sleeves of the sweatshirt and the cuffs of the jeans, and she could barely get them over her hips.
But they were blessedly warm and dry, especially when paired with a set of fluffy knit socks that looked handmade.
She came out of the back to find Baz drying off next to the fire. Declan had disappeared, but showed up again a moment later, ducking through the door with a bundle of dry clothing tucked under his jacket.
“Here,” he said, thrusting it at Baz. “Appreciate my sacrifice, because now I’m wet again.”
Baz laughed, although his gaze kept going to Fern, quick worried glances in between his obvious pleasure at being reunited with his friends and clan-siblings again. He also noticed Arden come back in; she caught the quick flick of his hazel eyes, the pleased quirk of a smile.
Casually he began taking off his damp T-shirt (Arden swallowed) as he turned to ask Declan, “Is it still raining out there?”
“I told you I was going to build an ark,” Lexie said under her breath. She began setting out plastic bowls.
“I think it’s slackening some,” Declan said. He picked up one of the damp towels and began scrubbing it through his messy mop of black hair. “Creek’s still loud, but it doesn’t seem to be rising anymore.”
Arden cleared her throat, trying to look anywhere but at Baz, who was stripping in front of her for the second time in an hour. Life was either being wonderful to her today, or confronting her with torment. Her mind was full of the touch of him, the taste of him.
But Fern stirred and moaned before Arden could allow herself more than a few quick peeks at Baz’s bare chest. Immediately the conversation stopped. It was Lexie who reached Fern first, after shoving her spatula into Declan’s hands.
“Honey, are you okay?” she asked, laying her hand on Fern’s forehead with the brisk, businesslike touch of an experienced big sister.
Fern blinked at the ceiling. “Arden?” she whispered.
“Arden?” Lexie asked in surprise. By now the rest of Fern’s small family of age-mates—Baz and Declan—were clustered around her. Arden had taken a step back to stay out of the way of their reunion. Hearing her name surprised her.
“I’m here,” she said hesitantly, moving forward a little. “I’m, uh. I’m okay. Are you?”
Fern’s dizzied expression began to focus. She smiled at Arden; then her gaze wandered up and around to the rest of them. Arden felt as if she ought to have the feeling of being shut out, and yet she didn’t.
It was nothing like the way she had always felt with Grant and his rich political friends.
She had always been aware that they only tolerated his poor-girl wife for Grant’s sake.
And even before that, her friends in college had only put up with her as long as she learned to reflect their beliefs, say all the right things, and act like them to fit in.
Never before had she felt such unconditional acceptance, the ability to be part of the group and simply be herself.
Some of the change, she knew, was in herself. She had been pushed so far as Grant’s wife that she was no longer willing to put on a fake persona for the sake of being liked; she had learned all too well that it would end in rejection either way.
But it was also simply these people. They liked her. At least, Baz did, Fern did, maybe Lexie did. They wouldn’t like her any better if she pretended to be someone else.
She glanced sideways at Declan, who was scowling generically at nothing in particular, as if merely hearing her name from Fern had annoyed him. Okay, maybe not him quite so much.
“What happened to you?” Baz asked, squeezing Fern’s hand. “Do you remember anyone attacking you?”
Fern tried to shake her head and winced in pain. “No, it was nothing like that. I was trying to find the old well—you know, the wishing well? I finally remembered where it was.”
“In the middle of a storm?” Declan demanded. He sounded, as usual, angry, but at least this time Arden could tell it was more worry than anything else.
Fern frowned. Something odd flickered across her face. “I—I don’t know why I needed to be out there so badly. I just did.”
Everyone seemed to accept this without explanation.
It seemed they were used to Fern doing things like that.
Arden found herself wondering if it wasn’t just that Fern was a bit peculiar, but also that shifters were more in tune with their instinctive side.
Perhaps it was humans who were the odd ones out, ignoring and explaining away their impulses rather than following what their heart knew to be true.
Lexie helped Fern sit up. “Do you feel up to eating? I was just making dinner.”
She passed around bowls of a hot mixed fry of eggs, sausage, and bacon, along with thick slabs of bread toasted on the stove.
There was hot coffee for most of them and a cup of tea for Fern.
The meal passed in spells of comfortable silence, interspersed with the others (mostly Baz and Lexie) gently questioning Fern about her accident.
Fern answered all her friends’ questions with “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.
” She didn’t recall seeing any other shifters there.
She was confident that she had slipped and hit her head.
No, she didn’t have any idea why she felt it was so urgent to find the wishing well at that moment in time.
When they had finished eating, Lexie was collecting the dishes when Fern, hands curled around a nearly empty cup of tea, turned to look at Arden. “Can I please talk to Arden for a few minutes? It won’t take long. I just want to ask her about something.”
Lexie promptly took the bowls to rinse them in a rain barrel. Baz squeezed Arden’s arm supportively, and draped an arm over Declan’s shoulders and offered to walk him home.
“It’s just across the street,” Declan grumbled, shaking off his cousin’s not so subtle offer of “help.” “I think one of us should stay.”
“If Fern needs us, she can call,” Baz said. “Or Arden too, for that matter. We’ll be right outside.”
They left, and Arden and Fern were alone. The sound of rain drumming on the metal roof had faded to a light pattering, punctuated now and then by a piece of wood snapping in the stove.
“What is it?” Arden asked, both puzzled and nervous. “Did I do something wrong?”
Fern shook her head. She pushed herself a little more upright on the sleeping bag. “Could you hand me the hot water to refresh my tea, please?”
Arden did so. She sat crosslegged in front of Fern on the floor, though all her paranoia told her to flee. She knows who you are. She knows who your ex is.
But if Fern planned to reveal her secrets to the entire group, Arden reassured herself, she wouldn’t have asked the others to leave.
“I don’t know quite how to begin,” Fern said. “I do know why I was at the well, sort of. I just can’t really talk about it with them. Not yet.”
“But you can with me? I don’t understand.”
“It involved you, in a way.” Fern took a sip of tea, then looked up with her strange, bright green eyes. “I—I don’t know if you’ll believe me. The others know about this, but I think they don’t know the extent of it.” She hesitated briefly. “I ... see things sometimes. Visions, I guess.”
“You mean like—dreams?”
“Sometimes.” Fern frowned. “But also sometimes when I’m awake. It doesn’t happen very often. It comes and goes. I think it’s something I got from my dad. He just—knows things, a lot of the time. It’s not quite like that for me, but it also kind of is ... if that makes sense?”
Arden shook her head. “I’m afraid not. Is this a shifter thing? Maybe you should be talking to them rather than me.”
“No, this is about you,” Fern insisted. “You see, Arden, I saw you. At the well.”
Arden stared at her. Of all the things Fern might have said, this was completely outside her guesses. “You—what? Me? I was at the well?”
“No, I was. I didn’t know who you were, of course,” Fern explained, which just confused Arden more.
“This was a very long time ago. Years and years, when I was just a small child. I had forgotten about it. But then I actually saw you, and met you—and I realized that you were the person I saw Baz with, all those years ago ...” She stopped suddenly.
“I was with Baz? In your—visions?” Arden swallowed. “What was I ... doing? In these visions.”