witchesintheweeds_GEN Page 15

  “Dart?” Nim asked. There was fear in her voice.

  Harris’s protective instincts rose and he stepped in front of Nim, placing his body between her and Trajan. “I’m not going to let you stab her.”

  Trajan slipped on his coat, his gaze never leaving Harris’s. “I’m not going to stab her.”

  It didn’t escape Harris’s notice that Trajan was now wearing more clothes than either he or Nim. It was a power move. If Harris had been an animal, his hackles would be up.

  “Why don’t you go on without us?” Harris said slowly. “I’ll stay here with Nim.”

  Trajan’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t be stupid. All she needs to do is break her skin with the dampener. A tiny scrape will do it.”

  “You say that, but you came here to kill her. Maybe you want to finish the job.”

  “I did not come here to kill her. I came here to rescue your dumb ass.”

  “Dumb ass?”

  “You got kidnapped by a girl.”

  “A powerful magical practitioner, and I’m not ashamed of that. I put up a good fight.”

  “Kidnapped by a girl,” Trajan repeated.

  Harris was well aware of how stupid they sounded. He glanced over his shoulder to see how Nim was reacting to this. Nim was no longer there. “Um, she’s gone.”

  Trajan followed his gaze. “Fuck.”

  Harris spun in a circle. “You were looking right at her. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  Trajan was scanning the tree line. “I was focused on your dumb ass.”

  The forest was so lush with vegetation that she wouldn’t have had to go more than ten feet to be completely hidden amid the bushes, or out of sight behind a massive tree trunk.

  A breeze made Harris shiver. “Knock it off with the wind.”

  “I’m trying to find her.”

  Harris crouched to peer at the ground. There was no sign of disturbance that he could see. Would her powers allow her to cover her tracks?

  He stood and walked a few feet away, scanning the ground as he did. The breeze picked up again, this time coming from the south.

  Harris stopped at the edge of the wide, glittering disk she’d called into existence. He stared.

  “Found her,” Trajan announced. “She’s headed up the mountain, in between the acid-trip pot plants.”

  “Trajan, look at this.”

  Something in Harris’s tone must have warned him, because Trajan was there a moment later, standing shoulder to shoulder with Harris and staring down at the disk.

  The trees overhead shifted and a large beam of sunlight hit the disk, which reflected and refracted the light, painting small rainbows on nearly every surface in the forest.

  Harris and Trajan crouched as one. Up close it was easy to see that the disk was not white, but clear, like glass. And it wasn’t a disk at all. They were looking at the base of an inverted cone. Harris could see through the perfectly clear material, into the earth. It was symmetrical, the downward pointing tip under the exact center of the flat top. Almost like a cut gem.

  Harris stared at the clear-glass like object nestled into the forest floor, the light sinking into it and then refracting out, making the leaves and branches of the sapling dance with rainbows.

  “Quartz,” Trajan said slowly. “It’s probably non-cloudy quartz.”

  “Right,” Harris said with matching deliberation. “It’s not a giant fucking diamond.”

  “Nope. Not a giant diamond. Because that would be…” Trajan trailed off.

  Harris started to laugh.

  “Hold it together, Barclay.”

  “Magic,” Harris gasped. “That would be magic.”

  *

  Harris stopped laughing with an abruptness that did not speak well of his mental health and then jumped to his feet. Trajan followed suit and grabbed Harris’s arm as he turned to bolt after Nimue. “Walk, don’t run.”

  “I’m not in kindergarten.”

  “We need to be smart.”

  “Smart? You saw her, she’s hurt. We need to go after her.”

  Harris was teetering somewhere between panicked and pissed. He had feelings for Nim, and from what Trajan could tell, she apparently had them for Harris too. Knowing that didn’t dispel Trajan’s desire to kiss her…and maybe then watch Harris kiss her. That, though, was both disquieting and intriguing. Whatever had happened in the transformation, it must have fucked with his emotions.

  Trajan shook his head, forcing himself to focus on the problem at hand, which was Harris. “If you go tearing up that hill, drawing attention to yourself and touching weird plants, you might end up in the same state as her.”

  Harris didn’t look convinced. He tugged against Trajan’s hold on his arm. “Come on.”

  Trajan tightened his grip and felt the muscles of Harris’s arm tense and harden in response. They did not have time for this. Given Harris’s emotional state, Trajan sure as hell wasn’t going to tell the other man that he was pretty sure the only reason Nimue had been able to walk away was that shock was muting her injuries. Once shock started to wear off, she was going to be in bad shape.

  “You lead the way.” Trajan loosened his hold, but didn’t let go. Harris nodded and started walking, his arm pulled up behind him by Trajan’s hold. He made a disgruntled noise and jerked his elbow free, only to instead reach back and take Trajan’s hand.

  A shock of desire raced up Trajan’s arm, and he nearly stumbled. He hadn’t felt that sort of instant lust since he’d been a teenager, when holding hands with a girl had been enough to make his dick hard. And now he was reacting that same way to Harris.

  If Harris had a similar response, he hid it well.

  Harris wanted Nimue, Nimue wanted Harris, and Trajan wanted both of them. He didn’t think that was how love triangles worked.

  They made it to the front edge of the small plots of cannabis plants without being confronted by anything. Given how the day had gone so far, that was basically a miracle. They paused, both stopping to stare up at the twenty-foot-tall plants.

  There was a path bisecting the planting area, which was essentially a topographically conscious plot. The massive leafy plants were so full that the path was more of a tunnel. With the fading sunlight, the tunnel-like path was in deep shadow.

  Trajan, who didn’t really feel the cold, shivered.

  Harris leaned forward, peering into the dark.

  “Thought you were in a rush to chase after your girl, Barclay?”

  “She’s not my girl.” Harris slanted a glance his direction. “You’re the action hero, you go first.”

  “These are plants, and you’re a Saol witch. You go first.”

  Harris cupped his hands around his mouth. “Nim!”

  The plants rustled, and they both took a big step back.

  “Nim!” Harris called again, a note of panic in his voice. “Shit. I have a really bad feeling about going in there.”

  “Is there a way around?”

  “Yes, yes.” Harris whirled to his left and started scrambling sideways along the slope. “This is the main path, but the planting area isn’t that big. We can go around the outside and then take one of the smaller perpendicular paths that separate the plots. It might look solid from here, but there are big unplanted areas where there were trees, or rocky soil. Maybe she’s stopping in one of those places.”

  Trajan reached out and grabbed Harris’s hand. “We stay together.”

  “Then hurry.”

  “I have a better idea.” He called up the wind, pulling the air from the top of the rise down along the slope. When it reached Trajan, he could sense the foreign but increasingly familiar essence of her magic.

  And something else. Another, stronger magic.

  Fuck.

  Chapter 13

  The fear-inspired adrenaline coursing through her veins made it hard to hold still, but Nimue did it. If she moved, she might attract the creature’s attention.

  She’d been hiking up the hill at a jogging pace, us
ing her power so that each step she took was sure and firm, the earth shifting beneath each step. Her thigh muscles burned as if she were climbing stairs, but she was moving quickly, which was worth the burn. She’d managed to reach the large rock that jutted out of the mountainside, creating the natural lookout point Harris had used the first time she showed him her crop. Much like the boulder beside the river and the rest of the forest, it had transformed, but instead of changing into an improbably large piece of fairytale-colored quartz, it was shiny black obsidian, dangerously slick and riddled with razor-sharp points. She’d emerged from the darkness of the overgrown path and nearly run into a sharp edge. Though she knew the sun had not yet set, the shadows were deep and long, making it hard to see the black stone.

  Looking at the jagged edge that had almost sliced open her cheek, she’d had a moment of fear that this was like the not-stone spires she’d just finished cutting through. A tentative pulse of power reassured her that it was nothing more than an SUV-sized piece of real obsidian. She’d been relieved, and skirted the rock, picking up the path on the uphill side.

  That relief had been short-lived. The plants were not as tall here, meaning more light filtered through, and she was able, just barely, to see the tips of the redwood trees and an occasional patch of blue sky through the lacy leaves of her cannabis plants.

  She was looking up, trying to decide if the trees here had changed at all, when she spotted it—a dark, gliding shadow.

  Her steps had slowed, and when she reached the last row of cannabis—the upper border of her planting area—she emerged from the tunnel-like path into the forest.

  And she saw what had cast the shadow.

  Like a mouse, like prey, she’d frozen, not moving except to take slow, shallow breaths while her blood throbbed in her veins.

  Here the transformation was less pronounced—the forest looked more or less the same as it had before, except everything was more—the trunks of the trees were redder, the needles almost aggressively green. The small undergrowth on the forest floor was now ankle-deep in places, and the scent of the tress was incredibly strong, as if someone had lit an entire shop’s worth of evergreen-and redwood-scented candles.

  It was possible that someone who just walked into this part of the forest might not know that it was transformed, if all they saw were the tress and the forest floor.

  But the bus-sized owl was a dead giveaway that the forest wasn’t entirely normal.

  The owl was perched on the stump of a redwood. Calling it a stump was misleading, because the top of it was twenty feet off the ground, and the tree had to have been ten feet in diameter. That massive size meant it had been an old-growth redwood, but there hadn’t been a tree of that size in this part of the forest, and certainly not one that had been chopped off twenty feet up.

  The owl sat motionless, looking at her with its large black eyes. It was a spotted owl, the white-and-brown feather pattern and distinctive black eyes making the species easy to recognize. But owls didn’t grow this big. The feathery feet were massive, and the talons that curled over the front of the stump were the size of elephant tusks.

  The owl tipped its head to the side, and instead of looking cute and quizzical, it looked like the monster from a horror movie.

  Nim took a step back—she couldn’t help herself, couldn’t bear to stand there, out in the open, one second longer. If she retreated back down the slope, into the tunnel created by her crop, the owl couldn’t get her.

  “Dark One,” the owl said.

  Nim turned and ran. There was a limit to what her brain could process, and it seemed giant talking owls was on the other side of that line.

  A great, dark, silent shadow passed over her and she ducked, running at a crouch, which was stupid, since that would hardly stop the owl if it could get to her.

  As she ran, she had to actively stop herself from using her magic to make her sure-footed. Though she’d defiantly, stubbornly, used magic on the way up, she was now going to heed what Trajan had said and avoid calling on her power.

  Without it, she stumbled a few times, tripping over unseen divots in the ground and the odd exposed tree root. She was running in a gray-green twilight, and her instincts told her that the sun was getting ready to set. Her breath came in pants, and each step caused a fresh zing of pain to streak up her legs from where the blight burns and cuts on her feet hit the ground.

  She rounded the curve in the path, and skidded to a stop as she caught sight of the outcropping of obsidian. The owl sat on it, facing her, dark table-sized eyes watching her as she stumbled to a stop.

  “Nim!”

  Plants rustled, and Harris pushed his way between rows of cannabis, Trajan right behind him. She was out of breath, didn’t have the air to scream a warning. Harris was looking at her, his head turned just enough that he didn’t see the owl.

  Nim raised her right foot and then stamped it down onto the ground. A shockwave rippled out from the spot her foot hit, but instead of spreading in all directions, it was controlled into a four-foot wide wave of earth. A foot in front of Harris, the pressure she’d released swelled and then shot up, creating a wall of earth seven feet tall.

  There was a thumping noise, followed by an “oof” noise.

  “Not cool,” Harris called out.

  “Giant owl,” she gasped.

  “Dark one,” the owl said.

  There was a moment of silence, and then Harris and Trajan peeked around the sides of her four-by-seven wall of earth.

  Harris’s eyes widened. Trajan sighed and looked resigned. They pulled back behind the wall.

  Nimue turned to the owl. Running clearly wasn’t the right approach to the current situation. It had been a foolish hope to think she could run. Spotted owls were silent fliers, deadly predators, and highly territorial.

  “Ask it what you should call it,” Trajan called out.

  “What?” Nim asked.

  “Talking, enchanted animal? Always ask for its name.”

  That made as much sense as anything. The owl hadn’t looked away from Nim or acknowledged that it could or had heard Trajan.

  “Greetings,” Nim intoned, feeling stupid and frazzled. “By what name may I call you?”

  “You could have just asked ‘What’s your name?’” came Trajan’s wry comment.

  She bit down on a retort, staying focused on the owl.

  “I am Quiet.” When the owl spoke, its beak opened and closed, but it looked like bad animatronics—the owl simply didn’t have the physiology to speak.

  “Greetings, Quiet. My name is—”

  “I am Shadow.”

  “Oh, um, greetings, Shadow. My name is—”

  “I am Death.”

  Nim waited. Apparently the owl had run out of names.

  “Greetings, Quiet Shadow Death.” That sentence could have been comical—the whole situation could have been, if the giant owl wasn’t so completely terrifying. “I am Nimue.”

  “You are the Dark One.”

  Nim paused a moment, giving herself time to think about her next words. How would Lucy have responded in Narnia?

  “I have not heard that name used before, Quiet Shadow Death.”

  The owl tipped its head to the side, and she had to repress a shudder. “But you are the Dark One.”

  “Have we met before?” she asked on a hunch.

  “I watched you, in the before time, when you danced with the darkness.”

  “The before time?”

  “The before time.”

  “Was the before time when you were small?” Trajan called out.

  Quiet Shadow Death’s head swiveled, its large, dark eyes staring at the protective wall of dirt she’d created. “The before time. When the forest was larger.”

  “So the before time was…this morning?” Harris asked. “That’s better than what I was thinking.”

  Later, much later, after they made it out of here, she would ask what he’d thought.

  “You saw me dancing sky-clad,
” Nim guessed.

  “With the darkness around you,” the owl agreed.

  “I did not call the darkness,” she assured the owl. “I only use right-hand magic, good magic.”

  “Good?” the owl asked.

  “Magic that doesn’t harm anyone, anything.”

  “But your magic does cause harm.”

  Nim winced as if the words were a physical blow. “I am sorry if I’ve hurt you.”

  “The darkness is in you. Eating you.” Quiet Shadow Death snapped its beak in emphasis.

  “The blight, the curse,” Harris called. “It might be able to see it.”

  “Curse. Dark One.” The owl clacked its beak again.

  The owl could see the curse. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Ask.”

  “Do you still see it? The darkness?”

  “No. And yes.”

  “You had to know that wasn’t going to get a straight answer,” Trajan yelled.

  Right. Try again. “What does the darkness look like now?”

  “It no longer burrows. It waits inside you.”

  Nim pressed her hand against her stomach. “Inside me?”

  “Vomit,” the owl said. Nim blinked. The owl raised its wings, partially spreading them. “Vomit.”

  “Oh. You mean I should get rid of the darkness by vomiting.”

  The owl only stared.

  “But I am not an owl. I don’t, um, make pellets.”

  Quiet Shadow Death opened its beak, but then whipped its head around, looking to the side opposite from Trajan and Harris. It raised its wings, beat them twice, and rose into the air. Both its takeoff and its flight were nearly completely soundless. Quiet Shadow Death indeed.

  There was a sound like a deep copper bell rung once, and the sun set.

  The forest echoed with the owl’s call. It didn’t sound like the archetypical “who, who” that children’s books insisted was the sound owls made, but rather a shriek that sounded like “ah-woo-a.” The volume and echo were enough to have her slapping her hands over her ears.

  “Nim, I don’t want to touch these fucked-up pot plants too much. Move your dirt.”

  Nim could barely hear Trajan, but when she saw his hand waving above the top of her barrier, she ran the ball of her foot and toes over the ground in an arc and the dirt fell.