Hear Me (13 page)

The bells were ringing again—no, wait, those weren’t bells, but a siren. The paramedics arrived, shoving Ivy and Trapper aside to deal with Shawn.
 

The dog wheezed, but barely moved. As the others dealt with the man, Ivy carefully rolled Trapper over to see if the bullet had exited his other side.

A shadow fell across them both.
 

“Ivy?” Jeb’s voice came from above. “What happened here?”

“I’ll tell you what happened,” the deacon butted in. “Some monster out of the forest possessed my dog and made it attack us. It was a mercy killing, I tell you.”

“It wasn’t a mercy killing,” Ivy muttered. “Trapper’s not dead.”

The deacon took a few steps back, which was when Ivy remembered he was still holding a gun. This whole morning had gotten completely out of hand. Five minutes ago, she’d been sitting in her shop drinking tea and now she was tending to a dying dog, after pulling a demonic force right out of the air.

And Archer was still nowhere to be seen.

“Do you need me to run home and call the vet, Deacon?” Jeb was asking.

“I don’t want anything to do with it,” he replied. “Should be put out of its misery.”

“Yes,” Ivy broke in. “Call a vet. Can we maybe get Trapper in the back of your truck, Jeb? Let me grab some blankets and my purse—”

“Leave it be, Miss Potter,” the deacon said. “You have no idea what might be contaminating its body right now.”

“Mostly?” she hissed at him as Jeb hurried off to fetch his truck. “Bullets.” She wouldn’t treat a houseplant with as much disdain as the deacon was showing his dog. Whatever Trapper may have done to Shawn, it wasn’t his fault.

It was… something else.

Deacon Ryder clucked his tongue at her. “You saw the same thing I did. Don’t you care what this town is facing? A dead dog will be the least of our problems now that magic can leak out of the forest at will. What do we do when demons start possessing every person in town?”

Ivy shook her head and waited for Jeb to return. She wasn’t about to leave Trapper alone with the deacon. He might try to finish the job.
 

“And I still want to get a look in your greenhouse, young lady. Whatever that thing was, it seemed to have special interest in whatever you’ve got growing inside there.”

“My greenhouse is locked up tight, sir. And I’ll kindly ask you to step off my property. I don’t like men coming here and waving guns around.” Especially not when they seemed more than ready to shoot anything that came out of the forest.
 

Deacon Ryder scowled, but moved off the property.

Jeb returned with his truck, and together, they lifted Trapper up into the bed. Ivy ran inside the shop to grab some blankets and her purse.

“Archer?” she poked her head into her bedroom, her father’s room, the bathroom, her panic rising at every empty threshold. “Where are you?”

Just as she feared, there was no response. Back outside, the deacon watched them from the street as Ivy climbed in back with the bleeding dog. She pulled Trapper’s head into her lap. He was still, his breaths coming in shallow pants.
 

“You’ll be okay,” she said, and searched his eyes, as if they might hold the secret. Archer’s voice still rang in her mind, chilling yet undeniable.
 

As they rumbled up the road to town, she smoothed down the animal’s fur, trying to make sense of everything that had happened that morning. Everything had happened too fast. The revelation about her parents’ deaths, the intrusions from Mr. Beemer and Deacon Ryder, Archer’s disappearance, and then…whatever it was that had overtaken the dog and attacked her and Shawn.

Whatever it was… because she couldn’t bear to believe that vicious monster could have been Archer, no matter what she’d heard when she touched it.
 

***

At the vet’s office, they whisked the dog away for surgery.
 

“You should go home, Ivy,” Jeb said. “You look exhausted.”

“Long night,” she replied woodenly. But where had Archer gone? He couldn’t have escaped to the forest already, not with all the men from the quarry patrolling the border where the barrier lay broken.

And he wouldn’t leave without her, right? Without even
telling
her?
 

“What, couldn’t sleep with all the silence?” Jeb asked her. “Can’t say I had that problem. I haven’t had such a restful night in years.”

“Good for you.” She played with the leather strap of her purse. She couldn’t help but replay her conversation in the shop with the deacon, the way she’d dismissed and diminished her attachment to Archer. Puppy love, she’d called it.
 

He had to know she was lying to get rid of their unwanted guest. He had to.

Jeb was quiet for a moment, letting expectations pool between them. “What did the townies want out of you?”

Odd choice of words. “
We’re
townies, Jeb.”

“Why?” he asked. “Because we live on this side of the bells?”

She didn’t want to answer that, so instead she said, “Beemer and Ryder came by to ask if I’d seen anything come out of the forest when the bells stopped. I told them I hadn’t.”

“That’s what you told them, huh?” He nodded. “Good choice.”

“It’s the truth.” She turned to him. “Why? Did you see anything come out of the forest?”

“Not me.” Jeb raised his hands in defense. “Then again, my eyes aren’t as good as they once were, Ivy girl.”

She shook her head and donned her coat. Cryptic conversations with her neighbor wouldn’t do her or Archer any good right now.
 

“Of course,” he went on, his tone deceptively casual, “I never did have the sight as good as a full-blooded forest man, and those years drugging myself with redbell tea to stave off the effects of those bells probably killed any magic I had left. But—” he dropped his voice to a whisper, “—if I did have a touch of the sight left, I’d say you’re glowing brighter than a midsummer fire.”

She did a poor job of hiding her gasp and Jeb smiled in triumph.

“Nah, you didn’t see anything come out of the forest. But I’ve no doubt you saw plenty, later on.”

He might as well have waggled his bushy eyebrows at her.

She zipped her coat up to her chin and avoided his gaze. “You sound ridiculous,” she said. “What do you take me for, some idiot townie girl who rolls over the second a fickle forest man snaps his fingers?”

The old man chuckled. “No, Ivy girl. You’re the one who keeps saying ‘townie.’”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ivy walked home slowly, marveling at the sound of her boots crunching through snow, of trees creaking beneath the weight of ice, and local birds chattering away in the boughs, the rare, crystalline silence of deep winter. It was all quite perfect, until she saw her house, and the yellow plastic tape stretched across her yard.

She ducked beneath the tape and stomped across the wintry lawn toward the greenhouse, heart in her throat as a series of horrible scenarios flashed through her mind. They’d found Archer. They’d killed him. Or maybe he’d called up his dark magic again and set it after the men of the town.
 

A dozen people milled around the door to the greenhouse, which lay splintered and hanging from the hinges.

“Hey!” she shouted, and they whirled around, ducking their heads in guilt as they caught sight of her. “What the hell did you do?”

“
Hell
, indeed.” Deacon Ryder strode out of the group to block her path. “The council thought it prudent to do a thorough examination of the property after the demonic possession we witnessed here earlier.”

“You broke into my greenhouse!” she spluttered, shocked into ineloquence by the violation. Would they have done the same to her father, or did they still think of her as a child, whose rights they could trample whenever they wanted? She drew herself up straight and when she spoke again, her voice was firm. If she could stand up to Archer’s curses, she could stand up to men from the town council.

“What are your plans to repair my door? I have fragile plants in there that will be destroyed by the cold temperatures.”

“I wouldn’t describe the plants you have in there as fragile,” said Ernest Beemer. “We’ve been at them for nearly an hour with axes, and we’re hardly making headway.”

“You’re cutting down my crop?” she craned her neck to see over the crowd. “You have no right—”
 

The redbell. Her customers, the forest folk who needed her medicine…

“We’re just trying to get in,” Beemer said. “You’ve blocked the door.”

“I have not—” She cut off as she caught sight of the wall of brambles filling the doorway, a knot of thorns as thick as her torso. Several branches had been sheared off but the entrance was completely closed.
 

“When was the last time you were even inside this place, Miss Potter?” Beemer asked from behind her.

“This wasn’t here,” she gasped. “I swear this wasn’t here…”
Last night.

“Don’t you see, Ivy?” the deacon counseled, putting his hands on her shoulders. “There is magic coming from the forest again. We need to see what’s inside the greenhouse and what danger it might pose to the town.”

Archer.
Archer must be inside the greenhouse. No wonder he didn’t want these men searching. And Ivy didn’t want it either, but they were all staring at her, as if she had the ability to make the brambles part.
 

“It’s a
greenhouse
,” Ivy said, giving her voice just a touch of derision. “Did no one think to break a window?”

“Gee, why didn’t we think of that?” Shawn stood off to the side, bandages wrapped around his neck and arms. He looked eons away from the fellow who used to lob spitballs at her hair from the back of math class.

Don’t touch me, witch.
The whispered memory of
forest-lover
loomed large in her mind.

He pointed at one of the panes, which she now realized was broken, not that it made much of a difference, as brambles spiderwebbed thickly across the opening.
 

Ivy peered closer to see the tangle of thorns spread over every pane in the dome, completely blocking the view of the interior.

“There’s something hiding in there,” Shawn said now. “I know a nest when I see it.”

“What have you got in that greenhouse, young lady?” Beemer demanded.
 

My forest lover, of course
. There was nothing she could say to make them believe her. They knew who—and what—she was. “Plants?” she offered.

Someone came back with a chainsaw and no one even bothered to ask Ivy’s permission as they buzzed through the brambles. The thorns had created a wall several feet thick, until it was as if they were drilling a tunnel, rather than a door.
 

Archer, be careful
, she found herself begging, her hands squeezed into tight fists inside her coat pockets. When it was just two men, he’d set a dog on them. What would he do if a dozen penetrated the fortress he’d built?
 

The quality of the chainsaw’s whine shifted as it finally broke through to the interior, and everyone stepped back, as if expecting something magical and horrible to burst forth. Nothing happened, even as the man working the machine carved out an opening big enough for a person to crawl through. It was dim inside, shadowy, as Ivy had never quite seen it. Like the inside of the forest itself.
 

All the men looked at each other. No one seemed ready to climb through. The air that floated out smelled of midsummer, green and brown and hot against their faces.
 

“Well?” Beemer crossed his arms and glared at Ivy. “What have you got in there?”

“My answer hasn’t changed in fifteen minutes.”

And still, no one moved, which just proved to Ivy that they had no plan at all. They’d expected an attack, and when none was forthcoming, they were at a loss.
 

“Gentlemen,” she said, making her tone as authoritative as possible, “I believe you are mistaken. These are some overgrown brambles, nothing more.”

“Thickets do not grow overnight, Ivy Potter, not even in your mother’s enchanted greenhouse.” Deacon Ryder peered into the depths. “This is forest magic.”

“Maybe it’s just the barrier,” she suggested weakly. “The trees by the barrier died from the sound of the bells. Maybe it didn’t kill the plants in here, protected as they were by the glass, but it… stunted their growth. And now that the barrier is gone, they are…making up for lost time? They are forest plants.”

Shawn gave her an incredulous look. Okay, so it wasn’t very well thought out.
 

“There is something making up for lost time,” said the deacon, “and it’s dark magic. Ready your weapons, boys.”

“No!” Ivy held out her hands. “I won’t have you all shooting up whatever is left of the crops in my greenhouse. I will go in.” She straightened her coat and stood tall. She might be the only one safe to enter.
 

“Be careful, child,” said the deacon. “You know not what might lie within.”