Hear Me (10 page)

She didn’t, and the fact that Archer had thought of that, that he could even remember it when Ivy could hardly remember her own name, amazed her. She pulled herself up and kissed him, long and gentle, running her fingers through the silky strands of his beard for the first time. “This is nice,” she said, stroking the bit of hair on his face. It was easier than everything else she wanted to say. “New.”

He stretched, smiling. “Yes, well, we can also discuss the changes in your breasts, if you’d like.”

She swatted him, and he shifted to avoid her. She heard the crush of plant matter.
 

“Archer, sit up. You’re crushing the redbells.”

He pushed himself up on his elbows. “What?”

She pointed at the flowers underneath them. “Get up. You’re ruining my crop.”

He looked, then let out a whoop of triumph. “I am!”

She crossed her arms over her bare breasts. “Yeah. It’s nothing to get excited about.”

“Of course it is, Ivy-mine!” he cried, and took her hands in his. All at once, he was the Archer she’d loved as a teen, bright and shining and full of light. “I’m crushing them, not burning them to a crisp. The curse is gone!”

It was true. Whatever remnants of dark magic had lingered in Archer, it seemed to have dissipated. “So what? I…we…” Had the sex somehow fixed him?
 

“Possibly,” he said, as if she’d spoken the thought aloud. “It did feel like magic.”

He grinned, but Ivy looked away and reached for her pants. This was a little too much magic for one night. Before, in the heat of the moment, she didn’t care, but come morning, there would be lots of questions, and far too few answers. Surely the council would want the bells to ring again. And she and Archer might be fine, this one timeless hour in her greenhouse, but then what? There were too many people in town who feared dark magic, and Archer had family left alone in a dying forest.
 

She pulled on her panties and jeans, and as she was slipping her feet back into her shoes, another question occurred to her.
 

Archer said George Potter had never warned them about the creation of the bell barrier, but she’d never forget the look on her father’s face when he returned from the forest and said the people there wouldn’t leave. It had made perfect sense to Ivy. After all, even now, with barrier sickness and a dying forest, Archer still claimed the forest folk considered it home.
 

But Archer also said he would have come to be with her, had he known, and Ivy believed him with a bone-deep surety.

So what was the truth?

CHAPTER TEN

The street outside the shop crawled with townspeople. Up and down the road they walked, examining the silent bells from every angle—every angle, that is, that existed on this side. No one yet had dared try to cross.
 

Wrapped in bathrobes, Ivy and Archer watched from the attached apartment’s bedroom window.

“There’s no way you can make it through without them seeing you,” Ivy said.

“What do I care?” Archer replied, shrugging. “I’m not trying to keep what I did a secret.”

“I care.” Ivy tied the knot of her robe more tightly and smoothed her hair. “What do you think they’ll do when they find a forest man on this side of the bells?”

“What can they do to me, Ivy?” He spread his hands, curling his fingers in, and the hair on the back of Ivy’s neck stood on end. What bloomed there, invisible in his palms? “If they come for me, they will be sorry.”

She grabbed his wrist, and got a static shock for her trouble. At least, she hoped it was just static. “No dark magic, Archer. What are you thinking?”

He blinked down at her grip on him. “I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “These days, I go quickly to curses. Last week, I killed a rabbit just by looking at it.”

Ivy winced. She’d heard more than one confession this morning of his time spent with the dark arts. This year had been a lonely, wretched one, and the more powerful he grew, the more even his own folk had rejected him, for their own safety. “That’s all over with. The barrier is down now. You won’t be doing any more dark magic.”

“It’s not that simple,” he began.

A knock broke the stillness of the shop. It was coming from the front door.
 

“Well, here’s something simple. Stay put and let me do the talking.” She headed out into the hall, closing the bedroom door behind her and trying to shake off her unease. If she had anything to say about it, Archer would never practice dark magic again. If she’d been with him in the forest, she’d have never even let him try.
 

Now she’d found him again, and she wasn’t letting go.

Waiting for her on her front porch was the head of the town council, Ernest Beemer, in a long, wool coat and a ridiculous pair of red earmuffs that only emphasized the size of his bald, fat head. Beemer had been one of the ones to first propose the barrier. He owned the quarry, and claimed bramble-men from the forest regularly broke his machinery and poked holes in the dam. His business had boomed since the bells began to ring.
 

Ivy sighed. She could do this.

“Mr. Beemer?” she asked, as she opened the door. “I’m surprised to see you at my shop. I’m not due to open for another hour…”

“Have you noticed anything, Ivy?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“The bells.” He gestured to the forest behind him. “Some time in the night, they stopped.”

“Really?” She pressed a hand to her chest. “How odd? No, I had no idea. I sleep with this white-noise machine, see, so…”

“And there’s a break in the lattice. Right across from your shop.” Ernest stepped away and pointed at the hole where she’d found Archer. “It snowed last night, so we haven’t been able to find any tracks—”
 

Thank goodness for small favors, Ivy thought.
 

“—but the dogs have been sniffing from the break to your door.”

“Dogs?” Ivy blurted. “Why, Mr. Beemer, you don’t think anything dangerous came from the forest, do you? And cased my little shop? How wretched!” She pulled the lapels of her bathrobe closed, affecting a little shiver. “I’m so glad I invested in that extra padlock. Even if something tried to break in, they wouldn’t be able to.” There, that ought to do it.

Behind Ernest, on the street, she saw Jeb and Sallie walk by, looking equal parts confused and relieved. They saw her at the door and waved in greeting. She nodded, and turned back to the councilman, who was watching her, brows furrowed. He pulled out a walkie-talkie and spoke into it. “Hey, Ryder, I’m talking to the Potter girl now. She says she heard nothing, not even the silence.”

Must mean Deacon Ryder, another council member. He’d designed every poster that appeared in town while they’d campaigned for the barrier, convinced that forest magic was demonic, and that fighting for the bells meant fighting for the very soul of the town.
 

And though Ernest walked a few steps away as the reply crackled back, Ivy heard it anyway. “Check around the greenhouse anyway. You know that girl’s got forest blood.”

She really wished they’d stop calling her a girl. She’d been living alone and running a business for two years now. She wasn’t a girl when she paid her bills and worked for her customers. She hadn’t been a girl last night when Archer had made her come against the greenhouse dome.

But she wasn’t about to point
that
out to the gentlemen from the town council.

“I should probably get dressed,” she said brightly to Ernest. “Overslept a bit this morning. Maybe that’s the effect of no bells, huh, Mr. Beemer? For the first time in years, we’ve all gotten a good night’s sleep?”

He grunted at her and she shut the door. That was true, at least. She hadn’t slept so well in years, though whether it was from the silence or from the fact that she lay in Archer’s arms, she didn’t know. It was as if she’d fallen through a time warp, and was seventeen again. The wild, cruel Archer who’d awoken on the couch had vanished, leaving nothing behind but cocoa and charm and laughter and kisses. Even if it was all a dream, Ivy wasn’t sure she wanted to wake up.
 

Back in her bedroom, Archer was already wearing his forest pants and had found an old sweater somewhere. Ivy was relieved to see him clothed. It would make this easier.

“We need to talk,” she said to him. She’d said it last night, too, while they were still half-dressed in the greenhouse, but it hadn’t exactly happened. Instead, they’d gotten snacks and settled down in front of the fire to eat, and then they’d jumped all over each other and the only words they’d spoken had been each other’s names and cries of pleasure until they’d drifted off into sated sleep some time before dawn.

But now it was daylight, and they really, really needed to talk. About the forest, and the bells, and the scars of dark magic that lay across her lover’s soul. The curses might have left him enough to handle her redbell, but Archer wasn’t free. Not if he truly had spent months cultivating dark magic in order to break the enchantment on the bells. Magic bore a price.
 

“Right. Let’s talk.” He grabbed for her, but she sidestepped him and went behind her closet door.

“You said last night my father never told your people about the bells.” She quickly changed out of her robe and into another pair of jeans and a sweater. “And it’s not that I don’t believe you… I’m just wondering if there could be some kind of mistake.” After all, if the forest was overrun with dark magic, maybe her father had walked into some sort of illusion and didn’t realize it.
 

“What sort of mistake?” Archer asked from the other side of the door. “Either he told us or he didn’t. And I know he didn’t.”

She came out, pulling her curls back into a clip. “I mean… maybe there was a forest trick of some kind. Like he thought he was talking to your village but it was enchantment. That can happen.”

But Archer looked skeptical. “Of course it can. But your father was experienced in the ways of the forest. He would have seen the signs of an illusion, same as you or I.”

In fact, her father had taught her the signs before he’d taught her to ride a bike. Did the images waver, like those seen through water? Did things move and change whenever she blinked? Did she ask them questions only she would know, and they answered as if she asked whether it was night or day? She knew how to tell. It was basic forest safety.

But something had to explain why her father would have made such a terrible error. He died thinking Ivy’s mother had turned her back on them for good. It was one thing when she’d gone back to the forest. He seemed to understand it, and they still saw each other. There were plenty of people in the neighborhood, back then, who had forest lovers they saw only once in a while. As a teen, Ivy had even wondered if that’s how she and Archer would end up, splitting time between forest and town.

“But what else could it be?”

Archer said nothing, but took her hand. “It doesn’t matter now, Ivy. The barrier is down and we are here, together. Those three years are past.”

She yanked her hand back. “They aren’t! People died. Your entire village is on the brink of destruction. And it wasn’t necessary. They could have been saved…”

“Knowing the why will not change the past, Ivy,” said Archer. “What good will it do? Trust me, the answer is none.”

Ivy brushed past him and out of the room. Down the hall, the door to her father’s bedroom lay closed, as always, but she went right in. It was bigger than hers. She probably should have packed his things up long ago and cleaned it out, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t done any of the things she should have—defy her father, ask unlikely questions, wonder why even her mother, even Archer, would not have railed against being separated from her forever…

She’d believed everyone, and she did what they told her, and she stayed inside and she brewed tea and she let them box her in, bells or no bells. Ivy was tired of playing by the rules.

She yanked open his dresser drawers. “Maybe there’s an answer in here somewhere,” she said. “A letter? A journal?” Did her father even keep a journal?
 

Archer stood at the door, his hands crossed over his chest. “Ivy, what do you think you will find after two years? A voice from the grave? You think an answer will save you, but it will only cut you anew. Don’t go deeper into this forest. I fear what you might find.”

She slammed a drawer shut and turned on him. “Is that what happened to you? You went deep into the forest and found only darkness?”

His eyes were hard, his mouth a thin line. Archer was harder to read now, under his beard. All through the night, she’d caught him staring at his own skin in fascination, though she hadn’t been brave enough to ask him what he saw—or worse, if what he saw was himself, clearly, for the first time in months.

“Darkness isn’t
only
anything,” he said. “Once you let it inside, it’s everything.”

He was speaking in riddles again.
 

“Let it go, Ivy.”

“No. There are only two options here. Either he was tricked, or he lied to the entire town. And I can’t live with that.”

“Then believe he was tricked.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. But it did.