Hear Me (15 page)

She squeezed her eyes shut. Archer had warned her using very similar words. Warned her that he’d become something other than himself, that he’d dabbled in dark magic enough to stain his very soul. And she’d thrown caution to the wind.

“This is a hard truth, but a vital one. It took your own father ages to reach this conclusion as well. But when he realized the truth of his ways, and the danger that his permissiveness toward the forest folk posed to you, his precious daughter… well, he knew it wasn’t safe.”

Ivy looked at him. “Are you saying that my father turned against the forest because of my relationship with Archer?”

“Your father did not want you in any danger,” Ryder replied. “And you were in very great danger from that forest boy. Thankfully, George Potter was not so far gone that he couldn’t help you, where he had failed to help himself.”

Ivy stepped back, shaking her head in disbelief. “But Dad spoke in the town square about enchantments he’d seen, dark things coming out of the deep parts of the forest.”
 

“Indeed.” The deacon nodded. “What better advocate than someone who knew the breadth and depth of the dangers we faced? What more passionate warrior than a convert?”

Ivy’s head began to hurt, and this time, there were no bells to blame. Her father had always known of forest dangers. She’d thought he’d started to fear a great, dark magic. But what if his fear was much more personal?

It wasn’t the corruption of the forest Dad hated. It was Archer, and the way he’d corrupted Ivy.

All those months, she’d thought her father was so cool, so understanding. She’d told him things her friends would never dream of confessing to their parents.
 

And he’d told her to be careful, of course, to take precautions with her birth control and to remember that forest folk weren’t the type to commit. But he’d never forbidden her from seeing Archer, even as the talk in town grew frantic. He knew it would have come across as hypocritical, after his own affair with Ivy’s mother.
 

Archer had sworn this morning that George Potter had never warned the forest folk about the barrier. And maybe he hadn’t, because to him the bells had been a way to keep Archer away from Ivy for good. His guilt in the months following, when the bells drove Ivy and the other forest-blooded townsfolk half-mad…

I’m so sorry, Ivy. I was only trying to protect you.

Her father had lied to her. Her father had lied to the whole town, then died on the first solstice after the bells began to ring.

How many others would need to die for this false protection?

She looked at the old man before her, the one who so feared the forest that he’d warped a father’s love to help destroy it. “What do you want from me, Deacon Ryder?”

“There were three of us who made the bell barrier, my dear. Me, Beemer, and your father. Beemer brought the metal, I sanctified the bells, and your father crafted the design. Based on the greenhouse or something.”

Ivy supposed that made sense. The lattice from which the bells hung did share that same tessellated shape as the Potter greenhouse. But the lattice of the bells remained intact, save for that one spot where Archer had broken through. It was the magic, and the sound, that had ceased. She must have still looked confused, as the deacon went on.

“But that was just construction. Construction was easy. It was the miracle which proved tricky.”

“The miracle?”

The deacon coughed. “Yes. The seal we created between forest and town. The song of the bells. The hum of power. You’ve got forest blood—you know what I mean.”

Did she ever. Time was, she thought her skull would split open, it was so
miraculous
. “The magic,” she said. “You mean the magic.”

“Not magic!” he snapped at her. “Miracles.”

Yesterday, she’d stood in this shop and told some skeptical tourist that it depended on who told the story whether her tea was medicine or magic. Apparently the same conditions applied when it came to miracles.
 

Archer had been right. The bells were a curse, same as the kind he’d used to break it. He said there’d been sacrifices—pain, anger, power. Dark magic needed to overcome the dark magic those three men must have wrought.

“We needed three to make the miracle work,” the deacon went on. “Me, Beemer, and your father, again. Three of us to perform the miracle.”

Magic
, Ivy silently corrected.
Dark magic.

“I wanted to protect the soul of this town. Beemer wanted to protect its future. And your father…” Ryder gave her a weak smile. “He wanted to protect you.”

And instead he ruined her. Ruined everything that was good about their lives, and their friends, and his very livelihood.
 

“He loved you so much.”

Perhaps. But it was a wretched kind of love that would destroy something to protect itself. A weak love, like a forest plant transferred into a plastic pot. Ivy crossed her arms over her chest and squeezed, but the shiver had started up again, bone-deep and chilling.

“And now I need your help, Ivy. We can’t let your father’s work be in vain.”

It was already in vain. For separating her from Archer hadn’t worked. She loved him still, no matter what he might have become, locked away in the forest.
 

“Beemer and I—we believe we can perform the miracle again, but only if it’s still the three of us.”

Ivy looked at him, confused. “My father’s dead.”

“Beemer thinks you’ll do. You have your father’s blood.”

“You want my
blood
?” she asked, gaping. “You are standing in my shop and asking me for my
blood
?” She shook her head, slowly. “How can you lie to yourself like that, Deacon Ryder? You must know what it is you are really doing.”

His expression turned hard. “Listen, Ivy…”

“No.” She straightened. “I do not do dark magic. I want to protect the town as much as you, but I have seen what dark magic does to a person’s soul. My father was haunted by the harm he caused. I saw it every day on his face after the bells began to ring, and now I know why.”

She saw it on Archer, too, but the deacon didn’t need to know that.

The deacon opened his mouth as if to speak again, but she was saved from hearing his lecture by another knock on the door.
 

Jeb stood on the threshold, the dying light of the afternoon casting his face in shadow. “Ivy, I saw the deacon’s car out front. I’ve got his dog…”

“It’s still alive?” the deacon whined from behind her.
 

Jeb gave Ivy a look, as if to say there was a reason he’d brought the creature to her house instead of Ryder’s.
 

“Yes,” she fairly hissed at him. “
He
is still alive, thanks to surgery.”

Ryder shook his head. “I don’t want it. I won’t have it in my house.”

Ivy bit her lip. This man had shot his dog this morning, and he deigned to talk to her of love and protection. “Then you’d better leave my house, Deacon, as I’m about to have Jeb bring Trapper in here.”

Deacon Ryder looked like he wanted to say more, but Ivy took off, pulling old blankets and towels out of the closet. He stood there for several minutes, so Ivy took her own sweet time making up Trapper’s bed. The most pitiful of all the creatures in their town would find a place to stay with her tonight. She didn’t care what Deacon Ryder thought—what anyone in town did. To her she was a forest thing, contaminated like this dog. She could obey their evil laws and recite their evil rules and listen to their evil bells, but it wouldn’t change the way they saw her. And perhaps they were right, too. For she’d spent three years pretending she was one of them, and it clearly wasn’t true.

“I’ll be back in the morning, Ivy,” he said at last. “Think it over.”

She did not respond, nor did she breathe easy until she heard his car start up on the street. How odd, that she could hear things like car engines now. It had been years since she could hear anything but the bells.

But tonight, she heard everything clearly—the thoughts in her head, the beating of her heart. The Ivy she’d been trying so hard to be peeled away like onion skin, and she heard, for the first time, the Ivy she had been meant to be.
 

Jeb carried the beast inside and lay it down on Ivy’s makeshift dog bed near the stove. “I’d take him home with me, but you know my old cat, Midnight, won’t suffer the presence of canines,” Jeb explained.

“Poor Midnight,” Ivy replied. “We certainly can’t invade her home so close to Christmas.”

“What did the deacon want with you?” Jeb asked. “And what’s with all that yellow tape around the greenhouse?”

Questions without answers. “It’s been a long day, Jeb. A long, strange day.”

Jeb studied her, and she recalled what he’d said at the vet’s. It had been joking then, but Ivy didn’t feel so lighthearted now. She knew what lived inside her greenhouse. She knew who was responsible for the horror of the bells.

And she couldn’t tell this old man any of it.
 

Instead, she heated up some soup and some tea—not redbell, thank heaven—and sat with Jeb while he went over the vet’s discharge papers. Trapper was still out cold from the sedatives, and probably wouldn’t want to get up all night.
 

And he certainly wouldn’t be able to protect her if whatever was in the greenhouse decided to come out. Ivy shivered and wrapped her hands around her mug. She seriously thought about asking Jeb to stay the night.

But what good would it do? A retired woodsman was no match for enchanted bramble vines and forest evil. And Ivy would never forgive herself if her actions hurt anyone else in town.

After dinner, when the darkness had settled over forest and town, Jeb left. She locked up behind him, pulling her drapes against the night and the silence beyond. All that quiet beyond. It made her head roar. At last, Ivy put on some soft music and puttered about the shop, keeping her hands and feet busy in hopes that it might quiet her mind.
 

It didn’t.

In the absence of the bells, her thoughts roared—her father and the bells, Archer and his enchantments, the townspeople and their fear, and the choices that lay ahead of her. The rest of the town would stop at nothing to fix the barrier—that much was certain. All they’d have to do would be to point at the danger in her own greenhouse.
 

And what was she going to do about her greenhouse? If the barrier was fixed, she’d need her redbell, which means they’d need to do something to destroy…whatever it was growing from the bed. Though she’d promised the redbell to Archer to take back into the forest.
 

Archer, who had vanished into thin air.

Ivy put her hands on the sink, letting her head drop as the breath whooshed out of her. The cuts on her arms and face stung, her head ached, and her heart felt sore inside her chest. Twenty-four hours ago, she’d promised herself she would leave this town and this forest behind. Maybe she should keep that promise, now more than ever.

Behind her, Trapper let out a little whimper. Even without a bullet wound, she knew exactly how the poor dog felt.

Ivy…
Something breathed ice at her back.
At last…
She spun around.

The man who stood in front of the stove was Archer, but not Archer. He wore no clothes, and his eyes were swallowed up in black. His muscles were drawn tight beneath his skin, and his reddish hair stood wild on his head, like he’d been struck by lightning.

“That,” said a voice that cut the air to ribbons and sounded just enough like Archer to freeze the blood in her veins, “Took longer than I would have liked.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The counter was cool and solid against Ivy’s back. She gripped it with all her strength, as everything else tumbled away. The very floor of her shop seemed to tip toward the apparition before her, the terrifying not-Archer thing who stared at her like a ravenous beast.

She swallowed. “Archer.”

“Did you miss me, my love?” There was a coldness there. Something alien, inhuman.

“So we are playing questions again.” She kept her tone neutral.

This brought him up short. “I am not here to talk, Ivy Potter.” And then suddenly, he was only inches away, and his hands were twined in her hair, and his lips hovered over hers. She froze, terrified, trapped under his awful, endless, black gaze.

I am Puss in Boots. I am Jack the Giant-Killer.

It did no good. “What do you want, then?”

“I want to kiss you,” he said, quite reasonably, and then, “I want to eat you alive.”

She wrenched her head away. “Stop! Let go of me!”

His hands fell to his sides and he stared at them, unblinking, his brow furrowed as if they did not quite belong to him. “We are alone at last,” he said flatly. “It took all day.”
 

She backed up a single, precious step, replaying the many hours since he’d disappeared. “Wait — are you saying you were stuck inside Trapper… all day?”

He looked at the dog, the poor, wretched thing. “You didn’t seem to want to let him die. I had no choice.”