Elara moved, letting her magic spill out of her. Wayne saw her and stumbled back, hands raised. She swept Deidre up and gently brushed her tears off with her fingers.
“And if he ever mistreats you,” Elara said. “If he or your aunt ever hit you or hurt you, all you have to do is call to me. I will hear, and I will come.” She kissed Deidre’s forehead. Her magic touched the child’s skin, leaving a hidden blessing.
Elara took three steps and placed Deidre into Jane’s arms. “Take her now and leave. Quickly, before my husband and I change our minds.”
The Harmons ran for the truck, carrying Deidre. She watched them turn around and roll out, aware of Hugh standing next to her like a thunderstorm ready to break.
The truck left the gates.
Hugh turned and walked away without a word.
12
Elara leaned forward, rocking on her hands and knees, and sniffed the soil under the patch of wilting jimsonweed. It smelled moist, green, and alive. She sat back on her feet and pondered the thorny plants. Only yesterday, the patch was in good health, the stems standing straight, spreading the toothed leaves, and cradling white and purple trumpet shaped flowers. Today, the stems had wrinkled and shrunk, curling down. It was as if all the water had been sucked out of the plant, and it was dying at the end of a long drought. But the soil was moist.
Next to her, James Cornwell twisted his hands. A white man in his forties, he was of average height, but his arms and legs seemed too long somehow, his shoulders too narrow, and his frame too lanky. He wore a straw hat and he often joked that from the back people mistook him for a scarecrow. He was the keeper of poisons. If it was poisonous and they grew it, James was in charge of it. Normally he was upbeat, but right now agitation took hold of him.
“Never seen anything like this,” James said.
“Have you dug one up?” she asked.
He turned, plucked a plant from his wheelbarrow with his gloved hand, and held it in front of her. The root, normally thick and fibrous, had shrunk down, so desiccated it looked like a rat’s tail.
“What could do that?” James asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“The entire crop is a loss.”
He was right. Jimsonweed, Datura stramonium, wasn’t one of their most valuable plants. A powerful hallucinogenic, it belonged to the nightshade family, sharing ancestry with tomatoes, potatoes, and chili peppers, but also with belladonna and mandrake. Once it was used as a remedy against madness and seizures, but the toxicity of the plant proved to be too high and it was abandoned as soon as safer alternatives were found. Now it was mostly harvested to induce visions. They sold a small quantity of it every year to specialized shops and made sure it came with bright warning labels. It wasn’t a significant earner, but the sudden wilting was worrisome.
Elara glanced to the left, where a patch of henbane bloomed with yellow flowers. Hyoscyamus niger, also poisonous and hallucinogenic, brought in a lot of money, mostly from German and Norse neo-pagans. The plant was sacred to Balder, son of Odin and Frigg. Balder was famous mostly for his resurrection myth, detailed in Prose Edda, but the medieval text glossed over one important detaiclass="underline" Balder wasn’t a martyr. He was a warlord, proficient with every weapon known to ancient people. The neo-pagans prayed to him before every major obstacle, and henbane was a crucial part of those prayers. Henbane was too toxic to be grown and harvested by amateurs. It came with a big price tag.
If whatever killed the jimsonweed jumped to the henbane, they would take an expensive hit.
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
“I want it warded.”
“The henbane?”
He nodded. “I’ll put plastic up too, but I would feel better with a ward.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell Savannah.”
James twisted his hands some more.
“Would you like me to do it?” she guessed. “Now?”
“Yes?” he asked.
“Okay.”
“Thank you!” He reached into the wheelbarrow and withdrew a bundle of elm sticks.
The rapid thudding of a galloping horse sounded through the trees. Elara frowned. A rider came around the bend, emerging from the trees. Sam, wearing his Iron Dog black.
He slowed the horse, bringing the mare to a stop in front of them. “Trouble.”
She jumped to her feet.
“What?”
“People from the Pack are here. The guy who was here before and two others, a man and a woman. They said they were the alphas of Clan Bouda.”
Just what they needed. “Where is the Preceptor?”
“In the moat, on the other side. We didn’t tell him yet.”
Clan Bouda, Clan Bouda… What was it the boy said before? His people killed the alpha of my clan.
Oh no. “Keep the Preceptor away from the bailey. Do whatever you have to do. Don’t just sit there, go! Go!”
Sam turned the horse around and rode back the way he came. She focused on the trees in the distance.
“But the henbane,” James moaned.
“I’ll be back.”
Elara stepped. The trees rushed to her. She stepped again, hurrying to the castle, burning magic too fast. Three days had passed since Deidre was taken from the castle and Hugh had gone inside himself. He didn’t want to fight with her. When he spoke, it was short and brisk. He spent all his time finishing the moat. She’d snuck into his dreams last night and found fire and death, ruins littered with corpses, and him, a terrifying monster prowling through it to the chorus of screams and killing, the fiery maelstrom behind him so big, it took up half of the sky. She couldn’t tell if it was a nightmare or a distorted memory.
In that moment, before he’d turned away and left as Deidre’s family drove out of the castle, she had seen his eyes. Hugh hadn’t realized his legacy. He knew what it was, he knew himself to be a killer, he let it torment him, but inside the castle walls he was sheltered from its full impact. The Iron Dogs admired him; her people looked to him for protection. Whether he knew it or not, Hugh leaned on that human net to keep going. He saw himself as strong, violent, and ruthless, but also as someone who protected and led. He was feared but respected and even envied.
He had never stopped to think how people from the outside saw him. There was no respect in what Wayne Harmon had said. Only contempt and revulsion.
Hugh was a man who couldn’t be trusted with children. A villain. A butcher without a single redeeming quality to him. And she was a witch, Satan’s consort, an evil creature, a deceiver and defiler, fit only to be stoned to death. It didn’t sting her. Elara was used to it. She had grown up with it.
She’d known both kindness and utter contempt. A Baptist church had sheltered her and her people once, knowing what they were, because they were hungry and had no place to go. In the next town, only ten miles down the road, the Christians had lined up along the road with loaded shotguns to make sure they kept moving.
Some people in the world only saw in black and white. They were driven by fear. They had learned how to survive in their little corner of the world and they saw any change as a threat to their survival. But they still liked to think of themselves as good people. Good people didn’t hate without a reason, so they grasped at any pretext, no matter how small, that gave them permission to hate. A line in a holy book. The color of a person’s skin. The brand of their magic. They were not in the habit of taking a second look or giving chances. Their fear was too great and their need to defend themselves too dire. They always lost at the end. Life was change. It would come to them, as inevitable as the sunrise, despite all their flailing.