Hear Me (3 page)

All the staring, all the waiting in the world wouldn’t change a thing. Archer was gone forever, and so was her father. If she was wise, she’d take the hint and leave town as well. If she stayed in the town much longer, she’d wither, sure as the trees planted at the barrier had.

Ivy drank down the last dregs of her cup and nodded to no one in particular. It was settled: come the new year, she’d start making a plan to leave—find a way for her customers to get their tea without her. Maybe Jeb could take over duties in the greenhouse. He wasn’t doing much woodworking these days. It would be good for him to have an activity.

And it would be good for her to get away, maybe go to some far off town where bells were forbidden and the forests were friendly. Somewhere where she could study the type of botany that had nothing to do with magic, where no one had ever heard of forest redbell or the tea one might make from it. Ivy used to get good grades in school. She could surely enroll in a college somewhere.

Or maybe just take some time off. A vacation.
 

Ivy let her head fall back against the cushion of the couch, sighing as the tea dulled the ache winding through her brain. Another place. Tropical, maybe, where all she could hear was the soft whisper of waves against sand and the singing of strange-colored birds, where she could sip frozen drinks decorated with paper umbrellas instead of medicinal tea, where there were new people, maybe even a new man, who didn’t remind her of the one she’d lost…

Archer was a vague, blunt emptiness in her chest most days, the twinge of old heartbreak. Rationally, Ivy knew hardly anyone stayed with their first love, and those chances were even more minuscule if your first love was a mercurial, half-wild forest boy. She only had to look at the example of her own family, at her forest mother, who’d rather range the depths of the wilderness than get stuck with anything so mundane as child rearing. Forest lovers weren’t for keeps, no matter what pretty promises they made you as they took off your clothes.
 

But, oh, those memories. Ivy stretched on the sofa, smoothing her hands down the length of her sweater and feeling her flesh tingle with sudden warmth. Yes, most days, Archer was nothing more than an old ache, but there were nights when her head filled with images and her body with sensations she couldn’t quell, even with all the redbell in her father’s greenhouse.
 

The first time they’d slept together, it had been high summer in the forest, and Archer had built her a bower of branches and flowers, high in the limbs of an ancient forest tree halfway between his village and the border of Ivy’s town. Midsummer’s night bonfires burned bright in the forest, and the sound of forest drums and reed flutes made every leaf and twig tremble beneath their magic. Despite a lifetime of wandering forest villages, sixteen-year-old Ivy had been scared. Children weren’t allowed at the rites, and now that she was of age, Ivy quickly understood why. The gossip she heard in town finally made sense, as the savagery and wildness of forest folk was revealed to her in all its naked—literally—glory.
 

Earlier, she’d begged her father to let her stay, and now she was wondering if perhaps she should have gone home. And then Archer had come for her. Archer, her old friend, who’d lately made her heart beat faster every time he came close, and blush whenever he’d whispered in her ear.
 

“Ivy.” The whisper in her ear was louder than all the drums in the forest. She could hear it in her bones. Archer had drawn her away from the flames and whispered of secret surprises to show her. So they’d left the bonfires behind. She’d trembled with fear and anticipation as she climbed up into the tree he’d brought her to, and gasped with shock and pleasure when she’d come upon the bower.

“Do you like it, Ivy-mine?” he’d asked, almost bashfully, his cheeks pink in the white light of the summer moon.
 

She’d loved it. She’d loved him, and nothing in the world felt more right than to bare herself to him, body and soul, in the middle of the forest night.

You weren’t supposed to keep your first love, no matter how your body burned for his touch. You weren’t supposed to yearn for a boy who’d never pick you over his wild forest home. And you were never, ever supposed to wish that things had been different, that the barrier separating you had never gone up. That way lay madness, and magic, and the destruction of your whole town.
 

Ivy knew better. She swore she did. But as her eyes grew heavy and the flicker of the fire blurred before her eyes, she couldn’t help but wonder. Would it be worth it to be swallowed whole by dark magic, if it meant one more night with the man she loved?
 

***

Ivy wasn’t woken by the stinging zap of static that momentarily engulfed the town, that made the lights flicker and the street signs tremble and buzz. She didn’t notice when her clay pots rattled on their shelves or her glass vials jingled in their holders.
 

Rather, it was the nothingness that followed which brought her to. Her eyes flashed open and she sat up, as if from a nightmare she couldn’t remember, so disoriented by… something… that for a moment she wasn’t even sure where she was. This was home—her shop, her couch, the fire burned down to soft, pink embers. But there was still… something. Something missing.

She stood, by instinct putting out her hand to help her balance, but there was no rush of dizziness, no twinge of constant pain as there’d been for three years. She froze as the truth hit her in a silent wave.

The bells had stopped.

CHAPTER THREE

Scarcely daring to breathe, Ivy tiptoed to the front door of her shop. She peered out into the darkness. It had snowed again while she dozed, and the formerly speckled street lay beneath drifts of frothy white. The bulb of every streetlight had blown, casting the entire street in blue-black shades of midnight. And across the way, the lattice of the bell barrier stood, still, silent—
silent
—and almost invisible. There was no jangle, no buzz of power, and the metal of each tiny alarm was dull and dead.
 

The barrier was down. The forest lay open, for the first time in years. Ivy swallowed, fear and relief waging war in her soul.
 

She should pick up her phone. She should call the town council. The barrier was failing.
 

She should put on her warmest coat and sprint for the forest before it was too late.
 

In the end, she did neither, for something moved, there in the darkness. At first, she thought it was just another drift of snow, but then it shifted and groaned and the snow shuddered off a lump of bloodied flesh the shape of a man. Heedless of the winter night, she slipped her feet into her boots, opened the door, and crossed the street.

This is dark magic
, said something in the back of her head.
Run. Scream.

But Ivy’s father had died at the barrier, and maybe this person was about to die now, so she walked ever closer.
 

The lump moved again, and grunted. She reached it and the form was unmistakable now. A man—a young man, his naked, blood-smeared back a mass of corded muscle, his tousled, too-long hair the color of late autumn leaves. She knew the back, she knew the hair, and she knew the man lying in the snow.
 

Ivy could no longer feel the cold.

“Archer,” she whispered, but Archer did not move again.

She rushed to his side and knelt in the fresh powder. This close, she could smell copper and ashes, and when she reached for him, blue-black sparks arced between her fingertips and his skin. She shrank back and toed his form with the rubber sole of her boot. He grunted, but did not wake.

He was not dead, then. Not yet. She reached out her hand again. His body sizzled beneath her hand, like the worst static shock, but that was all. Ivy looked up and down the deserted street, searching for another witness to her discovery, but there was no one. Just she and Archer, and a wall of silence, and the black forest beyond.
 

Ivy shuddered. Anything could be lurking there, just beyond the shadows of the trees. She should get inside. But she wasn’t leaving him here, half naked in the snow. Forest men were tough, but they still needed coats in wintertime.
 

It wasn’t easy to haul a shirtless, freezing man back into her shop, but somehow Ivy managed it. She stoked the fire in the stove, put a kettle on to boil, and pulled out every blanket she owned. Getting him warm was the first step, and then she’d see about getting him conscious.

With efficiency born of thousands of days in the shop, she moved quickly, gathering supplies from her collection of creams and tinctures to tend to his wounds. She piled the blankets at the foot of the couch and straightened, looking at her charge in the light of the fire.
 

Archer, lying before her, like a vision out of her wildest dreams.
 

Or her worst nightmares. The red abrasions fanning across his back and arms didn’t look like burns—not exactly—but she knew what happened when one attempted to breach the barrier. He was lucky he escaped with mere burns.

Or was it luck? Her father had burned to a crisp, and he didn’t even have the magic the barrier had been erected to thwart. For a full-blooded forest man to withstand it must have been nearly impossible. And she could barely contemplate what it must have taken to stop the bells altogether.
 

The silence scared her. She could hear herself breathe; she could hear
him
breathe. How long had it been since she’d heard something as simple as the rhythm of another person’s breath, unhindered by the endless jangle of bells?
 

And what sort of danger had Archer been in that braving the barrier seemed like the better choice?

Once, she might have known from Archer, from the mere touch of skin on skin. Though Ivy’s mother had been forest folk, she’d inherited little of their magic. Still, Archer could always bring it out of her. When he held her hand, he could share a memory. When he’d kissed her, she could see flashes of his thoughts. And when they’d slept together, back in those slow, summer days when their lives seemed as full and endless as the forest itself, their very souls seemed to link up.

When Ivy had tried to explain it to her town friends, they ridiculed her for falling prey to forest tricks. When she’d ventured to confess to a forest girl, she’d responded as if Ivy had been awed by the intricate mysteries of breathing or digestion. Archer himself had laughed.
 

“Ivy,” he’d sighed as he slipped off her dress. “Oh, Ivy-mine. Of course we’re linked. Didn’t you know? You and I share a single soul.”

But Archer had been wrong. For the barrier had gone up and they’d both gone on, alone, and for two people with a magical shared soul like he claimed, she’d felt awfully isolated these past three years. If they were truly so in sync, wouldn’t she have known he was alive? Wouldn’t she have instantly realized the bloody lump in the snow was the body of the only man she’d ever loved?

No, it was just a lie for young men to tell their lovers in the dark, just a bit of forest trickery, like the townsfolk said. A forest man could show you plenty of pretty fantasies to get you into bed. Weren’t the forest-blooded residents of the town enough evidence of that? They were all products of short-lived flings with forest folk. Ivy and her father had been abandoned by Ivy’s forest folk mother as soon as she realized that dull townie life and child-raising weren’t to her wild taste.

As a teen, Ivy hadn’t cared about that. Archer was excitement and awakening. Loyalty and responsibility existed only in some distant, grown-up world.

She knew better now. Ivy unfolded the first of the blankets and got to work. The first step, unfortunately, would be his pants. The buckskin trousers were soaked and stiff with blood. They’d have to come off. She clenched her jaws and tugged at the fastenings, keeping her eyes averted as they popped free and his pants peeled away from his skin. She closed her eyes and pulled them down, but they caught.
 

Of course.
She opened her eyes and tried to maneuver the pants around his butt and crotch, trying not to let her eyes linger too long on unfamiliar scars trailing down his torso and legs and the all-too-familiar other parts, which were shadowed by far more hair than she remembered him having at sixteen.

Cut it out, Ivy. He’s unconscious and wounded. Stop staring at his cock.

She washed the lingering dirt and debris from his body, but when her fingers brushed his skin, she felt nothing otherworldly at all. No whisper of dreams or glimpse of what might have transpired at the barrier to bring it down and him across. Maybe the magic had always been Archer’s alone, and he’d merely indulged her with tiny moments back when she was sharing his bed. After a few more minutes, she gave up trying to peer into his soul, applied antiseptic and bandages, then covered him head to foot in blankets warmed near the fire.
 

Was anyone else awake on this long, dark night? Did the others know the barrier was down? Again, she thought she should warn someone. They could post guards, perhaps, until the town council figured out how to reinstate the bells.

She shuddered at the thought. The silence had barely lasted half an hour, yet the idea of the bells now seemed the worst violation imaginable. Every cell in her body rebelled against the idea. For three years, she and her neighbors had suffered for the town’s safety. One night couldn’t hurt, could it?