"If the contamination is coming from the well," she said slowly, "the water wouldn't carry it downhill. It would spread outward from the source. Like ripples."
She was right. He'd been thinking about it backwards.
Corin stood, scanning the landscape with new eyes. The worst damage was near the north fence, closest to the tree line. The beds near the barn, further from that direction, were almost normal. And the well sat somewhere in between, abandoned and sealed and supposedly harmless.
"Something's leaching from that well," he said. "Or through it. Spreading outward into the groundwater."
"Something old?"
He remembered what Elias had said about patterns. About things that fed on dreams, on land, on whatever they could find.
"Yeah." His jaw tightened. "Something old."
Chloe was calm for a moment, processing. Then she straightened, brushing dirt from her knees. "We need to check it. The well."
"Ground's still too frozen to dig."
"Then we wait for the thaw and we check it the second we can." Her voice had gone firm, determined. "If something's poisoning your land and Freya's plants and who knows what else, we need to find the source."
We. She kept saying that. Like they were a team, partners in this strange investigation.
His bear rumbled approval.
Corin filed the information away, added it to the growing list of things he was trying not to think too hard about. The sour soil. The confused bees. The old well that might be leaching something toxic into the groundwater of Hollow Oak.
And Chloe Faelan, with her druidic blood and her careful hands and her absolute certainty that she was to blame for problems that had started long before she ever touched the earth.
She wasn't the poison. He knew that as surely as he knew his own name. But something was. And it was getting worse.
"Thursday still looks like our best bet," he said. "Weather's supposed to warm up. We'll check the well then."
Chloe nodded. "I'll be here."
They walked back toward the barn, boots squelching in the mud. Corin's thoughts churned, turning over possibilities, discarding theories, coming back again and again to the same conclusion.
Someone, not something, had touched the land.
9
CHLOE
The Hollow Oak Book Nook smelled like old paper and something faintly spiced that Chloe suspected was Lucien's doing. The panther shifter had a reputation for being territorial about his shop, and she'd learned that included the particular scent that permeated every corner.
She found Moira in the back room, surrounded by stacks of leather-bound volumes that looked older than the building itself.
"Freya said you might be stopping by." Moira looked up from the book she'd been studying, her mahogany curls escaping their clip as usual. Behind her bookish glasses, her milky brown eyes were warm but curious. "She mentioned the soil problems. And that Corin was here a few days ago asking about similar things."
"Did Lucien find anything?"
"Nothing that matches what you're describing." Moira gestured to the chair across from her. "But I pulled some older texts. Land sickness folklore. Contamination legends. Figured it couldn't hurt to look."
Chloe sat, eyeing the stack of books between them. Some had titles in languages she didn't recognize. Others had no titles at all, just cracked spines and yellowed pages.
"Where do we start?"
"Here." Moira slid a heavy tome across the table. "This one has a whole section on soil blight. Most of it's agricultural, but there are a few entries about magical causes."
Chloe opened the book carefully. The pages were brittle, the ink faded in places. She scanned the chapter headings: Crop Failure and Curse Detection. Poisoned Wells in Medieval Practice. The Druidic Taint.
