Better.
He shook himself once, snow scattering from his thick coat, and began to walk the boundary.
The orchard looked different through bear eyes. Sharper. More textured. He could see the stress in the apple trees, the way their bark had tightened against the cold. He could hear mice burrowing beneath the frozen ground, the distant hoot of an owl, the soft hiss of snowflakes landing on bare branches.
And he could smell everything.
That was why he'd shifted. His human nose had caught hints of wrongness in the soil, but his bear's senses were a hundred times stronger. If something was poisoning his land, he would find it.
He moved along the north fence first, where the damage was worst. The ground was still frozen solid beneath the fresh powder, too hard to dig, too cold to thaw. He lowered his massive head and breathed deep.
Rot.
Not the clean decay of composting leaves or fallen fruit. This was something else. Something sour and stagnant, like water that had been trapped too long in darkness. It clung to the soil in invisible threads, seeping through the earth like infection through a wound.
His bear growled, a low rumble that vibrated through his chest.
He followed the scent, moving slowly, testing the air every few feet. The trail led him along the fence line, strongest near the beds that had failed first, then fading as he moved toward the tree line. He pushed deeper, expecting the smell to intensify as he approached the source.
Instead, it dissipated. That was strange.
He circled back, trying to pick up the thread again. The rot was everywhere and nowhere, diffuse and sourceless, like smoke that had spread too thin to trace. It saturated the northern section of his property but refused to point toward an origin.
The old well sat somewhere beyond the trees, abandoned and sealed. He and Chloe had talked about checking it when the ground thawed, looking for contamination in the groundwater. But even now, with his bear's senses fully engaged, he caught nothing from that direction. No concentration of the sour smell. No trail leading toward those crumbling stones.
When they'd walked past it last week, it had looked the same as it always did. Overgrown, forgotten, completely sealed. Nothing to suggest it was connected to the sickness spreading through his orchard.
So where was this coming from?
Corin sat back on his haunches, frustration building in his chest. His bear's mind was simpler than his human one, more focused on territory and threat, but the conclusions were the same.
This wasn't natural. Whatever was poisoning his land, it wasn't runoff or drainage or the brutal freeze-thaw cycles of a hard winter. This was something else. Something that had been introduced. Something that didn't belong. Someone had touched the land.
Chloe's voice echoed in his memory.People are talking. They think my blood is doing this. That whatever I am is poisoning the land.
His bear dismissed the idea immediately. The rot smell was wrong. Sour and stagnant and completely unlike the green, growing scent that clung to Chloe whenever she worked in the soil. Her presence made his bear calm, not agitated. Whatever was leaking into his orchard had little to do with her.
But could a druid cause something like this without meaning to? If they didn't understand their own power?
He didn't know enough about druids to answer that. Chloe had said she couldn't control her gift, couldn't even explain it. What if she was doing this without knowing?
His bear growled again, rejecting the thought with absolute certainty. She wasn't the source. He knew that the same way he knew his own land, his own hives, the rhythms of the seasons. His specific shifter instinct that connected him to the earth told him clearly: Chloe Faelan was not the poison. But instinct wasn't evidence.
If the whispers kept spreading, if more plants died and more hives weakened, people would want someone to blame. And the newcomer with the strange blood, the one who couldn't explain herself, would be the easiest target.
He couldn't protect her with certainty alone. He needed to find the actual source.
Corin rose, shaking snow from his fur, and took one last look at the orchard. The rot smell hung in the air yet impossible to trace. Whoever had done this had hidden their tracks well.
He knew then that this wasn't careless contamination. This wasn't an accident. Someone had poisoned his land and then made sure the trail couldn't be followed.
That took knowledge. Planning. Intent.
He shifted to human form behind the barn, gasping slightly at the cold against bare skin, and pulled on the clothes he'd left folded on the workbench. Snow landed on his shoulders, his hair, melting in cold rivulets down his back.
His body ached with the pleasant exhaustion that always followed a shift. But his mind wouldn't rest.
Someone in Hollow Oak had done this. Someone who had a reason to poison the land and let an outsider take the blame.
