"Okay," he said. "Let me know if you need anything."
"I will."
She hung up without saying goodbye.
Corin stared at the phone for a long moment, his jaw tight. His bear paced beneath his skin, agitated and unhappy, wanting to go to her, to fix whatever he'd broken. But he couldn't. Not without explaining why he'd been acting strange, and he wasn't ready for that conversation and he was pretty sure she wasn’t either.
He shoved the phone in his pocket and went back to checking the beds.
The damage was worse than yesterday. The early buds on his apple trees, the ones that should have been safely dormant for another month, had started to swell prematurely. And every swollen bud showed the same signs of stress as his failing hives and struggling soil. Discoloration. Weakness. A wrongness that had absolutely nothing to do with the season.
Whatever was poisoning the land was accelerating.
By noon, Corin had checked every bed, every tree, every hive. The picture was grim. The northern section was nearly dead, the middle beds were struggling, and even the areas closest to the barn were starting to show signs of contamination.
He needed to find the source before there was nothing left to save.
The well.
He'd dismissed it before. When he'd shifted and traced the rot smell, it had dissipated before leading him there. The well had looked the same: overgrown, forgotten, sealed. Nothing to suggest it was connected to the spreading sickness. But Chloe's research had planted a seed. The Scotland case. A sealed well leaking old magic. Someone breaking the binding deliberately.
Corin grabbed a shovel from the barn and headed for the tree line.
The old well sat in a small clearing about a quarter mile from the orchard, surrounded by dead brush and leafless trees. Stone walls crumbled with age, the wooden cover collapsed inward, the whole structure half-swallowed by dormant vines. It looked exactly the way it had looked for as long as he could remember: Untouched. Abandoned. Sealed.
He circled it slowly, studying the stones. Nothing obvious. No fresh marks, no disturbed earth, no sign that anyone had been here in years. The ground was still mostly frozen, a thin layer of thaw on top that squelched under his boots.
His bear stirred with tension suddenly. It was as if no one had been here, but the problem was, hehadbeen there. He should at least smell himself.
Corin set down the shovel and stripped off his coat. Then his shirt. His boots. Everything, until he stood bare in the cold afternoon air, goosebumps rising across his skin.
The shift came easier this time, his body remembering the shape it had held just days ago. Bones cracked and reformed. Fur erupted across his skin. When it was done, he stood on four massive paws, seven hundred pounds of grizzly with senses sharper than any human.
He circled the well again, nose working.
The rot smell was there, faint but unmistakable. Seeping up from the stones like water through cracks. But it wasmuffled somehow, dampened, as if something was suppressing it. When he'd tracked it before, he'd followed the smell through the orchard until it disappeared near the tree line. Now he understood why. The source was hidden. Masked.
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make this well look untouched.
He began to dig despite the freeze.
The frozen ground resisted at first, but his claws were made for this. He tore at the earth near the base of the well scratching as hard as he could, sending chunks of ice and soil flying behind him once he was able to pry loose. The deeper he went, the stronger the rot smell became. Whatever was masking it couldn't hide the truth from direct contact.
It took him awhile to get six inches down, and that’s when he found a seam in the earth. Too straight to be natural. Someone had dug here before, then filled it back in and smoothed it over. The replacement soil was different from the surrounding ground, darker and looser despite the freeze. He kept digging.
A foot down, he found the edge of the old seal. Stone and mortar that had once formed a solid cap over the well's mouth. It should have been intact, undisturbed, the same way it had been for generations. It wasn't.
The mortar had been chipped away in a careful line, creating a gap just wide enough for something to seep through. Not broken entirely. Not obvious. Just... cracked. Enough to release whatever had been bound inside, slowly, steadily, over weeks or months.
Corin sat back on his haunches, his breath fogging in the cold air.
Someone had done this deliberately. They'd come here, dug down to the seal, broken it just enough to start a slow leak, and then covered their tracks so thoroughly that even a bear shifter's senses couldn't detect it without digging.
This wasn't an accident. It wasn't curiosity or ignorance.
This was sabotage.
He shifted once more to human form, the cold hitting him like a slap. His hands were shaking as he pulled on his clothes, and not entirely from the temperature.
