Someone in Hollow Oak had poisoned his land. Someone had broken an ancient seal and let old magic bleed into the soil, the water, the roots of everything he'd spent his life tending. And they'd done it carefully, methodically, in a way designed to avoid detection.
But why?
The question burned in his chest as he gathered his shovel and headed back toward the orchard. He didn't have an answer. Couldn't imagine what anyone would gain from killing the land he loved.
But he was going to find out.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, hoping irrationally that it was Chloe.
It was Elias.
"Yeah."
"You sound like hell. What happened?"
Corin looked back at the clearing, at the hole he'd dug, at the crumbling well that had seemed so harmless for so many years.
"I found the source."
A pause. "Where?"
"The old well. Someone broke the seal. Deliberately."
Elias was very quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was grim. "You're sure?"
"I dug down to it. The mortar's been chipped away. Someone did this on purpose, Elias. And they covered their tracks so well I almost missed it."
"Who would do something like that?"
Corin thought about the careful precision of the damage. The patience it would have taken to dig down, crack the seal, fill it back in, smooth it over. The knowledge required to know that well existed in the first place, and what breaking it might release.
"I don't know," he said. "But I have to find out."
He hung up and walked back through the orchard, his boots leaving tracks in the thawing mud. The apple trees stood silent around him, their prematurely swollen buds a testament to the poison spreading through their roots.
Someone had purposely done this to his land.
And if that wasn’t enough, they were letting Chloe take the fall for it.
Corin had more questions than answers, but one thing he did know was that they weren’t going to get away with it.
15
CHLOE
The bell above Freya's door had been chiming all morning.
Word had spread. The sickness wasn't just affecting Corin's orchard and Freya's herb garden anymore. Three other households had reported failing plants overnight. A vegetable patch on Elm Street. The flower boxes outside the Tansley brothers' Mercantile. Even the small herb garden behind the Griddle & Grind that Twyla had been nurturing for years.
Hollow Oak was scared. And scared people needed someone to blame.
Chloe was restocking the dried chamomile when the door chimed again. She looked up, expecting another worried customer, and found Paul Whitmore standing in the entrance.
He was a familiar face around town. Mid-forties, sandy hair going gray at the temples, the kind of weathered handsomeness that came from outdoor work. He ran deliveries for several of the local farms, drove supplies between Hollow Oak and the outside world. Pleasant enough when she'd crossed paths with him before, always quick with a smile and a comment about the weather.
Today, he wasn't smiling.
"Freya around?" His voice was casual, but his eyes kept drifting to Chloe in a way that made her skin prickle.
