The moment the doctor exited the room, Dane moved toward the hospital bed. “Jack,” he said, and Isobel, sensing what was coming, did the only thing she could think of.
“Dane, wait.” Her voice broke as she looked between the two men who meant the most to her, both of them preserved by a miracle. Both of them forever changed.
Dane was right.
Isobel met her father’s gaze. They’d spent so long not talking about this, keeping their promise to conceal the truth so far that it had gone unacknowledged even between the two of them, for years. “He deserves to know,” she said softly.
For a long moment, Dad didn’t say anything, the beeping on his monitor the only sound in the room. Then he turned to where the sheriff was watching the two of them with the wariness of acornered animal. “The tea I gave you to ease your chest pain,” he murmured. “I never told you where it came from.”
Isobel flashed to the jar of blue petals she’d found in the glove box of Dane’s patrol car.
The blue tea had become a permanent fixture in her surroundings over the years, a jar always set in a place of honor in their pantry. How many times had she curled up beside her father and sister and a cup of that very tea while Dad regaled them with some new and tragic folktale about a honeyman whose venture into a magical world always seemed to end in tragedy?
“We call them Little Lotties. They only grow in the meadow I spoke of earlier.”
Dane let out a breath and put a hand flat on the rolling tray beside the bed. “What does that have to do with me?”
Everything.
“When dried, they are not so different from any other herbal remedy, if a bit more impactful. But concentrated into honey, they give a person power over life itself.”
Isobel cleared her throat. “There was an accident that night in the chapel,” she said. “When you went in after your brother, you tried to break up a fight between him and Arthur. And you were…” She trailed off, unable to even say it.
“Hurt?” Dane finished.
“Killed,” her father corrected.
Dane’s attention snapped back to him, all the blood draining from his face. “What?”
“I’d only ever used the life-giving power for home remedies. To grow medicinal plants. To cultivate my garden. To expand the fields behind our house. There was always a cost, but I didn’t mind the changes, at first.” Dad set a hand to the base of the trunk in hischest. “Nature makes no distinction between flesh and earth. The ground is simply another skin we carve into, our bodies a garden to sow and harvest from.”
The words sent a chill down Isobel’s spine.
“I didn’t know if it would work,” Dad said more softly. “But I… I had to try. If I didn’t”—his voice cracked, thick with emotion—“then my daughter would’ve been a killer.”
Dane’s knuckles were white. “So, what? You gave me some of that… honey?”
Her father shook his head. “I didn’t have any on me,” he admitted. “All I had was the spoonful of honey from my tea that morning still running in my veins. And it was enough.”
“Enough…?” Dane whispered, his throat bobbing.
“To bring you back,” Isobel said.
She’d never forget that night for as long as she lived. It wasn’t just the horror of it all. She’d been holding her dead friend, anguishing, when her father knelt and placed his hands on the wound.
When Dane had gasped awake, his cheeks flushing with new life, something in her had changed too. His rebirth had re-curved the path of her life forever.
“And…” Dane struggled through the question. “Your tree?”
“The aspen started growing that very night. A tithe, I’d guess, to balance what I’d done. I was lucky it didn’t kill me,” he said with a laugh. But Isobel didn’t feel like laughing.
A knock sounded on the door, and a nurse poked her head in. “Sheriff?”
“What is it?” Dane clipped. Then he caught himself and stood. “Forgive me. I’m… very tired.”
“No problem,” the nurse deadpanned in a tone that suggested she was used to people’s bad attitudes.
Dane cleared his throat. “What’s going on?” he asked, moving on instinct to straighten a tie that wasn’t there.
