“We’re leaving.”
Chapter 1
Eva,
Eight Years Later
Eva plucked a thorax from the water bucket and set it in a bowl of corpses.
They’d finished pulling honey from the northwest apiary yesterday. Most of it went to the extractor, but misfit chunks like these were submerged in water overnight to let the honey slough off, exposing the naked, uncapped comb floating on top. Eva could boil those down and tin them into beeswax candles, salves, and lip balms.
Nothing, however, sold like raw honeycomb. This late in the summer, bottles of the sticky, sugared medicine practically flew off their shelves.
Eva understood. Twenty-five years of keeping the bees with her father and older sister, and still she thrilled each time she sank her teeth into those warm, dripping cells. There was a strangely primal allure to that hint of spice among the sweet, pollen and enzymes sliding down her tongue.
It was hard, when paired with one of the teas in their Honey Shoppe, not to call that magic. Tourists came from miles aroundfor a taste of the honeyman’s bottled summertime and a sachet of herbs they fully believed would rid them of their ailments. Dad shrugged off their wilder beliefs, always saying that nature was magic enough.
He didn’t disclose his somewhat enchanted green thumb, or his habit of collecting rare and mysterious flowers far up the mountain. Nor did he mention his magical daughter, whose greenhouse was brimming with herbs and florals Eva had cultivated to heal and cure.
“It’s not too late, you know.”
Eva watched Izzy swirl her finger in the water bucket across from her. “To do what, exactly?”
“Literally anything.” Izzy flicked a little water at her. “It’s Friday night, and we’rehere.” When Eva snorted, her sister leaned closer. “Come on. This’ll keep. Let’s go dancing.”
“At Dawson’s?”
If social gatherings with people who’d picked on her in high school were really the lifeblood of small towns, Eva preferred social anemia. She hated crowds. They made her feel like a bug stretched under a microscope.
Besides, the town’s nightclub was literally the worst place for Izzy to be.
“We can find a sober bar down the mountain,” Izzy urged. “It’ll be fun!”
Eva loved her sister, but she’d rather die than willingly subject herself to a night of painful pickup lines and some dry-humping stranger on a dark dance floor.
“I think I’m good here, Iz.”
Izzy rolled her eyes, which Eva pretended not to see.Let the sheriff take her dancing.
When she’d cleared all the torn wings and insect parts from the dirty honeycomb, Eva turned the bowl out onto a swath of cheesecloth, then swiped her wet fingers over the back of her neck. This summer was a scorcher.
The door to the workshop creaked open, spilling in a shaft of apricot sunset light as Dad stepped in, ducking Goliath shoulders under the door’s lintel. Eva’s eyes fell to the vee of her father’s shirt, where the brunt end of scar tissue and tree root lifted his flesh. The skin split at his sternum, a stubborn sapling pushing through a fistful of viscera and bone. Soft green moss spread over his chest, peeking from beneath the well-worn flannel of his shirt.
Every day, he got a little harder to look at.
“I thought you had an appointment,” Eva said.
Dad grunted and shook his head.
The roots of his sapling had burrowed deeper with every passing year, webbing his thoracic cavity into a mesh of wilderness and man. Eva usually tried to hide her worry. Dad and Izzy already treated her like glass ready to break. But her fears lay fallow beneath the surface.
“You rescheduled?” she prodded.
“No.” Dad tightened a grimace and sat across from her. “No more appointments.”
Eva’s heart skipped. She didn’t miss the guilty look that flashed across Izzy’s face, or the way her sister’s eyes dropped to the bucket in front of her.
She knew.
