“Isobel.” Her name came out rough as sandpaper, the look in her father’s eyes pleading—no,terrified—as he seized her arm and held her close. “Where is your sister?”
Chapter 24
Eva
Eva couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss.
It wasn’t that she cared for Arthur still. She’d simply never really gotten closure the last time he left, and now that the old wound had been bared to the sun again, the heat of it stung.
Eva kept her eyes on the riverbank, mindful of the microgreens pushing through the soil with her every step. They couldn’t be far from the meadow now. Soon this nightmare would be over. Once they found Dad’s legendary honey, they could heal Arthur, heal her father, and put this horrible week and all it had dredged to the surface behind them.
Arthur would run, no doubt. And Eva?
She would forget him. She would try.
Her body was a living ache of little wounds. She’d thought she was tired before, but after another night of almost no sleep, her steps fell a little too heavily. The waning adrenaline left her with little resilience, and her eyes burned, a stinging tear of exhaustion sliding down her cheek.
But she kept going. That’s what she was good at, wasn’t it? Pressing on. Moving forward.
Soon, the smell of overturned earth and rich, dead wood gave way to the fresher scent of morning. The river rushed to her left, and Arthur followed behind her. Having lost his shoes, he hiked in socks that were surely getting damp in the dewy grass.
When the sunrise turned the sky violet, Eva caught sight of a honeybee and followed its flight path across the river with her eyes, where it landed on a cluster of wildflowers snugging the other bank.
She stopped, her breath catching in her chest. “Arthur. Look.”
He came up behind her, not quite close enough to touch, and followed her pointing finger. There, just beyond the thicket of green pine and lurking aspen, Eva caught a glimpse of color.
Little Lotties. They littered the ground, but Eva had almost missed them entirely, the deep indigo and violet shades of the rare flower mimicking the sky above. That was her meadow. She was certain of it. Eva rushed to a log that had fallen across the river, stepping eagerly onto its slippery surface to get a better view. Her stomach clenched as she took a step on the slick rime of bright green algae covering the makeshift bridge.
“What are you doing?” Arthur asked.
“We have to cross!” Eva held her breath as she took one more step, then another, a flood of white water rushing below her. It was deeper here, the water rougher. A fall would be dangerous.
“Ev, wait.”
She was done waiting. She kept going, and after a moment, when she heard the sounds of Arthur relenting, she looked back to see him teeter slightly as he stepped onto the log, throwing his arms out to either side. He was pale, and clearly didn’t share her confidence, wobbling forward and warily glancing at the river.
Eva looked forward. They would be fine.
But as soon as she thought it, the log bridge shifted beneath her, rolling slightly to the left. It wasn’t wedged as firmly on the other side of the river as she’d thought. Eva caught a hard breath and tried to regain her balance.
Arthur cried out in alarm. Eva turned toward him instinctively, and when the log beneath them rolled again, her foot slipped on the algae.
The two of them plunged into the water below.
Her ankle smacked the stones. Eva cried out, swallowing a mouthful of water at the shock of pain. The strength of the rapids flung her downriver. The river was deceptively deep here, even more than she’d thought when she stood on the log bridge.
Through the rheumy film of water, Eva caught sight of Arthur floating nearby. She kicked toward him, but her good foot slicked uselessly along the riverbed’s loose slurry. When she finally broke the surface, she gasped in a wet and painful breath and flung her arm out. Arthur’s hair slipped through her fingers, and he surged downriver.
“No, wait!” Eva garbled. Her ankle screamed in pain as she pushed off the stones toward him, finally managing to get ahold of his T-shirt. As she tugged his limp form against her, something caught around her wrist.
A root.
Eva gasped at the way it slinked up her arm, squeezing tight and pulling her downward, under the water again. Sediment rushed through her fingers.
“Help!” The plea hardly made it past the shape of her lips when a second root wound around her knees, pulling her down to theriver bottom. Alarm spiked within her, and too soon, her body protested its lack of much-needed oxygen.
She ripped her arm free of the root, instinctively thrusting her gift deep in the earth, deeper than she’d ever gone. The banks erupted in color: vivid mosses, thick reeds, and watercolor blooms filling the space.
