They follow water.
Not the river, which runs through the valley below the village. The underground water. The springs and seeps and hidden streams that feed the wells and emerge as boggy patches in the lower fields. The green zones sit on top of them like markers, and the realisation came to me at two in the morning while I wasbrushing my teeth and thinking about something Maggie said about roots.
I don’t know what it means. Not yet. But the map is giving me a framework, and the framework is giving me questions, and the questions are the only currency that matters in a place where nobody gives you answers for free.
My first patient of the day is Helen’s spaniel, in for his fortnightly arthritis injection. Helen arrives at nine on the dot with the dog, a bag of homemade biscuits for me, and the latest instalment of village gossip, which she delivers without drawing breath.
“Graham’s got a new girl working at the bar. Terrible with the taps. Lovely with the customers. Arthur’s dog got into Mrs Hartwell’s garden again, and she’s threatening to fence the whole thing in chicken wire, which Arthur says is an act of war, and honestly, Phoebe, the drama in this village could fuel a soap opera.”
I give the injection while the spaniel sits patiently and Helen talks. My senses read the dog automatically: the stiffness in the left hip, the slight elevation in cortisol from the car ride, the warm, uncomplicated affection he radiates when I scratch behind his ears. My senses also read Helen: the slight increase in heart rate when she mentions Graham’s new employee, the careful casualness she’s projecting around the topic,the faint chemical signature of stress hormones that don’t match her cheerful delivery.
Helen is worried about something she’s not telling me. I note it and move on, because reading someone’s emotional state without their knowledge carries responsibilities I’m still working out. The information is there whether I want it or not. What I do with it is the choice.
“All done,” I say, lifting the spaniel off the table. “Same time in two weeks?”
“Perfect. You’re a wonder with him, Phoebe. The old vet was lovely, but Spencer always shook like a leaf in here. He’s calm as anything with you.”
I smile and don’t explain that Spencer is calm because I can smell his anxiety and modulate my approach in real time, adjusting my voice, my movements, and my scent—because apparently I can do that now, project calmness through my own pheromones in a way that soothes nervous animals. I discovered this by accident last week with a feral cat and have been experimenting with it since. It works on domestic animals consistently. It works on pack members too, which is a fact I’m keeping to myself until I understand the ethical implications.
After Helen leaves, I have an hour before my next appointment. I use it to walk to The Wren.
The café is quiet. Nell is behind the counter, andthe sight of her has become familiar in a way that pleases me. She’s become part of my routine. Coffee in the morning when I can manage it. A nod and a few words. Nothing deep. Nell doesn’t do deep, or if she does, she keeps it so far below the surface that I can’t reach it.
But I notice things. The way she watches the door every time it opens, not with hope but with a readiness that suggests she’s waiting for something she expects to be bad. The way her scent shifts when certain pack members come in, a tightening, a pulling inward. The way she moves through her space with the containment of someone who learned early that taking up less room was safer.
I order my flat white. She makes it without small talk, which I appreciate. When she sets it on the counter, our fingers brush, and I catch a flash of something through the contact. Not a clear reading. An impression. Loneliness so deep it has texture. A wanting that doesn’t have a name yet. The sense of a person standing at the edge of something, looking down, unable to jump and unable to step back.
I pull my hand away. She doesn’t seem to notice anything. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe the contact wasn’t long enough to register on her end. But the impression stays with me as I take my coffee to the table by the window and sitwith it.
Nell. Quiet, watchful Nell, who makes excellent coffee and keeps herself to herself and radiates a stillness that I used to read as peace and now read as something closer to a held breath.
I add a note to the map in my head. Not a data point. A question mark.
The rest of the morning brings routine work. A Labrador puppy for its first vaccinations, which involves more wriggling than any creature with four legs should be capable of. A phone consultation with a farmer about a lame horse that I’ll need to visit tomorrow. A follow-up on the spaniel Pete brought in last week, the one with the puncture wound that shouldn’t have existed. The wound has healed completely. Pete sounds relieved on the phone and doesn’t ask how.
At lunchtime, I eat a sandwich at my desk and study the map.
The cluster near The Hare and Hound is bothering me. Three of my supernatural cases originated within two hundred metres of the pub. A cat with accelerated healing. A dog with behavioural anomalies. A bird, of all things, that a customer brought in after it flew into the café window and that, when I examined it, had a bone density that shouldn’t exist in any avian species I know of.
I assumed the cluster was coincidental. The Wren is a social hub. People gather there. Animals belongingto those people get brought to the vet who drinks coffee there. Confirmation bias. Clustering illusion. The kind of statistical noise that looks like a pattern if you stare at it long enough.
But the green zone. The hum in the ground. I can feel it when I sit in the café, faint but present, the same charged quality I feel at Geoff’s farm and in the forest clearings. And The Hare and Hound sits directly above one of the underground water channels I’ve mapped.
I need to talk to Maggie.
Not today. Today I have a full afternoon, and the questions I want to ask her require the kind of conversation that happens over damson gin rather than over a fence. But soon. Because the map is telling me something about Mistwood that goes deeper than wolves and bonds and a vet with senses she didn’t ask for.
Roan arrives at six with dinner supplies. This has become our pattern. He cooks. I watch him cook and ask questions. We eat. We talk. Sometimes we don’t talk, and the silence is full rather than empty. Sometimes we end up in bed before the food is finished, and the reheated leftovers are always better than they should be.
Tonight he’s brought steak. The smell of it hits me the moment he opens the bag, and my body responds with an intensity that still catches me off guard. Redmeat. Protein. The post-emergence cravings are specific and relentless, and they have strong opinions about what I should be eating. Roan noticed before I did. He started bringing red meat three days in and hasn’t stopped.
“I mapped the underground water channels,” I say, while he seasons the steak with the casual precision that characterises everything he does in my kitchen.
“You did what?”
“The green zones. The places where the land feels charged. They follow the underground water. Springs, seeps, subterranean streams. I’ve mapped seven of them, and every one sits directly above a water source.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The steak sizzles as it hits the pan. “How did you map them?”
