Chapter 17
Magdala dreamt that she was standing on a stone in the middle of a raging river. The water ran swift and cold, alive with the darting green bodies of nixies and the muddy fins of undines. Their webbed fingers slithered along the rock, brushing her toes.
Voices carried on the wind, and she dragged her eyes away from the monsters to the shore where her father stood on one bank, beckoning her to swim to him. Her mother stood on the other bank, shouting for her. Her panic rose as they waved, urgent, insistent, their voices rising shrill above the torrent. Had they forgotten that she couldn’t swim? Didn’t they know that, if she listened to them, she would drown?
And then a third voice called to her, and she looked down. Asherton was treading water below. He reached up and cried, “Jump in and perhaps I will catch you!”
“Perhaps?” she asked.
He smiled his most beautiful, enigmatic smile and said, “Perhaps.”
“And what if you don’t?”
The nixie’s hands wrapped around her ankles, her calves, her thighs. They were dragging her into the water. Herparents’ screams rose, but why couldn’t they come to her? Why did she have to go to them? She could not swim!
Asherton laughed as cold, muddy water closed over her head. Fingers groped along her legs. Seaweed brushed her cheeks.
Magdala awoke with a start. The sun streamed in the window above her cot, warming her. Something was tickling her cheek. Drowsy, she opened her eyes and looked directly into Anton the plant’s bared teeth.
With a shriek, Magdala tried to scramble out of bed, but Anton’s roots tangled her legs, his leaves encircling her waist. He’d grown as big as a toddler in three days, his jaws wide enough to clamp around her throat.
“GET IT OFF!” she screamed, thrashing, expecting teeth to sink in her flesh.
Anton whined like a persecuted puppy and tightened his grip.
Asherton sat up in bed, his hair tousled in his eyes. He blinked at her, then threw the covers aside and jumped on Anton. He tugged, the muscles in his arms tight, but the plant wrapped its leaves around Magdala and squeezed until she thought she might pop like a crushed ball.
“Come to Daddy,” Asherton said through a grimace, pulling with all his might.
Frantic, Magdala reached under her pillow, grasped her knife, and would have slashed the leaf wound around her waist, but Asherton yelped, “NO!”, dove across Anton, and gripped Magdala’s wrist.
“YOU’RE WRETCHED PET IS TRYING TO EAT ME!” Magdala screeched, fighting him. Wrestling both Magdala and Anton, Asherton shouted, “I’m working on it, you violent witch!”
Crushing her arm against the wall, he slid his knee between Anton’s stalk and Magdala’s chest. She gasped, and he looked a little chagrined. “Sorry,” he panted, “but you said you wanted him off …”
“If you don’t want me to prune your plants, keep them in their pots!” she snapped.
Asherton finally wrenched Anton loose. They both tumbled to the floor where Anton moaned, burying his head in Asherton’s shoulder and weeping like a child.
“You hurt him!” Asherton cried, sitting up and pivoting Anton away from Magdala.
“He attacked me!”
“He did not! He just snuggled up to you in the night.”
“Because he meant to eat me!”
“Does he look like he wants to eat you? I swear, you are the most mean-spirited woman …”
“I am not mean-spirited!” Magdala stood, her blankets sliding onto the floor. “I am just the only person in this house with an instinct for self-preservation!”
Anton turned his eyeless head toward Magdala, and she could have sworn he was gloating.
“He paralyzed you,” she muttered.
“He didn’t mean it,” Asherton said. He sat on the bed with Anton clinging to him. “He’s justa baby.”
The door flew open and Zephyr stumbled in, wrapped in a fuzzy red bathrobe, his hair damp. “What happened?” he panted. “Where…” He looked around, wild-eyed, searching for an assassin.
