Chapter 1
Lilith
I suppose you couldsay the town had a little bit of “Southern Gothic” flair if you were being nice. But if I were completely honest, it kind of gave me the creeps.
I’d never been one for small towns, personally. Elvish people often preferred orderly cities with plenty of amenities, and my family was firmly entrenched in New Caelora. The bustling, busy metropolis of sky rises and one-way streets that made up my home city, the capital of the largest elvish province, enamored me in a way no quirky, empty village ever could. Even downtown Golden Laurel, just a stone’s throw from this outer university district I’d moved to, had a couple of gleaming towers made of clean lines of metal and glass, and roving street sweepers that worked nightly to keep the roads pristine. But here? These ramshackle buildings in this little hamlet had never even seen a bucket of soap and water as far as I could tell, let alone a street sweeper. Weeds poked through cracks in the buckled sidewalk. The signs were all faded and peeling to the point of illegibility. Boarded-up windows hid shadowed interiors, and a thick coatof dust and grime covered every surface I could see. If it weren’t for the cheerful chatter of college students coming and going, it would have felt like the setting for a ghost story.
I fought a shiver. The encroaching dusk and towering nearby trees probably added to the spooky feeling pervading the street in front of the dated apartment building that was to be my new home, but I also felt a bit… trapped. It had only taken a short search to find a little wyvern-drawn carriage to deliver me from the center of the college town, but out here the streets were vacant. Not a carriage or pull-cart in sight. Getting backintotown would take more effort.
But this was fine. Really. It would be temporary, regardless of what my uncle thought. I would get the new garden center up and running for him, and then I could go back to managing Blossom and Bonsai—the most profitable, gorgeous nursery in New Caelora. People like me, who craved a touch of greenery while living in a crowded city, could pop in to peruse the cheerful, leafy offerings and take home a cute little succulent for their desk or a pot of draping vines to grace their windowsill. Just thinking about the adorable, tidy rows of rare and exotic houseplants that made up most of our stock made me wistful—pairing people with the perfect plant match was one of my favorite parts of the job. Since I also had some sylvan ancestry and a bit of plant magic in my veins, I couldn’t imagine a more fulfilling career.
At least, until my uncle—who also happened to be my boss—had given me more and more responsibility, to the point that I was managing the nursery for him, and then had theaudacityto give me puppy eyes when he acquired a new nursery that needed an overhaul out here in the middle of nowhere. Boylen had unfairly effective puppy eyes for an old man. The only reason I’d agreed was because I trusted my younger cousin Melantha to fill my role and keep the shop running in my absence. She’d beenlearning and growing so much since joining the family business as a teenager, and I knew I could count on our Uncle Boylen to help her if she ran into trouble.
The door banged behind me, and I startled, whirling to find that it was only the pair of college-aged boys whom Boylen had hired to help me move. “It’s all in, miss,” the biggest one, an orc, said sheepishly, as the much smaller goblin waved goodbye and blinked at me with his overly large eyes. I thanked them both profusely, tipping them extra, and then bid them goodnight. The apartment was already furnished, since I didn’t plan on staying permanently, so the move had been easy and relatively swift. But I groaned internally as I watched the young men make their way up the street in the direction of the student housing block, knowing that I still had too much to do before I could sleep tonight—a bed to dress and toiletries to dig out of wherever they were buried in my boxes. I was already making a mental list of groceries I probably wouldn’t even be able to find at the rundown little corner market we’d passed on the way in.
The odd sensation of being watched tickled at my periphery, and I hunched my shoulders in response. There was no one else on the quiet block that I could see as I cast my gaze around, looking for the source. It wasn’t until I glanced up—several stories up—to the window just above my new third-floor walk-up, that I found two giant, glimmering red eyes reflecting at me out of the shadows. Just perfect. I lived beneath the boogeyman. I didn’t even try to fight my full-body shudder.
If I hadn’t beenlistening for it, I probably wouldn’t have heard it at all, but the soft click, click, click of my creepy upstairs neighbor pacing around his apartment kept me awake far longer than I was used to. I didn’t usually mind hearing my neighbors.I had been living cheek-by-jowl for most of my life, after all. But there was something sinister about the scratching noise, which I could only assume was my upstairs neighbor’s claws tapping against the hardwood as he moved about his top floor unit. It reminded me of the sound of rats scurrying in a ceiling and put me on edge the entire night.
The result was a grumpy morning as I stopped by the local coffee shop before heading out to inspect Boylen’s new nursery. The previous owners had really let it go, and since most of the staff had left when they retired, I had a lot of hiring and work to do to return it to its former glory. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen it, and I already had some thoughts brewing about how to improve it, but I wanted to talk to the only staffer who’d stayed on—a grouchy old man named Artem, who looked to be at least half dryad. I was used to chatting with my younger cousin any time I needed company at work, or joking around with the guys in the warehouse, so the thought of getting to know a prickly new employee was uncomfortable.
He was tall, with a stalwart build, and smatterings of weathered bark on his skin and tattered leaves growing in his hair marked him as one of the ancient forest warriors. But what stuck out the most about Artem to me was his permanently dour expression. I found he had a hidden soft spot though. “I couldn’t leave the plants,” he’d muttered grumpily when I asked him why he hadn’t left with the others when his former bosses retired. But I decided he was okay. I didn’t really mind that he was crotchety as long as he was good at his job. Maybe we could just be crotchety together.
There weren’t enough plants in stock to sustain the business, but what we did have was healthy and vibrant, happily thriving under Artem’s care. The greenhouse windows were filthy, and weeds grew abundantly between the bricks of the front walk. The first thing I did was hire a stout, gregarious dwarvish mannamed Jereck to tackle the numerous maintenance needs, the first of which was to paint the front sign. He might have talked entirely too much while he worked, but he was pretty efficient, and within a few hours our new shop—aptly named “The Floral Dilemma”—sported a sign with a pretty cream background and gold letters surrounded by soft green and gold leaves. I was thrilled. The bright, cheerful sign was the first thing that had lifted my mood since I’d arrived in this weird little town. I promptly busied myself with the happy task of placing orders for seeds and succulents, fertilizers and fancy new gardening tools.
My good mood lasted until Artem sidled into my office with a mild sneer on his face.
I realized I’d been humming as I worked. “Sorry, I’ll stop humming.”
“You can hum,” he said gruffly.
“Then what’s wrong?” I asked, still on uneven footing with the older gentleman.
He cast a critical eye over my list of orders. “House plants and flowers are all well and good, but we need crop starts and bare root trees for the ones out here who like to grow food.”
“Oh.” I wilted a little at that. While I had plenty of experience coaching new gardeners through growing cherry tomatoes or dwarf peppers on a balcony garden, my knowledge of fruit trees or larger crop-producing plants was limited. I didn’t even have any good suppliers.
“Go up to the university,” he said, taking pity on me and gesturing vaguely toward the west. “They’ve got that horticultural research facility where they breed all kinds of new apples and pears. The last owners were too stubborn to work with them because they didn’t like that persnickety head researcher, but he’s got some real neat trees up there. They’ll even let you try the fruit at one of their tasting events.”
So that was howI found myself at a “tasting” one late afternoon, surrounded by baskets of apples and pears and stone fruits all laid out on tables on the edge of an experimental orchard. There were a dozen or so other people milling around, tramping across the mulched gathering area. This was exactly the kind of thing that I would have loved to attend with my friends or my mom back at home, I noted wistfully as I looked around the open space by myself, feeling the loneliness of a new place just a little more intensely.
Several people were moving with purpose to purchase boxes of fruit they’d already pre-ordered, others towing excited children as they marveled at all the different varieties of fruit, so I didn’t pay much attention at first when I noticed a small child rampaging around amongst the nearby trees. She was young, with dark hair pulled up in tiny pigtails and light green skin like some of the sylvans and other forest fae. She was squatted down in the dirt, busily ripping mushrooms out of the soil and replanting them in another patch while talking animatedly to herself the entire time. It seemed like something she probably shouldn’t be doing, especially because the little knees of her overalls were all stained with soil, but since she seemed safe enough and I wasn’t a parent, I figured it wasn’t my business.
I moseyed my way toward one of the tables, passing a large family of gnomes who were arguing about which fruit to take home. The baskets of apples on the tables had little plates laid out in front of them and an older, apron-wearing elvish woman was cutting pieces of fruit as samples for people to try. There were all the usual apple colors—yellows and reds and greens—but there were also interesting dark purple varieties and one basket full of snow-white apples with a pale pink hue around thestem. I drifted closer, entranced by the unique fruit, to find that there were jagged holes in each apple revealing light pink fruit flesh inside.
“Well, hello, miss. You want a bite of the Moon Blush, do you?”
I glanced up to find the elvish woman making her way toward me, before she made a choking sound and stopped in her tracks, fists suddenly clenched tight and the pink in her dark cheeks draining as she stared at the apples.
“Alistair!” she bellowed toward the tree line, startling me. It wasshockinglybrash behavior for an elf, especially an elderly one. “Alistair! That kid’s gotten into your basket of Moon Blush apples!”
I had no time to ponder her shouting as a massive mothman—a creature straight out of my darkest cryptid nightmares—stepped out from the darkness of the trees. My jaw dropped at the sight of him. Nearly as tall as a dryad, with a thick, dove-gray lion’s mane of fluff and four long, dark arms that seemed to stretch on forever, the creature snapped out a menacing limb with lightning speed and snatched up the little child I’d seen playing with the mushrooms just moments earlier. She screamed like a stuck pig as he hoisted her up, up, up into the air, clutched in his claws by the back of her overalls. My heart lurched into my throat at the sight of her captured by thismonster. I was not prepared to watch this child die right here!
“Oh, no! Stop!” I barely choked out from across the table, my hands pressed to my cheeks. I felt weak in the knees as he turned to look at me with his lash-lined dark red eyes, frustration and confusion written on every feature. Not the predatory hunger I’d expected from his fearsome mien.
Also unexpected? The little girl’s shrieks turning to hysterical, throaty giggles as she reached for one of the fluffy white antennae that arched forward from above his brow. Her dirtyfist clutching his strange protuberance jerked his attention away from me, and he squawked at her indignantly.
“Let go,” he told her, sounding oddly petulant. Almostwhiny.
