Just her, the pack, and the forest, all of it finally, breathtakingly whole.
Chapter 10
The test results were bad.
Not catastrophic—she’d been around plants long enough to know the difference between a crisis and a problem, and this was a problem. But bad enough that she’d been staring at the same column of numbers for ten minutes, turning them over in her head, trying to grab that solution she almost had. It was there, in some fuzzy part of her brain. If only she could catch it...
But yeah, the potency had plummeted. Not across the board, which might have been simpler to explain. Across the board meant one cause, one vector, one thing to fix. This was selective. Some plants had dropped so sharply, the readings looked like errors. Others had barely moved. There was a pattern in it somewhere, she was certain, but it kept sliding away every time she thought she had the shape of it.
She was still scrolling when the door opened, and her whole nervous system saidoh, goodbefore she’d even looked up. Her mind, her body, the entirety of her settled. The low-grade tension she carried when he wasn’t around, the tight spot she’d stopped noticing until it was gone, released all at once. “Hello, Officer Growly.”
Rex in his uniform was, frankly, a temptation she was not equipped to handle before lunch. The green and brown of it did something unconscionable to his eyes, and his shoulders did something unconscionable to her, and the whole situation was deeply unfair because she was supposed to save the forest here. He smiled at her—thatsmile, the one that made her want to putdown every single thing she was doing and deal with him instead—dropped a paper bag on the counter, and came around to her. His hands were warm on her face. His mouth was soft on hers, deep and unhurried and tasting of him, and she forgot to care what the numbers were.
“Hello, Moonbeam,” he said against her lips.
“Hi.” Eloquent.
“I was filing reports and thought I’d rather be doing this.” He kissed her once more, softer. “So I got food from the pub and decided to take my lunch away from the office.”
“That was an excellent thought.” She breathed him in—pine, warm skin, and the wild that was just him—and her eyes caught the screen. Shoot,the screen! Right. “Excellent timing, too. Results just came in.”
He turned to the laptop. “And?”
“And it’s something.” She pulled up the full report. “Some plants are significantly worse. Others barely changed. I’ve been trying to find a pattern, and it keeps slipping away from me.” She exhaled. “Here, look at this.” She pointed to a column. “Tannin concentration. This yarrow, picked from the eastern slope, it’s down forty percent. But this one—” she scrolled, tapped another entry, “—same species, picked four miles further out, had barely any change. Tannin levels are almost normal. And it’s not just the yarrow. It’s repeating across almost every species with a significant drop.”
He was quiet, reading. She leaned back into him without thinking about it; his arms came around her, and she settled. He pressed his chin to her hair. It was comfortable, and easy, and crazy how quicklythishad become the baseline. How terrifying it was to imagine anything else. Which should have worried her, but at the same time, reason could not explain the righteousness of it. So why bother? They were learning each other, and themore she learned, the more it was obvious she would have ended up here, with him, no matter what.
“I think we need Lachlan,” he said eventually. She straightened and turned around to look at his face. “I wish we could talk to the elves, too, but Lach said they’ve gone somewhere deep into the mountains to recharge. Letha hit them hard this year.”
Zoe thought it through for a moment. “I thought Letha was good for them. Their best time. Or that’s what Jade said?”
“It is. But all that energy, all that extra magic pouring through costs something, apparently. This year, more so than usual.” He paused. “Lach would know more.”
His words tried to sit in her head for a second, but couldn’t settle. They kept tossing and turning. Something thin and not-quite-formed started pulling at the edge of her attention. “They were tired.Tired,” she murmured. Then she turned and tapped her hands on his chest. “We talked about making a grid. Let’s do it now. Do you have a map? A proper one, with all the drawings and stuff.”
“A topographic one?”
“I guess that’s the name.”
“Yeah, in the truck. Why?"
“An idea. It’s not a full one yet, more a cloudy idea. A maybe. But I want to put all these numbers somewhere physical and see if the cloud clears.”
He was already moving for the door, coming back a minute later with a proper ranger’s map with elevation lines and trail markers, crumpled enough to show it had actually been used in the field more than once. The rush of fondness for him should have been embarrassing, but was glorious instead.
She flipped the shop sign toClosed.
They spread the map on the floor, laptop open beside it, lunch completely forgotten. She called out locations and potencydrops, and he marked them precisely on the paper. It took nearly an hour, but when she finally sat back on her heels and looked at the whole picture....oh.
“Well,” she said.
Every plant that had shown a significant drop in its active properties formed a band. A clear, unbroken ring running roughly parallel to the town’s edge. Beyond it, further into the forest, further from Mystic Hollow, the numbers were nearly normal, some not even changed at all.
It was a wall. An invisible wall around the town, and everything inside it was exhausted.
Rex had gone very still. She looked up at him. “What?”
“My wolf,” he said slowly. “It’s always more restless when I’m working closer to town. I thought it was just noise. People, activity.” He paused. “But it settles the further out I go. Every time. I stopped noticing it.”
