Rex closed and locked the door again. “There was no devil, only—never mind.”
Lachlan stopped walking and held up one hand to stop... everything. Looked at the ceiling briefly, possibly looking for an extra stash of patience. Then back at Zoe, only Zoe, with the attention of a man who had decided there might be things in this room he simply wasn’t going to acknowledge. “I can come back in five minutes if ye need to regroup.”
“No, we’re fine. Thank you, though, it’s very kind.” She smoothed her hair back, let it go when it refused to cooperate, and gave up on the lost cause of looking like someone who hadn’t been thoroughly fucked on the floor.Don’t think, damn it. “And, ah, thank you for coming over so quickly.”
“It’s not often yer wolf summons me at that particular volume.” He glanced at Rex. “Yer buttoned wrong.”
Rex looked down. Looked up. Left the shirt crooked with sublime indifference, but extended his hand to Zoe and pointed to the floor while telling Lachlan, “Here. Come look.”
Lachlan’s eyebrows went up slightly at the map, at the notes, at the laptop open beside it, and whatever lingering amusement he’d carried in with him shifted into focus. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”
“We can move to the studio if —” Zoe started.
“The floor is all right.” He was already lowering himself onto it, eyes moving across the map. “Walk me through it, lass."
So she did.
They settled on the floor around the map, and she told him all of it. The initial reports, the collection day with the pack, and the numbers that had come back that morning showing the selective drop in potency right after Letha.
Lachlan listened, nodded, let her get it all out with nearly no interruptions. “The plants are physically healthy,” she said at the end. “Perfect, almost. No disease, no deficiency, no sickness. It’s only the active properties–the compounds that make them medicinally useful or give them their magical resonance.” She tapped the map, the ring she and Rex had traced earlier. “And it’s not random. Every plant showing a significant drop is inside this line. Closest to town. Everything beyond it is nearly normal.”
Lachlan leaned in. “When did this start?”
“I first noticed it about six weeks ago. But when I look back through my notes—” she pulled up a document on the laptop, turned it toward him, “—there are smaller anomalies going back further than that. I missed them because they were minor, and I had no reason to connect them. But it always seemed to happen around major seasonal events.” She paused. “And Rex, he also felt... different.”
“My wolf is more restless working closer to town,” Rex added. “I put it down to the activity, the noise. But it eases the further I go into the forest, every time, without exception.” He looked at the map. “I stopped noticing it because the fluctuation had become normal.”
Lachlan said nothing for a moment. He picked up her notes to read them, his eyes bouncing from notes to laptop. He was still frowning, but in concentration, not confusion, as he assembled pieces together. “The plants are healthy,” he repeated slowly.
“Just drained,” Zoe said.
“Aye.” He was quiet again before asking, “How much do ye know about how Mystic Hollow’s magic works, lass? The infrastructure of it.”
“I know things in a second-hand way. Magic doesn’t come to me or from me, but it comes from my clients and what I can do for them. I know the town is very magically active. I know there are wards, and that they get renewed. I know Letha is the biggest renewal event of the year.” She spread her hands slightly. “Beyond that, I’ve been working from observation more than personal involvement.”
Lachlan nodded. “Mystic Hollow has been a magically active site for a very long time, but the town has grown lately. The wards that protect it, the ones renewed at Letha, they don’t run on nothing. The magic that makes them and keeps them is not in a vacuum.” He gestured at the map, at her notes, at all of it, “The forest and its plants and herbs carry that resonance naturally.” He paused. “In theory, it’s a balanced system. The magic sustains the wards, the wards protect the town, the town protects the forests and the environment, so it all exists in harmony with what sustains it.”
“In theory,” Rex said.
“In theory.” Lachlan sat back slightly. “But balance needs to be maintained, and maintaining it requires attention. Awareness. Someone keeping an eye on the books, so to speak.” He looked at the map again, and something almost uncomfortable moved across his face. “This year’s Letha was the largest we’ve had in decades. More participants, more renewals, more wards strengthened or added than any year I can remember.”
The fog that had been sitting over the whole problem since she’d first opened those test results began, finally, to lift, and the pieces started to get into their place. “The plants are part of the system, they’re connected to the town’s magic.”
“Aye.”
“So when Letha draws on that energy—” She was thinking out loud now, working through it the way she worked through a formula, following the idea as it strengthened, “—the whole system draws on what is connected to it. The wards pull from the ambient magic. The ambient magic pulls from the source. And the source is—”
“Everything,” Lachlan said quietly. “The forest. The water. The soil. The plants. The herbs.”
“And nobody noticed because in a normal year the draw is proportional. The system recovers.” She looked at the map, at the neat, punishing band of depleted things running along the edge of town. “But this year wasn’t a normal year. This year, the town asked too much, and the plants closest to town, the ones most integrated into the magical ecosystem, they took the full weight of it.”
“Exactly right, lass,” Lachlan said.
Rex pressed a kiss to her hair, pride swelling through the bond.
Lachlan caught the gesture, and his eyes softened for an instant before his attention went back to the map. “The collection day ye ran with the pack,” he asked no one in particular. “Can ye do another one? I can get the wards temporarily suspended, and see if we’re on the right side of things.”
Rex didn’t even stop to think. “Our pack will be ready for whatever she needs.”
