“I have to…” Crap. I can’t tell her anything. Or can I? Would she throw me into the pit if she knew I was looking for the necromancer? Riven warned me to trust no one. I’m used to working alone. But I don’t know if I can do this by myself.
“Come.” She gets up, and the sand falls off her.
I look down at myself and see I’m still covered in Pit Monster residue, as if I came out of the ocean and then rolled in dry sand.
“That needs to come off. It can still do damage to you.” She glides down the path, expecting me to follow.
“I… need to get back.” I think of the nightshade and Jean-Claude. He needs me.
The sand on my arms wiggles. It’s still alive.
“Everly.” Ms. Fernren turns to me. “If you don’t get that off, it will organize, collect and try to choke you, or force its way down your throat.”
Oh. Well, then. That’s the immediate concern, even if I wanted to go to the count first. “How long until that happens?”
“We have time. Come.”
She leads me back to the forest path until she turns off on a smaller trail. Nervous of sunset, as many things go bump in the night, I follow closely. Ms. Fernren doesn’t say a word and marches down the path. We turn a bend, and a small cottage with an old-fashioned thatched roof waits another hundred paces down the lane.
NINETEEN♀♥♂♂♂♂EVERLY
Ms. Fernren’s house is quaint, with a green garden under the two windows of the house, Red Death being the most prominent bush. Surely, all the other plants could kill if ingested, too, but the Red Death is the only one with color. The trees remain dormant. The ground is cold and desolate. The sky is gray above the leafless branches. So the bit of green, toxic or not, is welcome.
As my teacher passes the front door, the flowers rise, turn and follow her. If they had legs, they’d be her shadow. Riddle sniffs at one, and the luscious purple bloom snaps at him. He flaps back and attaches himself to my shoulder.
“Don’t mess around, then,” I whisper.
I’m reluctant to walk in. This sand isn’t something I want to bring into her house. Plus, I don’t want to be the next thing those flowers eat.
“Come.” She waves.
All the garden flowers turn to me as one and wait. I love flowers. Flowers are nature’s bounty. A blooming plant means all is right in the world. So I stare straight ahead and recite not creepy at all in my head.
I limp towards the front door with as much pride as I have left, lugging my feathery paperweight. “Won’t I contaminate your house?”
She holds her hand up. “Stop.”
Halting, I look around at the flowers, tracking my progress. A yellow bloom, petals large as a lily, starts sniffing my legs.
“Stay still,” Ms. Fernren says.
The sand that’s stuck to my body starts shifting, falling, and sliding off. It snakes towards the front garden to one plant in particular: The yellow lilies with spikes holding pollen at their core. Only that’s not pollen, and the spikes wiggle like arms.
I recognize the thick leaves at the base of the flowers as an ice plant. But it’s not an ice plant I know. The flowers dip down and a mini-battle between the sand and the flowers begins. The lilies gulp chunks of sand within their petals, closing up when they have a large “mouthful.” They eagerly take the sand as it sloughs off me in haste.
“What is it doing?” I ask.
“That’s Delosperma.”
“It’s not the kind of ice plant I’m familiar with.”
She smiles. “Exactly.”
A frigid chill runs down my back. Yeah. She probably knows of all kinds of plants that a dryad wouldn’t think of allowing into their forest.
The battle between the sand and flowers continues. Sometimes the sand wraps around a stem and the flower is cut off from the base. But the sand has to reach the base of the plant first.
Riddle watches in rapture, climbs down from his shoulder perch and twitches his little ears. He knows enough not to interfere, but his focus is solely on the battle between the flowers and sand. Riddle seems to have grown during the day. Where before he was the size of a large potato, now he’s about the size of a small koala bear.
The little guy starts shaking in excitement, barely able to hold back. But as the vicious flowers and mini-Pit Monster fight in what amounts to a life or death battle, I think he understands that getting into the mix would mean risking wings and legs.
Once the sand is off me and the tide turns in favor of the lilies, I dust myself off and say, “Well, thank you.” Then I take a deep breath as I think about Jean-Claude and the threat awaiting him. “I really need to get going, Ms. Fernren.”
She glowers at me the way only an unemotional plant can. “Ms. Stillwater, I know you say none of the pit sand got into your mouth, but you were in over your head.”
“In more ways than one,” I mumble.
She narrows her eyes. “Even if a grain travels down to your gut, it can do harm. Come.” She waves me inside.
I hesitate and look down at Riddle.
He peeps, but it’s not a direction. It’s not even a confirmation.
The house is clean and much like any other. Chairs, table, a kitchen, a dining room. Nothing out of the ordinary, except the floor is dirt. It’s the one thing my teacher and I have in common. We’d rather have our feet on soil. Things like shoes aren’t protective for me or for Ms. Fernren.
“Sit.” She points to
