Wiping his hand over his face and tugging at his chin, Tanner opened the bedroom door and waved me through. “Let’s go say hi to everyone. And Calli?”
I spun around, holding my palms to my face and hoping I would look normal by the time I reached the kitchen. “What?”
“Thank you.”
“Where’s Sallie?” I asked. The group revolving through the front door was decidedly male.
Harper answered. “We left her and Jasper at Lei-li’s. Thatch and I have to work tomorrow, and James and Mal offered to let her stay.”
“They’ve got the safe room all set up and showed us how to get in. And get out,” Thatcher added.
“And you two feel okay about being at the farm?” I asked. “There’s no hiding in those fields.”
“Mom.” Harper leveled his gaze at me.
“Okay, I get it,” I said, palms up, head down. “I want you to hear about my adventure then decide.” I repeated what I’d told Tanner about meeting Alabastair, added more to the part where Doug and Roger showed up armed to their fingernails, and left out the piece where House revealed Meribah’s blood in the root cellar. “I think the Flechettes have more invested in their plan to buy up orchards than we suspected.”
“And now you’re concerned they’re going to come after Harper and Thatcher,” Wes said, sharing concerned glances with Tanner.
“Yes.” I sank onto the hard dining chair. More than almost anything else, I was terrified of Meribah getting her claws into my sons. I would kill to get them back, and that knowledge terrified me.
“Mom, what happened to the promise you made, when was it…yesterday? The promise about letting us have normal lives? This is the new normal,” Harper said. “It’s just that now we know what the dangers are and who’s dangerous.” He lifted the amulet he wore on a cord around his neck. “Thatcher and I are protected.”
Wes cleared his throat. “The wards surrounding this property protect you when you’re here, much more so than when you’re standing on the other side.”
“Wes? Tanner? Can we get Kaz or River over tonight and build these young men a pelote?” Christoph had been hanging back from the rising heat of the exchange between me and Harper.
“What’s a pelote?”
“A single-use charm that will get them to whatever portal it’s built from.”
“Call Bas. He’s the temporary Keeper for one of the crabapple portals. I think he’s at the Pearmains’,” I said. “If you need me for anything, I’ll be in the root cellar.”
Crammed into the back seat of my tiny car was my sample collecting kit, the one I usually hauled between my office in town and the farms and orchards I visited. I hefted the bag to the wretched wooden door leading into the root cellar and set it on the new concrete slab. I needed better light.
Stomping into the house, because one orgasm and a few answers weren’t enough to render me love-struck to the extent I could ignore the danger my sons would be in when they went to work, I asked the guys if they’d bought any clip-on lamps.
They had. Christoph wordlessly handed me two, with bulbs, and said, “I’ll drop an extension cord out the window.”
Having the lights helped. I grabbed a hoodie on my way out again and clomped down the porch stairs.
In my kit was a camping headlamp and spare batteries. Every bit of light would help once I was inside the root cellar. I opened the door, clipped one lamp to the frame and the other farther in, pulled the hoodie over my head, and strapped on the headlamp.
The familiar rhythm of marking out a grid with stakes, attaching string until the entire area was mapped out, soothed the irritation, which was really just a mask for my fears.
“Would you like my help?” Tanner hunched by the door. His voice swept between my clothes and my skin, leaving imprints of his hands from my throat to my inner thighs.
“Aren’t you needed with making the portal thingy?” I asked.
“It’ll be another thirty minutes before River can extricate himself from whatever he’s doing.”
“I’ll hand the baggies to you, and you can write on the bag with that Sharpie.” I pointed to the pocket with the markers. “Repeat the number and letter I give you back to me. Please.”
Settling into work-mode with Tanner as my helper wasn’t hard. Even with creepy memories whispering at the periphery of my awareness, I stuck to the simple ease of scooping up soil, dumping it into a baggie, handing the baggie to Tanner, and giving him the coordinates from the grid. With his help, I’d taken samples from the half closest to the door before Christoph knocked on one of the grimy, cracked windows and motioned for Tanner.
“You okay?” he asked. I nodded and waved him off.
Mold was beginning to irritate the insides of my nostrils. Work boots and rubber gloves kept my hands and feet from reading the soil as I might have liked. But the choice to put a layer between my bare skin and the ground under my house was deliberate. I was afraid the cold, slimy soil would send me hurtling backward into memories that still choked me up.
Added to those memories was House’s certainty that Meribah’s blood was down here.
Fur ruffled across the back of my neck, even though the hood covered my head. I dropped the tongue depressor I was using into the next to the last square.
Bear. What are you doing here?
My hand shook as I picked up the piece of smooth wood, opened the baggie, added the soil, and marked the location. I fished a fresh depressor out of the hoodie’s pocket and went to lift the last sampling of soil. An invisible paw cradled my elbow and guided
