“Yes,” he agreed. “But only in part.”
“So how does this explain what happened half an hour ago?”
Tanner groaned. “My teacher had a daughter—all three of those Keepers had daughters, who themselves grew up as Keepers. They had no say in it, given the dire straits, and my teacher’s daughter and I became lovers for a time. And then we parted ways.”
“Is this daughter here, on the island?”
“If not here, then she’s close.”
“Why the strong reaction?”
“She wants something from me I can’t give.”
“Why?”
“She’s become corrupted.” There was more. I could see it in the way the corners of his eyes tightened. His features stopped shifting and hardened into the Tanner I’d met at the Pearmains’.
“Do you think she has something to do with the catatonic orchardists and the severed heads?”
“I’m not willing to rule out her possible involvement.”
“You have to admit it’s an odd coincidence.”
He nodded. “I agree. It is. But jeopardizing the orchards also works against her, so…” His words drifted off into the far corners of my sleepy house.
“Tanner? I need to be able to trust you.” I was desperate for my bed.
His eyes looked genuinely wounded that I even questioned his intentions. “I’m not here to hurt you, Calliope. We’ve known each other what, twelve, thirteen hours? Every instinct I have is to protect you and this house and your sons. There’s more I can do to shield all of us from her influence—and I’ll do it, I promise.”
We leaned against each other and lapsed into silence. The story of Idunn and her apples and the Keepers was a lot to absorb. Add in the parts about women morphing into trees and Tanner’s old girlfriend being the jealous type…
I shook my head. I needed to sleep.
“Do you think we can go to bed now? I haven’t felt a thing since you started telling me that story.” I closed my eyes, sank my awareness deep into my land, and came back knowing the wards we’d cast had cloaked our presence.
Tanner must have performed a similar scan. “I think we can. Would you mind if I showered?”
I shook my head and clambered to my feet. My knees didn’t want to straighten, and a hot shower would be a godsend. “Go ahead. I’ll check all the locks and…”
“I’ll do it with you.” Tanner rested his arm around my shoulders and kept me at his side as we stepped over our circles. Whatever had been here earlier didn’t appear to notice—or care—that we’d left the confines of the protected space. My house was in its nighttime cycle of deep, steady breaths.
Together, we checked the locks on the ground floor doors and windows. I left Tanner at the bottom of the stairs with a feeble goodnight and mumbled instructions for where he could find clean bedding and towels.
Dropping my clothes on the bathroom floor, I gave thanks to the marvel of modern plumbing and scrubbed the blood off my body and out of my hair. I left the bottom half of my bedroom window open a couple of inches and wedged a section of wood in the top half to prevent it from being opened farther.
Not that anyone or anything would try to get into my house through the windows. That would be too much for one day. Too, too much. I did, however, lock my bedroom door and wedge a spindle chair under the knob.
Wednesday morning— after asking Tanner to please clean up the dried blood and stopping to grab breakfast and a coffee on the go—I had my assistant Kerry research the Pearmain property while I downloaded images from the day before off of my cell phone.
“Here’s everything I could find.” Kerry stepped into my office clutching a stack of files to her chest. “It’s not much, but from a cursory look, I’d say the orchard has been in the family at least two hundred years.”
I rotated my office chair and gestured for her to leave everything on my desk.
“Be careful handling the older papers,” she warned. “I noticed the newspaper clippings are crumbling at the edges.”
I stood and brought the stack to the work table set alongside one wall. A cork board was mounted above the chair rail; maps of the island and the region covered most of its surface. The repetitive motion of removing the pins and separating them by color into little boxes helped me begin sorting the past twenty-four hours.
Pull. I’m not pregnant.
Drop. Hallelujah.
Pull. If I wanted access to my magical potential, I had a lot of catching up to do. And I had to accept guidance. Drop.
My sons had nascent abilities, ones that needed magical mentoring, as it were, pull, pull, and look who showed up.
Drop.
Scratching the back of my head, I shook off my body’s suggestion about what other kinds of magical mentoring Tanner might offer me. Turns out there was a complicated man under the Provincial agent’s orderly exterior. And the man had some heavy baggage. Heavy, old baggage.
I switched tasks to stabbing at the cork board, pushing a red-flagged pin into every apple-grower’s location. There wasn’t an obvious pattern in their placement, but I didn’t need the obvious right now. I just needed information. “Kerry? Can you get me a breakdown of the varieties of apples grown on the island?”
“You trying to drive me and the growers nuts?”
“No.” I dropped one of the pins and crouched to pick it up. The stiff fabric of my jeans pinched and poked at my belly roll, further irritating my old tattoo. “But I know how obsessed most of them are about their apples. I’m grasping at straws a bit here, but see if they’ll tell you which varieties they grow the most.”
“You got it.”
“Oh, and ask if they have any rare or endangered trees. And get a list of their year-round workers and seasonal workers.”
“How many years back do you want me to go? Three, five?”
“Three should be fine.”
My phone buzzed with an incoming text message from Tanner, asking “May I use your office?”
I glanced at
