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“It means I’ve never met anyone like you before, Grace. I think you can do anything you want to do.”
It’s a really big compliment, especially coming from Hudson, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to say to that. At least until he smirks and continues. “Well, besides trying to eat an entire restaurant full of food in one day. Big fail on that one.”
“You know what? I’m totally okay with failing there,” I shoot back. “Especially since the person calling me on it basically subsists on a few glasses of blood a day.”
“Are you blood shaming me now?” He gives me a mock-offended look.
I roll my eyes. “I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing.”
“It is totally a thing.”
“Because you say so?” I arch a brow.
“Maybe.” He narrows his eyes at me. “You got a problem with that?”
“Maybe I do. In fact—” I break off as Flint calls to me from across the square.
“Hey! There you are, New Girl.”
It’s Hudson’s turn to roll his eyes. “Dragons really do have the worst timing, don’t they?”
Mekhi, Eden, Luca, and Flint descend on us seconds later. “Oh my God,” Eden says as she takes the last sip of a giant milkshake and tosses the cup in the nearest recycle bin. “That was so good, but I am so full.”
“They got you, too, huh?” I ask sympathetically.
“They got us all,” Flint answers. “When I saw Macy a little while ago, she was more than a little green around the gills.”
“Nice people, though,” Luca says with a grin. “Everyone has been so friendly.”
Mekhi shrugs. “Yeah, but we got absolutely no info on the blacksmith.”
“That’s because you’re all amateurs,” Hudson gloats. “His wife’s name is Falia, and she’s a jewelry maker from the Soli tree.” He winks at me. “We also got directions to her house.”
“We’re never going to live this down, are we, Eden?” Mekhi jokes.
“What can I say?” I tease. “Sometimes you got it—”
“And sometimes you don’t,” Hudson finishes.
Mekhi rolls his eyes, but Eden doesn’t reply. She’s too busy staring at my right hand. “She’s a jewelry maker, you say? Is that why Grace is suddenly wearing a promise ring?”
All eyes turn to me, and I squirm. “It’s just a ring.” I shrug. “I thought it was pretty.”
Flint whistles long and hard, then says, “Dude, you already got her a promise ring? I thought that was, like, a hundred-year anniversary gift or something. Da-yum.” If I’m not mistaken, there is actual admiration in Flint’s green eyes for the vampire he normally only vaguely tolerates on the best of days.
Not to be left out of the fun, Mekhi adds, “Holy hell. What did you promise her? You know that shit’s, like, forever, right?”
All the guys snicker at that, Flint fist-bumping Mekhi as he mentions something about Hudson being “bond whipped.” For his part, Hudson takes the ribbing good-naturedly, but his gaze darts to mine a few times, probably to gauge if I’m going to ask what he promised me with the magical ring. Well, he’ll have to wait for that, because all I feel is relief that I didn’t actually make some lust-drunk promise to wash this guy’s sheets for an eternity.
Only Eden seems to not find the humor in the ring, one eyebrow going up as she says to me pointedly, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Almost never,” I reply, and it’s the truth.
She chuckles but doesn’t add anything else.
After another five minutes of everyone trying to guess what Hudson promised me, Eden asks, “Do you think we should go talk to Falia now, while Macy and Jaxon are entertaining Erym?”
Luca adds, “Or do you think we should wait for them?”
“I think Jaxon will kill us if we leave him with a lovesick thirteen-year-old for much longer,” I comment.
“More reason to bail, if you ask me,” Flint says, and there’s something in his voice that has me looking at him closely, wondering if he’s really as happy as he’s seemed lately.
But his eyes are clear, the smile on his face easy, and I decide I must be mistaken.
“I’ll text him and Macy,” Mekhi says, pulling out his phone. “Let him know where we’re going and to keep Erym occupied for a little longer.”
We head west as we were instructed, and it isn’t long before the quaint, structured environmentalism of town gives way to wilderness and unstructured forest. Houses start looking more run-down and are coming further and further apart.
I’m stressing a little, afraid that on the lake isn’t going to be enough directions to find Falia’s house, but once the lake comes into view, I realize it isn’t quite the problem I thought it would be.
To begin with, it’s more of a pond than a lake, so there are only two structures on the whole north edge of it. One is a small shed that looks like a stiff wind would knock it down. The other is a house carved into and around one of the largest redwood trees I’ve ever seen.
The one I saw in town was nearly ninety feet across, with a shop carved into the first twenty feet or so of the trunk. This tree is easily that large in diameter, maybe even a little bigger. But instead of carving into the bottom of the tree, someone has built all the way around it—without carving into it at all. Considering redwoods don’t have big branches like the trees that usually hold treehouses, it is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.
There’s a staircase that starts at the bottom of the tree and winds its way around and around it in a widely spaced diagonal pattern. I’m on the ground looking up, so I’m not really sure how high it goes, but it looks like it doesn’t stop until close to 150 feet up the trunk. But the staircase isn’t even the most interesting or magnificent part of the tree.
That goes to the platforms extending over the staircase, built snugly against the side of the tree in all directions, that wind their way up the trunk along with the staircase. The platforms, like the staircase, are built on all four sides of the tree, so one faces east, the next one north, and so on, all the way up the tree.
Whoever built the platforms didn’t carve into the tree to secure them—they obviously wanted to make sure not to harm the tree in any way—but they fit the trunk so perfectly that they must be custom-built. Each platform has a roof over it, and most are even screened in.
“Each room is built onto a different part of the tree,” Flint says in awe as we stand back and study it.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Eden comments. “It’s brilliant.”
“And old,” Mekhi agrees. “Who would have thought they would have had this kind of construction know-how hundreds of years ago? Or been so concerned about the tree that they made so much extra work for themselves? Most people didn’t even think about the earth way back then.”
I start to say something about generalizing, but then I remember who I’m talking to. People who have been alive a really long time—and who know exactly what life was like a couple hundred years ago…or more.
“Earth magic,” I remind him. “It’s hard to do something to hurt the earth when you’re so intimately connected to it.”
“Maybe so, but something is definitely hurting that tree,” Luca says. “See how different it looks from the ones around it? All those strips and cankers on the bark mean it’s really sick.”
“Not the house,” Hudson agrees. “But yeah, something is definitely making it sick.”
We look all the way up to the thin branches that adorn the top quarter of the tree. And I realize that even the treetop looks sick with the way it’s wilting forward.
“What do you think is wrong with it?” I ask as we finally get close enough to see it in the sunlight.
As we do, I’m struck by how it really was an engineering feat of incredible marvel.
The whole house—the whole property—looks like it was once well loved and beautiful. All the bones are here, from the cheerful carvings on the staircase and room railings to the large, fenced-off garden that I’m sure was a sight to see in its heyday. Even the roses, now growing wild throughout the land on this half of the pond, once had a place to belong: a circular area off to the side of the tree that looks like it was overgrown a hundred years ago, maybe even more.
As I look at this place, I’m reminded of one of the versions of Sleeping Beauty my mother read to me when I was a kid. After the girl pricked her finger and fell into a sleep for a hundred years, the entire castle fell asleep with her. All the plants continued to grow until the castle was overrun on all sides. Everything was dusty and in ill repair, simply waiting for Aurora to wake up. Waiting for her to return and make the place whole again.
This entire parcel of land has that same feel to me. Like everything about it has been waiting so long that it has given up. Waited so long that every piece of it is slowly dying.
It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in my life.