Page 1 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

The land had been lying in wait for half a century by the time the young man arrived. Half a century of dormancy, of the deep, dark sleep of ancient things.

The moment he stepped out of the rental car in his battered hiking boots, a shudder went through the earth.

The hares felt it, rippling through the long grass.

The finches felt it, rattling the tips of the narrowest tree branches.

Even the tiniest wildflowers felt it, coursing up through their trembling roots.

Beneath the earth, an old magic stirred.

He was tall, fair, and quick to smile. There was a girl with him, stoutly built with a bob of auburn curls. He beamed over his shoulder at her, golden and boyish in his goading.

As the young man – barely more than a boy, really – tightened the laces of his boots, the land rose up to meet him.

Misty breezes caressed his scalp through his close-cropped blond hair, briars tugged insistently on his pant leg, and sedge grasses bowed beneath his feet like soldiers saluting their prince.

He breathed in deep, filling his lungs with the scent of salt and primrose.

Earth, sea and sky ached to enfold him.

He turned his face up towards the clouds and closed his pale-lashed eyes against the sun. The light slanted across his curved mouth, his strong aquiline nose.

It had been so long. Years of waiting, of slow rot anxiously gnawing away at tangled roots.

The pair of companions chattered, in high spirits as they shared a swig of water from their communal flask.

Though the land didn’t speak the garbled child-tongue of English, it knew what these two were after.

There could only have been one destination, because the story had always been a circle, always a gyre turning in the sky, forever unfolding, forever beginning anew.

The young man strode out towards the cave, and the story began once again, with his name inked like blood on the first page.