Page 15 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER NINE

Adam

Adam was not convinced he wasn’t being led out to the woods to be murdered, but he was certain that if he walked away now, without any answers, he would regret it for the rest of his life.

Nicola had told him so, upstairs when he was pulling on his shoes, and she had also told him that if he didn’t come with her, she was going out there with Finley and Eileen all by herself.

Adam thought this was colossally foolish, but whatever Nicola had seen outside had electrified her so much that she wouldn’t be dissuaded.

Adam figured they stood a better chance against death as a team, so he had surrendered to the strange pull of Craigmar and traipsed out with the others into the wilderness.

This must be a dream, Adam thought, hugging the basket of bread closer to his chest as they hiked up a hill. I’m going to wake up in my bed in Michigan with a splitting hangover any second.

Eileen was leading the way and Finley was keeping pace just behind, his hands thrust into the pockets of his oilcloth coat as he took big strides up the hill.

They had left the green ten minutes ago, following a circuitous path through the woods led only by Eileen’s intuitive knowledge of the land and Finley’s occasional corrections with a compass.

As they moved further and further away from the house, Adam considered yanking Nicola in tight and making a mad dash for the car, but he didn’t like the idea of testing Finley’s loyalty to Eileen.

The groundskeeper might have a change of heart and let them run, or he might wrestle Adam to the ground and then drag him all the way to the cave, ultimately in thrall to whatever dark sway Eileen held over him.

He didn’t know his hosts at all, Adam realized with a sickly churn of dread in his stomach.

He might have been dazzled by Eileen’s storytelling and the firelight in her dark eyes last night, and he might have been immensely grateful for Finley’s help with the directions and the rooms and the bags, but he didn’t really know them.

Not what they wanted, not who they were, and certainly not what they were capable of.

As if sensing his distress, Nicola reached out and gave his hand a squeeze. She had been tasked with carrying a jug of farm-fresh sheep’s milk, which she cradled to her chest as though it were a baby.

“Are we close?” she called up to Eileen, who was taking the hill in determined strides.

“Just up ahead!” Eileen called back. She sounded awfully winded, and Adam almost worried about her health before reminding himself that she could be bringing him out here to sacrifice him to the old gods or something. He should look out for his own well-being first, not to mention Nicola’s.

It wasn’t very long before Adam felt swallowed up by the woods, devoured by oak and ash and the tangle of wildflowers and thorns underfoot.

Eileen hadn’t explained the milk and bread, and Adam got the feeling that she wasn’t the type of person who did much explaining at all. But she had said, very sternly as they slipped out the kitchen door, “Drop that bread in the dirt and even I won’t be able to help you.”

Just about the time that Adam was starting to panic about never being able to find his way back to the house or the rental car again, they summited the final hill, and the view at the top punched the air out of him.

A crevasse split open the gray stone of an exposed rock face, so old that trees had grown around it, their roots grasping for fertile soil.

The opening was three times Adam’s height, but narrow and dark, slick with condensation and lichen.

He had done plenty of amateur spelunking on outdoorsy pleasure trips, but this cave didn’t feel like any of the ones Adam had explored before.

It didn’t feel like an invitation to adventure.

It felt like a rip in the fabric of reality, a place where the skin of the mundane world had been flayed back to reveal the wild impossibility beneath.

“What is this place?” he asked, unable to tear his eyes away from the cave.

Out here, the air smelled like ozone and mineral-rich water and the intangible possibility of what he could only call magic, even though he didn’t believe in that sort of thing and hadn’t in a long time, certainly not since his grandfather died.

He could hear the crash of ocean waves in the distance, but that was the only sound in the air.

There was no skittering of woodland animals, no birdsong, not even the rustle of wind in the trees.

It was utterly still, as if all of Craigmar was holding its breath, waiting to see what he would do.

“It’s the reason my family built their house here,” Eileen said, pressing a hand to her chest as she struggled to catch her breath.

Finley rubbed a soothing hand between her shoulder blades, concern creasing his brow.

“It was here before the estate, or the town. Before my family settled in these hills at all.”

“What do we do now?” Nicola asked, her voice barely above a whisper despite the fact that there was no one out there to eavesdrop on them. She must have felt it too, how strange this place felt, how… charged.

Adam had never been superstitious, but something about being here made him understand why people threw spilled salt over their shoulder or crossed themselves to ward off evil.

“Now we make our offerings,” Eileen said. “Would you splash a little milk near the mouth of the cave, songbird? Not too close now.”

“It’s a libation, isn’t it?” Nicola asked.

This sharp observation took Eileen off guard, and the girls shared a fizzling look of recognition.

Adam had never been more grateful for all that Joseph Campbell and Richard Hutton she had read, even though he couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.

“For the spirits of the land? Or the spirit of the cave?”

“Something like that,” Eileen said.

Nicola moved to pour some milk at the mouth of the cave, but she paused at the last moment and began to shimmy out of her sweater. Before Adam could ask what the hell she was doing, she had stripped down to her tank top, flipped her sweater inside out, and pulled it back on again.

“You’re a clever one, aren’t you?” Eileen asked, looking at Nicola with an expression somewhere between pride and hunger, like she was so pleased with her that she wanted to eat her.

“What was that for?” Adam asked.

“For protection,” Nicola said, as though it were obvious. Adam racked his brain for what she was referring to, and something about wearing clothes inside out for protection stirred a spotty memory. Wasn’t it supposed to keep away evil? No, not quite evil, something more specific.

Nicola smoothly raised the jug up high and poured a smooth, white stream of milk onto the earth. Despite the spring rains, the ground swallowed the milk up as though thirsty from drought.

Nicola’s face was reverent, utterly focused on this single task. She looked mythic, like she could have been a priestess in Greek robes or a Druid wreathed in leaves, not a lit major in a T.J. Maxx sweater.

“Very good,” Eileen said, leaning heavily against a nearby boulder. “The bread now, Adam.”

“Tell me why we’re doing this again?” Adam said. His hands moved of their own accord, unwrapping the fragrant sourdough loaf from the dishtowel it had been wrapped in.

“It’s a ritual,” Eileen said with a sigh, as though he were being deliberately obtuse. “Kirkfoyles have carried it out for centuries. What you’re making is an offering, to the spirits who rule the land.”

Adam didn’t even believe in Jesus or astrology, so he certainly didn’t believe in land spirits, but that didn’t mean that something inside him didn’t stir at that word: offering.

It thrilled a deeply buried part of him, to think that there were invisible powers out there in the world who might be worthy of things like offerings or rituals or sacrifices, all those things he had read about in books.

This was one of his secrets: It wasn’t that Adam refused to believe in anything bigger than himself; it was that he had yet to be impressed enough by anything to find it worthy of his deference.

Now, he wasn’t so sure.

“What happens then?” Adam pressed.

“You’ll see,” Eileen said.

Adam looked at Nicola, her frizzed curls lit up like a saint’s halo in the sunlight shining through the trees, and he marveled at the open wonder on her face.

She was taking all this in her stride, thrilled to be brought into such a charming folk custom, but he noticed that her hands were shaking. She was frightened too.

Adam had to be brave. For Nicola, if not for himself.

He crouched down in the moss and laid out the bread near the mouth of the cave.

As he bent, he smelled not only the rotted tang of decaying leaves and the richness of the soil, but sweetness.

Not cream or flour, more like crushed red berries that had been left to ferment into something syrupy and boozy.

His mouth watered even as his stomach tightened, instinctive as a bird avoiding a brightly colored beetle whose coloring telegraphed the presence of poison.

The world spun slightly, and when Adam stood, he found that he was dizzy.

“What now?” he asked. “Do we just leave it?”

“We have to tell them we’re here first,” Finley said. He was wringing his hands like he was trying to rid them of some stain.

Eileen reached into her coat pocket and produced a woven thread strung with tiny golden bells. It looked simple, cheap even, like something Adam might buy in a head shop along with TCH gummies and nag champa incense, but Eileen held them with reverence.

Eileen wound the bells through a nearby tree branch and they tinkled merrily, discordant in the grave atmosphere.

“Now we wait,” she said.

“Eileen—” Adam began.

“Quietly,” she said primly.

Adam fell silent.