Page 12

Story: The Hazelwood Pact

Rowan returned to the aberrant wardstone near the old well to investigate it further. The leyline beneath it pulsed like a bruised heartbeat: off-rhythm, off-color, off-everything.

She crouched beside the ancient wardstone, the cold seeping up through her knees despite the layer of protective sigil-chalk she’d scrawled on the ground. The air smelled sharp and brittle. Her fingers, still trembling faintly from that gods-damned dream, curled against the stone's jagged edge.

She hadn’t even had time to scold her own subconscious.

The sex dream still clung to her like pollen, her skin betraying her with phantom heat and remembered touches.

Her hands had glowed. Glowed. And now here she was, barely a morning later, trying to solve a magical sabotage mystery while pretending she hadn’t woken up slick, dazed, and feral with yearning.

“Sabotage first. Emotional spiral second,” she muttered, brushing back a lock of windblown hair with ink-stained fingers. “Get it together, Rowan.”

Mottle, perched atop a broken fence post, squinted at the stone with froggy disdain. “You’re absolutely radiating composure. Like a cat in heat trapped in a greenhouse.”

“Thanks for that image,” Rowan said through clenched teeth, tapping the wardstone.

It responded with a thin whine, like a tea kettle boiled too dry.

The usual thrum of ley resonance was absent.

In its place was something...hollowed. Not frayed, not simply decayed, but interfered with. Cored out like fruit.

And in its crevice, woven behind a dusting of moss, was a sigil.

It had been hidden beneath a layer of camouflage warding, clever and cowardly. But the signature was unmistakable: the knotting was tight but off-center, the runes shallow and angled with a kind of desperation. She pressed two fingers to the outer ring.

A pulse shot through her wrist like an electric slap.

Rowan hissed and yanked her hand back, cradling it. Her fingertips sparked gold and then died out again, magic retreating with a skittish snap.

“I hate to say I told you so,” Mottle said, “but this seems exactly like the kind of thing someone should investigate with backup . Or at least with better shoes.”

“I have perfectly adequate… oh bloody nettles,” Rowan muttered as her boot squelched into mud. The ground had turned soft and strange, seeping from beneath the wardstone like it had been weeping.

“I’m calling this whole outing a magical crime scene with a side of wet socks,” Mottle declared.

Rowan blew out a breath and started sketching an unweaving sigil in the air. Rough, but functional. A brute-force unravel. She wasn’t in the mood for finesse.

Which, of course, was the exact moment a soft voice behind her murmured, “You really ought to warn a leyline before manhandling it like that.”

She jolted violently and nearly dropped her chalk. “Linden!”

He stood a few feet away, all tall serenity and wind-ruffled hair, cloak brushing the dew-slicked grass like he belonged to the Hollow more than its hills did. His smile was infuriatingly gentle. Rowan’s stomach did a slow, traitorous swoop.

“Did you follow me?”

He lifted his hands, palms up. “I felt something off through the ground. You’re not exactly subtle when you poke the ley threads. They ripple.”

“Oh, well, pardon me for disturbing your moss communion.”

He stepped closer, kneeling beside her, the earth softening under his knees like it wanted him there. His presence disrupted everything: her concentration, her pulse, her sense of coherent narrative.

She wanted to crawl into a hedge and stay there for a week.

Instead, she gritted out, “There’s a sigil tucked under the moss. Wrong sort. Defensive at first glance, but it’s more like...a tripwire?”

Linden’s brow furrowed, serious now. He leaned in to examine it—close, too close, she could smell the faint trace of rosemary on his skin. His shoulder brushed hers and her magic jumped like a startled hare.

“I see it,” he said, quiet. “Someone laid this deliberately. It’s tuned to the leyline’s current. If it destabilizes enough…”

The ground surged beneath them like a wave.

Rowan had just enough time to curse.

The trap sprang.

A flash of light, high-pitched and searing, split the clearing. A shimmer of sigils spiraled outward in a net of sharp magical thread, reaching for her ribcage like hungry fingers.

And then Linden was there.

Not just there , but around her.

He moved faster than breath, wrapping his arms around her and dragging her down just as the spell cracked the air above them like a whip. She felt the pull of it catch his shoulder, Linden grunted, but his body shielded hers completely, dragging her flush against the warm, firm line of him.

They hit the ground together in a tangle of limbs and tangled breath. The net of magic fizzled overhead, sizzling out like a thwarted match.

She couldn’t move.

Because she was under him .

Rowan’s entire body screamed in sensation.

Linden’s chest pressed against hers, solid and hot, the beat of his heart a desperate thunder between them.

She could feel every contour: the firm line of his thigh between hers, his breath shuddering against her ear, the weight of his hips grounding her like an anchor.

His hair tickled her cheek, and gods, his hands — one cradled the back of her head, the other splayed across her ribs, fingers splayed like he was mapping the shape of her safety.

“Are you alright?” he asked, voice hoarse with adrenaline, like the question had scraped its way out from under his ribs.

Rowan opened her mouth. Closed it again. Thought about nodding. Considered biting his shoulder instead.

Because how do you say yes when your pulse was still synching itself to the rhythm of someone else’s heartbeat? When the world had narrowed down to the weight of him over you, the cradle of his arms, the heat blooming between every inch of accidental skin-to-skin contact?

So she smirked. Because that was safer than honesty. Smirking was armor. Smirking was better than I dreamed about you touching me and now I don’t know what’s real anymore .

“I’m fine, leafboy.”

A flicker, barely a breath, moved across his face. Not a smile, not quite. But his eyes softened, went bright and unreadable all at once, like moss catching morning light.

And then the pad of his thumb moved. Just once. A slow, careful stroke over the side of her ribcage, right beneath the curve of her breast. Gentle. Protective. Almost reverent.

She wasn’t sure he even knew he was doing it.

But her body did. Her body absolutely did .

Magic flared behind her sternum like a match, singeing the edges of her composure.

It pulsed golden and stupidly tender against her spine, lit up her nerve endings with a dozen memories her mouth hadn’t asked for: him pressing her down into grass, into dream, into velvet-dark impossible pleasure.

She hated how much she didn’t want him to move.

And then, damn him, he did. Slowly. Like he didn’t want to break the moment, or maybe like he was giving her time to gather up all the shattered versions of herself she’d dropped.

He rose with a grace that felt obscene in the aftermath of something so intimate, cloak falling back around his frame like a curtain closing on a stage she hadn’t realized she’d stepped onto.

He offered her a hand.

Said nothing.

She took it anyway.

Her palm slid into his like it had been waiting there. Like the space between them had never really been empty. Magic sparked again, soft this time. Gold and warm and unbearably familiar, like a home you’d abandoned and then dreamed about for a decade straight.

She didn’t look at him because if she looked at him, she might say something dangerous.

And then, of course, because the gods were petty and Mottle had no sense of tone, came the voice of the toad.

“Well, that was very dramatic. Would’ve been better with a kiss, though.”

Rowan startled so hard she nearly dropped Linden’s hand.

“I hate you,” she said without venom.

“I’m the voice of the people,” Mottle replied smugly, flexing his webbed toes like a man who’d just orchestrated a coup.

She shot him a death glare and turned, finally, back to the clearing.

The silence there had teeth now. Something lurked just beneath it, like a second pulse under her own, shadowy and thudding.

They moved together, a breath apart, toward the site of the triggered sigil.

The air shimmered faintly, warped by lingering magic that hadn’t quite dissipated.

Rowan crouched, plucking a half-burnt scrap of parchment from the tangled roots of a nearby birch.

The runes etched into it bled oily green into the paper, the tethering glyph corrupted at the base like it had been deliberately twisted.

She turned it in her fingers, frowning. “This isn’t leyline rot. It’s a sabotage weave. Someone’s hijacking ley flow. Splicing in decay magic where the current’s weakest.”

Linden crouched beside her, his jaw tight, eyes darkening to deep moss. “This kind of work… it’s not someone untrained. It’s deliberate. Precise in its own twisted way. ”

She whispered, “I should go back to my shop and see if I can find clues in my journals.”