Page 94 of The Wolfing Hour

Floyd was still yelling at me on the phone. “You’re going to learn that you don’t fuck with?—"

“I’m going to kill you.” My voice was a whisper that contained screams. “Soon.”

I ended the call.

Protect our people. Kill them all, the dark voice chanted.

Faintly, I heard:We have to let Ronan?—

No.

I was done with the other voice, the witch, the one who kept trying to use restraint and reason. She was going to get everyone killed with her milquetoast rationalizing and fear-soaked warnings.

Floyd broke through the park protection spell.

It hadn’t been strong enough to keep him out.Ihadn’t been strong enough.

I can’t keep them safe.

“Betty?” Ida frowned up at me from the steps. “Are you all right?”

“I won’t let him hurt you.”

If I can’t protect my people with my soil magic, I’ll have to do it another way.

“Betty, it’s okay.”

I can protect us all. Let me.

This time when the demon spoke, I leaned into her rage. Absorbed it into my blood the way I did my soil, let it power me.

Let me protect them. Let me in.

Yes.

Chapter

Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Icame back to myself in the garden room, on the floor, staring up at the clock hanging beside Cecil’s workstation.

5:30 A.M.?

What happened?

I vaguely recalled a nightmarish, jerky sort of movement through space and time, but when I reached for the memory, pain iced through my brain, and I cried out.

I rolled onto my side and came face-to-face with a horror show.

Everything was dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

My chest crushed my ribs, my throat ached. I wanted to cry, wanted to climb on the roof of the garden room and scream at the top of my lungs.

The rosemary was dried up like a Christmas tree in February; crispy brown needles covered the ground. The mint plant in the old dresser that had taken to bullying the marigolds with its spidery runners had withdrawn back into its drawer. Themarigolds were gone, the dill was wilted, sage mottled yellow, basil withered, and the thyme I’d tried so hard to grow, first starting it in a little pot in the kitchen and then moving it out here to be replanted, had shriveled back to its roots and lay on the soil in a brown little fist.