Page 71 of Twisting Twilight (Homesteader Hearth Witch #9)

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

“Why did you go all noble and keep him alive?” Flora groused as she removed a crystal from the barrier.

Exhausted, I stumbled free of the force field, trusting the garden gnome to seal it back up behind me.

She did, and not a moment too soon before the stag charged at it with his antlers.

The strike sent him careening into the ground.

The reverberations of the trembling force field at my back knocked me to my knees.

“Meadow,” Sawyer cried, loping over and setting his paws on my leg. “What is it? How do I help?”

“Arthur,” I rasped. By the Green Mother, it took every scrap of willpower to stay awake.

The chill of the winter solstice was suddenly unbearable—there was no fire element to keep me warm.

I was so bone-deep tired I couldn’t have grounded myself even if I tried.

It was only desperation keeping the adrenaline pumping through my veins.

Despite my choice, my claim, the tether binding us was weak. A hollow ache remained in my heart—our bond was still imprisoned in the cloch.

“He won’t get up,” Daphne whispered.

“But he’s just tired, isn’t he?”

She shook her head. “His fur…” She had to pause to gain mastery over her wavering voice. “His fur has been hiding quite a few wounds, Meadow. I’m sorry.”

Daphne stared at the hulking beast with glassy blue eyes.

She’d only ever known Arthur Greenwood, local mild-mannered lumbersnack, as unfellable.

We all had. The pixies fluttered about his head like worrisome hummingbirds, chiming in his ears and bringing him little forest presents as if the generosity of glossy acorns and pretty red maple leaves would revive him.

“H-he can’t be—” I couldn’t finish the thought. Couldn’t form any thought. My mind just went blank.

“He’s still breathing,” Shari added in a small voice. “Slowly.”

“Ladies!” Flora trilled. “Find me some bloodroot and yarrow! We’ll whip up a wound salve and get that bleeding under control lickety-split.”

“It’s winter,” Shari protested softly. She cast a glance at the barren woods. “Those plants are long dead.”

Tears damming in her eyes, the garden gnome screamed, “Chop-chop!”

A strong hand seized my biceps and pulled me to my feet. “You’re his mate, aren’t you?”

I recognized certain timbres in his voice, the shade of those hazel eyes, a familiar build.

Arthur’s father? Grandfather? My gaze swept to the spot of trampled earth where the bear dying of mallaithe venom had once slumped.

There was no bear there, only a ring of wood sorrel, and a naked shifter stood before me now.

“You’ve claimed the bond, right?” he demanded. “Mated him? You can just give him some of your magic through that bond to bring him back!”

“Like us!” Sawyer exclaimed.

Not with a fated mate bond still stolen. And we weren’t mated, not the way the shifter was implying.

My tongue was like a wet rug in my mouth—sluggish. When I didn’t reply immediately, he gave me a little shake that set my teeth rattling and my eyes rolling.

“Hey!” Sawyer clawed at the bear shifter’s bare ankles.

The shifter’s tough skin seemed impervious to the strike, but that didn’t stop Ame from scruffing her ward with her teeth and dragging him back.

Thistle snarled at this attack and made to intervene, but the lynx jumped between the familiars and the faelene with fangs bared in warning.

Thistle hesitated, never seeing a feline or faelene of this size before.

“Get your hands off her, Berengar Greenwood!” Grandmother seethed.

The bear shifter’s hands were literally the only thing keeping me upright.

He knew it, and I knew it too. Berengar maintained his grip as the Circle of Nine and the Hawthorne Manor reinforcements flowed into the clearing.

A man who looked like Lewellyn Chase but thirty years younger stood noticeably close to my cousin Lilac.

They each bore identical silver scars on their necks, low near their shoulders.

None of the witches, save for Cousins Boar and Rose, seemed content with the young Nemean wolf’s proximity, but nobody protested. Their attention was on Berengar.

It should be on Arthur.

If they thought they could bully the elder bear shifter into compliance with sheer numbers, they were sorely mistaken.

At Berengar’s back, Coalition enforcers appeared.

They were ragged and weary from their fights with the magic hunters, who were nowhere to be found.

From their grim expressions, they had one more fight left in them if it came to that.

A scrappy red fox bounded forward with a cry, shifting into a lithe middle-aged woman with burgundy hair.

She crouched by the grizzly’s head, stroking him over and over and dampening his fur with her tears.

“Wake up, you stubborn cub. You’re not done giving your Auntie Sionnach gray hairs. Wake up! ”

She surged to her feet and darted across the clearing. Between one blink and the next, she slapped me across the face. Hard. “Do something!”

The pain cut through the adrenaline haze, through the fatigue, and brought my greatest need to the surface.

My family’s chorus of indignant screeches transformed into gasps as the butterflies lifted from my skin.

They enveloped me in shadow and deposited me at Arthur’s side with a rush of coolness rippling up my forearms. I flung my arms around his thick neck.

The great bear flinched under my touch. Under the cloch’s touch, where I had pressed the blue gem against his fur during my embrace. “Hold on, bear claw. Please.”

His bulk propped me upright as I planted my feet against the earth and attempted to ground myself.

I had to try. The magic only trickled in.

I was too spent, too much in need of rest and food, to draw up magic to speed my core’s replenishment.

Pushing away, I stumbled towards the one thing that had a surplus of magic just waiting to be tapped.

I didn’t need a freed fated mate bond to save Arthur. I just needed a boost?—

“Meadow, don’t,” Thistle warned.

The elm tree rejected me. Just for a second, I felt a twisting beneath my hands as if I’d attempted to grab roiling noodles out of a pot of boiling water. Thistle th— The expletive was knocked clean out of my head as I careened into the immovable side of the bear.

My friends cried out my name and rushed to provide what help they could. The pixies reached me first, fanning me with leaves.

“Gwyn,” I moaned, wincing against a raw throat.

The weakened wight had lost herself to the power of the cache. While her presence, buffeting along as it was along the elm tree’s channels like a paper boat in tempestuous seas, protected the magic, her lack of control rendered that magic useless to anyone in need of it.

“What about the Revival Spell?” Sawyer blurted.

Mom shook her head sadly. “We can only use that spell once every ten years.”

“Baloney.” The striped tomcat charged up to the coven, heedless that his own magical reserves were depleted. “Show me!”

When Ame and the lynx stalked up behind him in solidarity, Thistle stayed right where she was.

Her lantern-like eyes were riveted on the elm tree, on the silver light that wavered in intensity.

Mom eased the grimoire out from under her arm and flipped open to an empty page in the last third of the book.

A mournful mew escaped my familiar.

“Help me,” I pleaded. The forest and all its onlookers went silent as I lifted the cloch. For such a light gem, it took both my hands to do it. My arms shook. “I can’t break this cloch on my own. But if we can?—”

“You’d use your life force to save that bear?

” Grandmother demanded. “That is the only power left at your disposal. Your magic is one thing, but your life? I forbid it.” Her hard ivy-green eyes were glassy, her shoulders trembling with restrained emotion.

She would not see the granddaughter she had sacrificed so much for die to save a shifter. But that decision wasn’t hers to make.

“We have nothing left.” Marten’s voice held only regret. My brother slipped his hand into his pocket and produced an ashy-black lump. “And our hearth ember is spent.”

“Give me that stone.” Lewellyn loped out of the trees.

“Felt you were back, Meadow, but it took me a sec to get here from the mill. Sorry.” He threw Daphne a wink before plucking the cloch from my hand.

Before I could protest, he tossed it into his mouth and shifted into a golden-white wolf.

His molars chomped down, then he spat out the cloch with a howl.

I caught it before it could disappear into the leaf litter.

“Lewellyn!” the younger Nemean wolf cried.

“Idiot.” Grandmother rolled her eyes.

“Could my ember do it?” I demanded. It was no longer needed to protect the farmhouse, not with Ossian a stag and his magic hunters on the run. Or composting into the forest.

“Do we have the time to get to the farmhouse and back?” Flora asked. “Can your butterflies do that?”

I didn’t know. Could we even spare the precious minutes to find out?

“Try asking the wight for help,” Daphne urged. “You just tried to take the magic. When I was a horse, she gave me endurance and strength. Maybe she can do the same for you if you were polite about.”

“You’re not getting any help from that wight or that tree, good manners or no,” Thistle announced gravely.

The faelene backed away from the elm as if were about to explode.

“She was too weak to bind it. Think of it as a Manann mare and her a fae rider with delusions of grandeur. She can’t keep her seat, and the horse won’t break.

So long as she battles it, neither she nor it can help us. ”

Flora slammed her palm into her fist. “Then we help her.”

Aunt Hyacinth thrust a disbelieving finger at the elm tree. “A garden gnome against that?”

“A circle against that,” Flora fired back.

She surveyed us, her friends. “Isn’t that what we are?

Unconventional, sure, but a circle of power nonetheless?

This Crafting Circle created a brand-new spell in the Tussock woods and helped Meadow go all badass on the bridge against Ossian.

Our power helped restore our memories. We can do this too.

Give the wight that boost she needs so she can help us in return. ”

We all shared a look, our hope raw, our courage rising. We had done all that. United to one cause, we’d all poured our individual magics and strengths to see the job done. And our time in Elfame had only made us stronger.

The garden gnome held out her tiny hands with a grin. “C’mon, ladies. Let’s go save us a lumbersnack.”