Page 29 of Thistle Thorns

“But Ame said—”

“Forget what she said. If you stay here, Grandmother will certainly collar you. You were there when she bought the moonstones, Sawyer. She’s probably downstairs right now with a pair of pliers and gold wire and a big fat moonstone with your name on it. She might’ve even made an entire harness. But, if you leave—”

“I don’t want to leave you!” He sprang from the bathtub tray into my lap, digging his claws into my fleece leggings.

“—you can find Ame and go to Grimalkin University.” I smoothed my hand over his head, scratching at his neck. “Surely they know something about this master of beasts? Even if it’s just legend? And—”

The legends we told you at Hawthorne Manor are true, Mom’s words came thundering back to me.

“That legend could be steeped in truth,” I said quickly. Hopefully. “Any information you can get can make us more prepared.”

I peeled the cat off my lap, the leggings twanging with each release of his claws, and lifted him to eye-level. “Please?”

He batted me on the nose with a velveted paw. “Fine. Don’t you dare leave for the manor before I get back. Or do anything stupid.” After a brief paused, he added, “Or brave.”

After stroking his head one last time, I lifted us up from the floor and headed to the window. Easing up the sash sent a blast of cold air into the bathroom that immediately made the tiles freeze under my feet. “You know I can’t promise that.”

He made a face. “I know, but you can at least try.” Crawling out onto the roof, the little tabby tomcat turned around to shove his head up under my fingers for a farewell scratch in his customary aggressive display of affection. My fingers barely kneaded into his skin before he spun and darted away into the night.

“Be safe, little cat.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Grandmother was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, a moonstone collar in her hand. “Where’s your cat?”

“He’s not much into accessorizing, so he left,” I answered, stopping on the second to last step when Grandmother hadn’t moved out of the way.

Whatever reprimand she had in store for me was stifled when the hearth released a tumultuous warning pulse that had every witch stop what she was doing. Aunt Hyacinth and Mom bolted out of the hearth room and onto the back porch, Aunt Peony shoved her head out the kitchen window, and Aunt Eranthis, Grandmother, and I barreled out the front door.

“Here,” Mom cried.

The three of us in the front raced to the back to join the others as we peered out towards the apple orchard. The rain had turned to a thick fog that swirled and snaked in unseen air currents, smothering the trees and the wildflower thicket between us.

“If Stag were here,” Aunt Peony muttered from the window.

The blond-haired weather witch could’ve snapped his fingers and left the sky as bright a blue as a robin’s egg, but he wasn’t here, so we had to squint and hope for the best. The hearth released another series of warning pulses, and soon three figures loomed in the twisting vapor.

Four, actually, for as Dad and Uncle Badger hauled the captured fiáin between them, Flora hurried after them, kicking at their heels and shrieking, “Let ’im go, long-legs! That’s my feral fairy!”

The tip of her beechwood wand glowed green, but before she could strike him with barbed horse nettle or stinging hogweed, Uncle Badger stamped his foot. A mound of earth rose at his command, jettisoning the garden gnome into the air.

“Uncle!” I admonished.

“I don’t want to hear it,” my normally soft-spoken uncle replied irritably. “Her sunflowers bit me.”

“Better the sunlions than the carnivorous clematis!” Flora shouted.

Her own green magic had activated the moment Uncle Badger had sent her into the air, dormant wildflower stems rising to her call. They’d woven into a trampoline-like net that first caught her, then launched her after the witches.

Dad ducked her second assault, using a bit of his air magic to whisk her harmlessly away. “Meadow, honey, if you’d stage an intervention, that’d be great. Wrangling this fiáin is hard enough without having to fend off the secondary attacks of a feral garden gnome.”

He’d kept the fiáin alive, no doubt using the ambiguity of Grandmother’s instructions to justify why it was still breathing. The creature was just as thin and wiry as before, its navy blue skin as shiny as a beetle’s wing-cases in the drizzle. Its own wings were trapped against its back, yet they still fluttered in agitation. Miraculously, they didn’t appear moth-eaten from the effects of the cinders last night. They were healed.

Dad and Uncle Badger had it trussed up in bindings of green magic that looked like the silk of a spider’s cocoon, all the way from its shoulders to its feet, and were hauling it between them like a prisoner off to jail. The fiáin twisted in its restraints, not necessarily to free itself. Blind, milky eyes rolled this way and that as it sniffed, desperately looking for something. A pitiful mew escaped from its rows of needle-like teeth.

“I’m coming, Flint,” Flora shouted.

I’d already shoved my feet into boots and was halfway through the garden before Dad had called for me, and now I blocked the path of my friend as my family manhandled the fairy through the rear garden gate. “Flora,” I began.

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