Page 57 of Thistle Thorns

“We can talk about that later,” I said briskly, already turning away to help Otter back to the farmhouse. “Arthur says Antler Tattoo is close. We need to hurry inside.” Pausing, I looked past Daphne, expecting to see the third Crafting Circle lady clinging to her buckskin skirt. “Where’s Shari?”

“Back at the house, of course.”

“But…” But you’ve never left her alone in your life. Even when the blight was spreading from the heart tree in Alder Ranch, Shari had been in Cody’s care, never alone. And when Daphne and Flora had gone to St. Louis for the moonflowers, she’d been with me.

“Meadow,” Sawyer whispered, pressing close. “Flora never calls me Sawyer. It’s always ‘tomcat’ or ‘Stripes.’”

It was then I truly looked at my friends. A second later, my eyes slid to the side.

The elegant older woman and the garden gnome had fuzzy edges. Thick fuzzy edges. Thick enough to fool my recently developed ability to see through glamours.

When my focus returned to Daphne’s face, I realized her smile wasn’t reaching her blue eyes. Blue eyes that weren’t hers.

That smile vanished as I let Otter slump unceremoniously to the ground and called emerald green magic to my fists. The hearth ember flared like a green sun within its censer, rousing at my call and feeding what magic it had left into mine. “Who are you?” I demanded.

The Hawthorne witches halted their woozy retreat from the woods, half-turning around at the sound of the granite in my voice. At my feet, Sawyer’s fur began to rise, and the pixie on his back lifted into the air with an angry chirp.

Quick as a hornet, it launched itself at Flora.

Flora shouted as Dart tore a huge chunk out of her nose, and when she snatched at the pixie, it wasn’t her nimble fingers that clamped around its silver-green body, but a calloused hand with coarse black hair bristling around the knuckles. In his other hand, the wand had become a spiked club.

The pixie screeched a strangled flute-like sound as Wystan the hobgoblin flung it to the ground and stomped down on its slender spine with his boot. When his glamour vanished, the one on Daphne evaporated, leaving the magic hunter with the antler tattoo spreading across his neck standing there instead.

“Hello, Misty Fields.” He flashed me a sickle of a white smile. “A pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.”

I was momentarily stunned, but not about the released glamour and the presence of the Antler Tattoo Guy. Wystan? During my first few days in Redbud, I’d offended the hobgoblin, and he’d been so convinced I’d been malicious instead of ignorant and had refused my apology. The pixies had carted him off to whoever knew where, but there he had clearly nursed his grudge against me. Enough to rat me out to the magic hunters.

“…unusual green eyes, just like he said,” the magic hunter had said outside the Magic Brewery just a few weeks ago. I’d wondered then who had told him I had such uniquely colored eyes, but I’d never thought it was the hobgoblin.

Hands fisted, I raked my cuffs against one another, activating the runes. Battle magic like angry ivy-green briars rippled up to my shoulders. “What did you do to my friends?” I shouted.

“Meadow, get back!” Grandmother shouted, sloughing Uncle Badger and Dad off on their spouses so she could rush to my side.

“Meadow, is it?” the magic hunter drawled.

“My friends,” I snarled, keeping to the conversation at hand.

“They are unharmed,” Antler Tattoo said, the fae-like markings on the backs of his hands glowing as he gestured to the nearest black walnut tree at the edge of the moonflower grove.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the tree shortened and the base of its trunk ballooned out until it resembled a nineteenth-century hoop skirt. But instead of a corseted Parisian aristocrat’s torso emerging from the bulbous undercarriage, it was the upper half of a sylvan youth with pointy ears, closely cropped black hair, and eyes burning with blue faelight.

A mallaithe.

It bared black teeth as its roots unwound from their seamless trunk-like appearance to reveal my three friends clustered tightly inside. Shari was as pale and trembly as a quaking aspen, Daphne’s brow was furrowed in righteous anger, and Flora’s face was red from all her shouting. Her wand was nowhere in sight, so either another of the mallaithe’s roots had it imprisoned beyond her grasp, or it’d been left behind when she’d been abducted.

“She left us,” Shari whispered, her voice pitching with hysteria. “She left us!”

I saw no sign of Ame.

“And your friends will stay unharmed if you come with me now,” Antler Tattoo said. “I’ll even let your family go free.”

There was a cry behind me—Aunt Hyacinth.

I risked a frantic glance over my shoulder to find my aunt crouched over her son, Otter convulsing on the ground. The mist had tightened around us, and a vaporish hand was receding from where the sluagh had touched my cousin. There was a shrill cry as my mother was affected next, just the lightest brush against her shoulder, and she collapsed unconscious against my father. Aunt Eranthis cut through the swirling mist with a supersized needle of green magic, but she was too weak from the summoning and the reviving for the attack to hold much weight.

“You’re no match for me or my family,” I snapped, only half-bluffing, since my family was dropping like flies from the sluagh’s icy touch. “I’m not the same witch you tried to intimidate with your fiáin.”

“I’ve evolved too, witch,” Antler Tattoo sneered, shrugging out of his peacoat.

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