Judge her by her size, I will not, I thought.
Holden and I followed Eugenia and my great-grandmother into the darkness, this time without the showy display of lights. When we came to a huge sycamore, La Sorcière stopped. Eugenia looked over her shoulder at us and smiled with poorly concealed pride. “This is the best part.”
The witch touched the tree with a bare hand, and it groaned like a dog receiving a belly rub. The trunk shuddered once, and the whole base of the tree ripped open, exposing a doorway. Eugenia waited for the witch to go in then stepped back for us to enter ahead of her. “Totally safe, I promise.”
At this point I would have walked face first into a normal tree if someone told me it would give me an alternative to Carn and his ferals. And, as a considerate follow-up gift from the Fates, we’d also been rescued by the very people I’d been sent to find. Sometimes a girl gets lucky.
And sometimes luck has nothing to do with it.
On the other side of the tree door we entered a space I was at a loss to comprehend. It was a house, but it was also still the forest. Sycamores had grown together in a tight circle so fused by age and the forces of nature, all the trees had begun to form as one. The canopy had sealed in on itself, Spanish moss dangling over our heads like a green chandelier. The space was lit, but I couldn’t say how because there was no electricity. The roots of the trees had warped to form wide ledges that were laid out with blankets, and a black cauldron sat on top of a smoldering fire next to the door.
“Wow,” I said.
“Amazing,” Holden agreed.
“You live here? You’re like Luke Skywalker after he crashed into—”
Holden squeezed my hand and shook his head.
Eugenia, to her credit, laughed. “She does kind of look a bit like Yoda, doesn’t she?”
I’m not sure if the witch did it to be funny, but she reached out then and cracked both Eugenia and me in the head with her cane. Witches didn’t appreciate being compared to a nine-hundred-year-old Jedi, apparently. It wasn’t an insult. Yoda was a total badass.
Be a wicked smartass, I will not.
Yeah, right. That would be the day.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I awoke the next night in Holden’s arms under a tight canopy of mossy trees, and my first thought was, Oh, I must be dreaming.
A gentle clanging drew my attention to the corner space of the tree house where La Sorcière was stooped over a cauldron whispering words that definitely weren’t English while breaking off sprigs of fresh herbs into the bubbling broth.
So, not dreaming after all then.
When I tried to leave the root bed, Holden protested by snuggling me closer and nipping at the back of my neck. I elbowed him. “Wake up,” I demanded.
“Oof,” he replied. After he took a moment to chase the sleep away, he added, “Oh.”
The memory of the previous two days came back with the force of a physical blow, and I shuddered violently. Being able to sleep without fear for my safety or Holden’s had been the greatest gift these women could have given me.
Eugenia came through the door, her arrival announced by a sigh from the tree, and dumped a stack of dry wood next to the witch. The old woman asked a question by lifting her white eyebrows a fraction of an inch. “No, no problems,” Eugenia responded.
Amazing what kind of understanding formed between people when they were alone together for five years.
Seeing we were awake, my sister’s expression broke into a wide smile. She snapped her fingers once, and whatever phantom light had illuminated the space the previous evening lit itself again. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Eugenia had picked up a thing or two during her time with La Sorcière, but I still had trouble understanding how the girl could be both a werewolf and a witch. The two were such different forms of magic they shouldn’t be allowed to peacefully coexist in one body.
“Mémère told me who you were,” she said excitedly.
“What did she tell you?” I wasn’t sure how much the old woman knew, and I wouldn’t be tricked into confessing something the girl didn’t actually know.
“That you’re my sister.”
I nodded.
“How long have you known?” Eugenia asked.
“Do you have a watch?”