Anne Bishop - Belladonna

Sebastian stopped. “Magician. Isn’t that the whole point? To hope?”

Michael swayed with the force of those words flowing through the currents on the island. “It is. Yes, it is.”

They stepped into the gravel side of the box and sat down on the bench.

“What do you want me to do?” Sebastian asked.

Michael took out his whistle. “I’m not sure how this reaching through the twilight of waking dreams works, but you were able to reach my aunt and the Ladies of Light on the White Isle when you sent that riddle, so I’m thinking you could reach Glorianna in this other landscape.”

Sebastian looked at the tip of his boot. “I’ve already tried that. It didn’t work.”

Michael nodded. “And I’ve tried what I could do. I’m thinking neither is enough by itself, but together…All we need is a crack, a way to send a little something to help her remember who she was. She divided her heart and built a wall to keep them separated, but given a chance, they’ll come back together. We’re trying to create just enough of a chink in that wall for her to feel the other half of her heart.”

It was tempting to play the love inside himself, but while Sebastian unfurled the power of the incubus and moved through the twilight of waking dreams, Michael played the music he heard in the incubus’s heart.

A beautiful bed in a garden. A piece of granite, the stone of strength, with veins of quartz that sparkled in sunlight. Rich earth. And flowers that rose out of the ground in a dazzle of colors that delighted the eye—and made the scar in her chest ache and ache and ache until…

That was better. Much better. Those beautiful flowers were nothing more than a lure. As they bloomed, the nectar dripped down the petals and poisoned the rich earth, killing the beauty.

And despair moaned through the dying trees, and sorrow was a bed of stones.

And somewhere, just out of sight, a boy laughed, his delight at being included, at being accepted, producing a shimmer of Light.

She woke, her hand pressed against her chest to ease the terrible ache.

Something stirred in her landscape. Something that didn’t belong here.

Something she couldn’t want here.

She rose, feeling stiff, feeling achy, feeling angry. She would strip away any pretties that had crept into her landscape. She would crush anything that fed the weeds of Light, those damned currents she couldn’t eliminate completely, no matter how often she tore at the roots.

Time to find the Eater again. It gave her a savage pleasure to use those remaining flickers of Light to manifest something desirable and watch It try to belong, to fit in with the very creatures It had once wanted to destroy.

Boo, hoo, boo, hoo, little Eater. Belladonna has a treat for you. Poison in the pretties.

Or maybe just a pretty. The hearts in this landscape would tear each other apart to possess something truly pretty. Or tasty. Or desirable.

She laughed, and the sound was a blight on the land.

But as she prepared to leave the lair she had created from a garden a girl had abandoned long ago, she stopped and listened.

For a moment, she thought she heard music. And then there was only the wind.

Sebastian rubbed the back of his neck to ease the ache.

Michael tucked his whistle in his pocket and ignored the stiffness in his hands—and wondered how long they’d been at this before neither had been able to sustain the effort.

“What do you think?” Sebastian finally asked. “Did anything happen?”

“I don’t know,” Michael replied wearily. “I don’t know.”

Sebastian stood up and stretched. Then he looked at Michael. “Then I guess we do this again tomorrow.”

“I guess we do.”

He walked with Sebastian to the stationary bridge that would take the incubus to Sanctuary and the first step on the journey home. Alone again, he stopped at the bed near the house—and smiled.

“Something happened,” he whispered. “Something did.”

The bud on his little heart’s hope plant had bloomed, and another bud was starting to grow.

Michael half turned when he heard the brisk knock on the kitchen door, but before he could step away from the stove, Sebastian was inside, closing the door against the wind and the wet weather.

“You got rain.” Sebastian set the market basket on the table, then stripped off his coat and hung it on a peg by the door.

“Not the best of days to be trying the music,” Michael said, “but there’s an umbrella here. We can stuff ourselves under it for a little while.”

“Won’t that be cozy?” Sebastian rubbed his hands as if he were trying to warm them up. “It’s not raining in Aurora.”

There was a message in those words. “I’m making tea,” Michael said. “If you want koffee…”

“I’ll make it myself,” Sebastian finished, taking a few things out of the market basket.

“I can make it,” Michael said, feeling as if his hospitality had been called into question.

“No,” Sebastian said firmly. “You can’t.”

Ah. So it wasn’t his hospitality that was being called into question but his ability to make an acceptable—according to Sebastian—cup of koffee.

“Fine then,” Michael grumbled. “Make it yourself.”

“I’ve got two jars of Aunt Nadia’s soup, and Lynnea made a couple of beef sandwiches.”

Bribery. And since that would make a far better meal than anything he would have scrounged for himself, he got a pot out of the cupboard to heat up one jar of soup, then set two places at the table.

“It’s been a few days now, Michael,” Sebastian said after he ground the koffea beans and got the brew started. “I couldn’t keep sliding around the question of where I was going each day. So I told Lynnea where I’ve been going—and that led to telling her why.”

Michael ladled the soup into bowls while Sebastian put the sandwiches on plates. “And she told Nadia.” Which explained the food.

“It’s made them hopeful—and that has given them all a lot of energy.”

The way Sebastian smiled gave him a very bad feeling.

“So who else knows?”

“Just the people you’d expect. Family—and close friends.”

Lady’s mercy. That wasn’t all of it. He sensed there was more, but whatever else Sebastian wanted to tell him was something he really didn’t want to know.

When they were halfway through the soup, Sebastian said, “It’s spring. I was told it’s time to tidy up the gardens.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That means it’s not going to rain here tomorrow, Magician, so you’d better be home and you’d better be prepared.”

Michael blinked. “For what?”

Sebastian shook his head and sighed. “Four women, which includes your aunt Brighid, who like to play in the dirt and grow green things.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They will be here tomorrow—along with me, Teaser, Jeb, Yoshani, and Lee—to help you tidy up the walled garden, and plant a few flowers in the personal garden.”

Michael plopped his spoon in the bowl, slumped in his chair, and stared at Sebastian. “There’s close to two acres of land in the walled garden, and that much or more that could be considered the formal grounds around the house.”

“Uh-huh.”

“All of it? We’re going to tidy up all of it?”

“Uh-huh.”

He felt the blood draining out of his head. But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He wasn’t a gardener, and didn’t pretend to be, but the gardens didn’t look too bad to his untrained eye. “So what’s to be done then?”

Sebastian held up a hand and began ticking items off with his fingers. “Weeding, mulching, raking the leaves that were neglected last fall—”