Hear Me by Viv Daniels Page A

in neat little rows. She’d found them mystifying, sterile. She’d asked her father how the researchers could study life, with plants that were so thoroughly captive. But their forest’s plants, her father had explained, were like the forest folk: impossible to tame, hard to even keep contained. The Potter greenhouse was a maze, a jungle of twisted walkways and overgrown root systems. Some of the plants dwelt in clay pots, true, but most drew their strength from the bare soil beneath the glass.
    It was to this greenhouse that Ivy led Archer now, after first giving him a spare shirt that had once belonged to her father. She’d had quite enough of averting her eyes from his well-muscled chest and abs for one evening.
    And if her ploy worked, she’d never be troubled by visions of his body again. Her teenaged dreams of running away to live with her boyfriend in an enchanted forest were one thing. Getting dragged into a dying forest and trapped there by a married dark magic practitioner she used to love was quite another.  
    She just had to keep telling herself that.
    The still, snowy night they stepped out into was unbroken by the sound of jangling bells, by the buzz of their power—the power Archer claimed was black magic. Ivy had donned a red fleece sweater over her shirt in deference to the frigid evening. Archer had refused so much as a scarf over the old, plaid shirt she’d given him. Indeed, he’d barely buttoned it, as if even the idea of their modern, machine-stitched clothes with their plastic buttons and factory tags were anathema to him.
    It was odd, shuffling across the snow to the backyard greenhouse. Quiet. Ivy had quite forgotten the squeak your boots made against fresh-fallen snow, the tinkle of ice crystals against pine needles. Moonlight sparkled blue and silver on the ground and across the panes of glass that curved above them as they reached the greenhouse door.
    She unlocked it and gestured for him to get inside, before the warmth escaped.  
    “Oh, no, Ivy Potter,” he said, and waved his hand. “Ladies first.”
    She rolled her eyes and entered and he followed close behind. She shut the door. He stilled, like a buck when it hears the snap of a twig or catches the scent of a predator on the wind.
    “What’s that?” he asked. He was cocking his head, listening. But Ivy knew it would do him little good.
    “It’s nothing,” she replied. “ That’s our secret.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

    Originally, her parents’ plan had been to shield the forest plants from the town, from the sounds of motorcars and air conditioners, the buzz of electrical wires, and the smell of diesel and Freon and paint. It had been Ivy’s mother’s idea to make the greenhouse soundproof, or nearly so. She didn’t like the sounds of civilization, so she was sure forest plants wouldn’t either.
    And once the barrier went up, and the plants nearby died, but the greenhouse flourished, Ivy and her father knew exactly why.  
    The forest here lived. Thrived . All day, all night, every summer and winter. The plants were lush, huge, as only plants who hadn’t felt a winter’s chill in twenty years could be. Their long, artificial summer benefitted from the soil and the sun that fed this magical slice of Earth, yet were protected from the harsher elements, as well as from the artifices man had brought to this place.  
    Archer’s eyes were wide as he looked around him. This wasn’t his first time in their greenhouse, of course. He’d spent many hours wandering its paths with Ivy when he was younger. But memories faded, and the world around them had changed. As a child of the forest, Archer was probably unimpressed with their meager specimens back then, probably hardly noticed the way one couldn’t hear street traffic or the quarry shift whistle. Now though, when silence was a golden gift and the forest was withering away behind the barrier…
    He closed his eyes and breathed. “It’s clean here,” he whispered. “Quiet.