Hear Me Read online

  HEAR ME

  by

  Viv Daniels

  Copyright © 2014 by Viv Daniels

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents, are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental or fictionalized.

  Published by Word for Word

  ISBN: 978-1-937135-07-2

  FIC027240

  FICTION / Romance / New Adult

  FIC027120

  FICTION / Romance / Paranormal

  “From everywhere, filling the air,

  Oh! how they pound, raising the sound,

  O’er hill and dale, telling their tale.”

  - The Carol of the Bells

  CHAPTER ONE

  The clanging of the bells formed a constant din in this neighborhood far at the edge of the town. On the other side of town, where the wide, perfect streets housed the court and the post office and the council hall, you could hardly hear the endless ringing. But all the way out here, where you could see the tops of the forest trees, where cracks in the pavement held the ghosts of gnarled roots, and the residents’ hearts still pumped with forest blood, you never escaped the sound of the bells.

  You just had to remember that it was for your own protection. The barrier of the bells was the only thing saving the town from the deadly magic that dwelt deep within the forest, magic that could swallow the town whole, along with the soul of every man, woman, and child who walked its streets. For three long years, the barrier—a wall of silver sound twenty-five feet high—had kept the forest out of the town, and the townspeople out of the forest.

  A dusting of snow lay on the land like powdered sugar on top of a spice cake. Whenever the wind picked up, it swirled in eddies along the streets, followed by the inevitable racket of the wind-chimed bells. The lattice of bells glowed with power and rang with danger. If you so much as walked on that side of the street, your hair would stand on end and a metallic, acid tang would fill your mouth.

  And that was normal people’s reaction. Those with magic blood fared far worse.

  Every lamppost Ivy Potter passed still held faded, shredding posters of those old days before the bells, a reminder of the time when the forest posed a threat and the town had to fight to save its people. One showed a drawing of a woman in agony, her belly swollen, her legs shackled with vines, standing outside a forest hut while naked, dirty children rolled around in the mud at her feet. Protect your Daughters! A Forest Life is No Future. Another was the simple face of a forest man, his ears almost comically pointed, his reddish beard matted. Flowers bloomed in place of his eyes. Have you Seen this Man? Report Sightings to the Council.

  Grimacing, Ivy pulled her scarf more tightly around her neck and quickened her pace. It was four days before Christmas, and the sidewalks were clogged with shoppers laden with bags of gifts and groceries. To a one, they wore thick, wool hats or earmuffs and kept their eyes averted from the barrier.

  Once, tourists had come to marvel at this tiny town at the edge of the wilderness, butting up against the dark forest that nearly filled a crevice between impassable mountains. No matter what changes and advances came to the world beyond, the townspeople here had always kept at least some of the old ways. To outsiders, they were legends at best—rural, backward superstitions. But to the locals, they were a way of life.

  Now, these same locals still did a brisk business during the holidays, when the ringing of the bells took on a festive air, and tourists braved the edges of the barrier for glimpses of the monsters that supposedly lived beyond, then scoured the antique shops for relics from the now-forbidden forest.

  Her own shop lay on the edge of town, on the very last street before the barrier of the bells. Half flower shop half tea house, Petal and Leaf catered to more locals than tourists. Those who purchased Ivy’s rare flowers found them withering the farther they traveled from the reach of the forest, and few tourists had use for her herbal teas.

  The locals, however, couldn’t live without them.

  There was no bell over Ivy’s shop door, but every customer looked up when she entered. The relative silence of the shop was shattered by the ringing for an instant every time, as the door opened and broke the green, golden stillness of her haven. The customers, milling as they did among the bottles and plants, or seated at the carved wooden tables, would pause and wince until the door shut again, leaving behind only the whistling of tea kettles or the crackling of the fire.

  “It’s better in the summer,” said one of her regulars, Sallie, to no one in particular. “The leaves muffle it a bit.”

  The others nodded, as Ivy unwrapped her scarf from around her blonde curls, and hung her coat and hat on a hook by the door. Sallie’s observation was no more unusual among her clientele than remarking on a hot summer or a dark winter. In the summertime, when the air was filled with birdsong, the buzzing of insects, and the rustling of tree leaves, you could almost pretend you couldn’t hear it. But winter was the worst: the bells pealed all day and all night, with nothing cutting the wind, and nothing to compete with the noise. It filled your head and invaded your dreams.

  Those who still had dreams.

  Ivy emptied the change she’d brought back from the bank into the cash register, then came around with a fresh pot of redbell tea and refilled Sallie’s mug.

  “Have another,” she said, patting the old woman gently on the arm. “And I don’t want you getting up from that table until that crease is gone from between your eyes.”

  “I’ll have more, too, Ivy,” said Jeb, another regular. He held up his earthenware cup, his gnarled fingers still wrapped tight around the tea-warmed clay. Ivy brushed a wave of her pale, blonde hair off her shoulders and headed over to refill his cup.

  Another woman, a tourist, watched from her table. She sipped gingerly at her mug of peppermint tea; a half-eaten brownie lay on the plate in front of her. “Excuse me,” she said to Jeb. “You aren’t one of those—do you get the headaches? From the bells?”

  He grunted in that particular way you could only accomplish north of sixty, and turned away, revealing the side of his head and the slight arch at the tips of his ears. It was all the answer he’d provide to a tourist, but it was also all she needed.

  These days, most of Ivy’s local clients were not only part forest folk, they were also elderly. If no history or connections tied you to this dying neighborhood, why stay in a place that made you sick? Almost everyone under fifty was long gone.

  Yet Ivy stayed. She stayed for the shop, for the greenhouse her parents had built, and for the plants her father had once so carefully collected from the forest. She stayed for her customers, who wouldn’t leave and yet couldn’t remain without her herbal tinctures. And she stayed because, bells or no bells, a life out of sight of the forest was unthinkable.

  The tourist was taking in her surroundings with new eyes. “So wait, you’re all descended from…from forest folk?” She glanced down at the brownie with obvious distrust.

  “Don’t worry about the brownie,” something wicked inside Ivy made her say. “That’s from the factory across town. But my Peppermint Bliss you’ve been drinking—well, that should make you sleep a hundred years.”

  The tourist’s mouth dropped open.

  “She’s joking, ma’am,” Sallie said. “That’s just an old story. No one here has any magic. We’re townies. That’s why we’re on this side of the bells.”

  No, no one here had any magic. Occasionally they sported moss-green eyes or pointed ears, but no magic. She and her neighbors with
forest blood simply suffered the negative effects of the bell barriers, without any of the perks. Ivy sighed and tipped the teapot toward Jeb’s mug, but she was too careless, and steaming liquid sloshed over the side and onto his hand. He hissed in pain.

  “Oh, Jeb!” Ivy snatched the towel hanging from her apron and started mopping up the mess. “I’m so sorry! I don’t know where my head is today.” Setting down her teapot, she rushed over to the window and broke off a piece of aloe from the spiky plant on the sill.

  “It’s okay, Ivy girl,” he said when she returned, but he was clutching his hand and his gruff old face was looking even gruffer. “We know where it is.” His gaze shot toward the window, to the lattice of bells on the other side of the street.

  Ivy bit her lip. She hadn’t figured anyone else was counting days. Then again, tonight was the winter solstice, a hard date to forget for anyone with forest blood.

  “Let me see,” she ordered, taking his hand in hers. Here were the marks of the life of a carpenter. Old scars from where saws had slipped, a chunk missing from a pinky. In the face of all that, a bit of scalding water wasn’t a problem, but she smeared aloe over the affected area nonetheless.

  “He was a good man, Ivy,” Jeb whispered. “Your pa. Always told me about the best trees in the forest.”

  Jeb was retired now. Tough to keep woodworking when you had no access to wood. And he and her father had indeed been friends once, when George Potter had scoured the forest for rare specimens and Jeb for fine hardwoods. But that was their old life. The forest was off-limits now, and two years ago tonight, her father had walked right into the barrier and turned into a puff of smoke.

  She was still holding his hand. Jeb pulled it back and tsked at her, a hint of mischief on his weathered face. “Now, Ivy, shouldn’t you have your hands on a younger fellow?”

  “When there are men like you around, Jeb?” she replied, shaking off her gloom. “How can I think of anyone else?”

  She returned to the stove to make another pot of her bell tea. Right, Jeb. Like there were even any young men around for Ivy to have her hands on. Like there’d been anyone at all that could catch her eye since Archer.

  Outside, another gust of wind blew, jarring the lattice of bells and sending ribbons of unease unfurling through half the people in the shop. The edge of a poster whipped back and forth against its lamppost, making the devilish face of the forest man seem to wince in pain.

  When Ivy was young, she’d played at her father’s side in the forest, and spent many long afternoons and evenings beneath its far-branching trees and among the folk who lived there. Back then, the forest hadn’t been seen as a menace. Everyone had heard stories, of course, of things that fed on the night and men who went off into the depths and came back as something other than human. But these dangers were rare and distant, and no one—at least, no one from this side of town—ever gave them much thought. Certainly not Ivy, whose father had worked in the forest, whose mother had come from there.

  Back then, the forest folk hadn’t seemed so different either. Wilder, perhaps, with little interest in the new types of businesses, transportation, and gadgets that were suddenly available outside the forest. But their forest ways seemed no more magical to Ivy than telephones or credit card machines. They were people, not odd creatures. People, like her mother, and like Archer.

  Even when they’d been kids, Archer had never cared for Ivy’s plastic toys or light up games. He’d taught her to skip stones and climb trees and make slingshots from forked twigs. At Archer’s side, Ivy had explored every stream and root and glen between her house and her friend’s forest hut. When they’d gotten a little older, they’d explored a lot more than that, and there hadn’t been any gadgets involved there either. Little wonder no man had interested her since high school, that she’d never dated Bill Portsman, who drove a bus and asked her out once a season like clockwork, or Shawn Cooper, who used to spitball her hair in math class and now worked at the tire shop. When your first lover could literally read your mind, what hope did any other guy have?

  But that was all over now. As the town grew, so did its conflict with the forest, and as they all learned, magic thwarted turns into magic dark. As Ivy became a teenager, the dark magic of the forest began to fight against the encroachment of the town, and as the forest grew dangerous, then deadly, even her forest-loving father had been forced to make a choice.

  The wilds of the forest were no longer acceptable to the townsfolk, and the people of the forest even less so. The barrier of the bells had gone up, and Archer and the rest of the forest folk had declined to join the town, choosing the evils they knew of the forest instead of the ones they feared in civilization.

  Ivy stared out the window of her shop, at the glowing silver barrier and the treetops beyond. The trees closest to the barrier were dead now, their trunks blackened by invisible fire, their skeleton arms bare even at the height of summer. But farther in, the forest remained wild and deep. Maybe there was a place where the people were safe, where Archer and his kin had carved out a place free from danger.

  Or maybe the dark magic her father had feared had consumed them all, and turned the only boy she’d ever loved into a monster beyond reckoning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The kettle whistled on the stove, its piercing squeal almost soothing next to the constant, bone-deep jangle of the bells. Ivy brushed her thoughts of forest folk away. It was as her father had counseled her in those first horrible weeks, when the sound of the bells had made her neighbors run mad and sent her to bed with earplugs and sedatives that barely took the edge off. He’d told her what she needed to think, the mantra she needed to repeat whenever it all seemed too much to bear.

  It does no good to fret about what lies beyond the barrier. I’m safe here in this town. We’re all safe, because of the bells.

  “I don’t understand,” the tourist woman was saying now. “If you get headaches from the bells, why don’t you leave?”

  Ivy rolled her eyes but stayed silent. It all seemed so easy to outsiders.

  “Do you want to buy my house?” Sallie asked the woman. “It’s right by the barrier so it’s not like it’s expensive. Also, do you know of a good job I could get somewhere else? I’m all ears.”

  “Pointed ears,” Jeb added wickedly, though Sallie, like Ivy, did not have that forest trait.

  The tourist scowled into her cup. Ivy already knew what was coming next. “Well, you could go to the forest.”

  No one could go to the forest, just like the forest folk could no longer leave. The barrier stretched from cliff to cliff in the mouth of the blind canyon, and no one had ever successfully climbed up the sheer sides. The forest was an isolated island of darkness and magic, especially now, cut off from the rest of the world.

  And if the folk who dwelled within had succumbed to the darkness since the barrier had been erected, well… they had chosen the forest. Her father had tried to help them. Before the town raised the barrier, he’d gone to the forest folk and begged them to come to the town, where it was safe. They’d stayed on their side.

  And Ivy had stayed on hers.

  Her life was here, in the town, with the people who needed her. When the neighbor kids moved away for the army or school or just the big cities down the highway and never came back, Ivy stayed. When half the block lay abandoned while people escaped the barrier sickness—until the only ones left were those as entrenched as any forest folk, unable to imagine a life anywhere else but these streets—Ivy remained. Day after day, she tended to the rare forest plants living on in the greenhouse, she brewed her teas, and she served her customers and she listened to the nonstop ringing of the bells.

  She flipped the dial on the stove and pulled off the hissing kettle. The recipe for bell tea wasn’t difficult, but it was exact. A precise mixture of seventy percent dried petals, twenty percent leaves, and ten percent bulb shavings from the forest redbell flower, plus a few sprigs of mint and holy basil for flavor. The water had to be thirty seco
nds past boiling, the steeping time, four and a half minutes. Honey was okay, especially local, but sugar dulled the effects. No cream. Never cream.

  The dose… well, that depended on the customer. For some, a single cup would do, and she never poured more than four. It wasn’t easy to carry the patron home afterwards. Ivy’s own prescription was a cup and a half. Sallie had once told her she’d do better with two, especially living so close to the barrier, but Ivy had resisted so far. If she was up to two cups at twenty years old, how many would she be drinking by the time she was her customers’ age?

  She poured the steaming water over the tea leaves, swirling the pot around to make sure every leaf was saturated.

  “Excuse me?”

  Ivy jerked her head up to find the tourist woman standing before her. She held a few linen satchels of loose tea. “I’d like to purchase these, please.” She smirked. “I mean, if they aren’t enchanted.”

  “They’re medicinal,” Ivy replied, checking the price tags. “It’s up to storytellers to decide how much medicine is magic.”

  “There’s a difference!” the tourist said, indignant. “Magic is, like…evil.”

  Right. Magic was evil now. Ivy should remember that, especially in front of a stranger. Who knew what stories she’d spread in town about the wicked tea shop owner and her half-fae clientele? Deacon Ryder would wallpaper the neighborhood in posters.

  Talk about a headache.

  “This tea is Nightmare Eraser,” Ivy said, holding up one of the tourist’s picks. “It’s got chamomile in it for relaxation, lemon balm to soothe your spirits, and anise to repel bad thoughts. You can believe what you want about its potency, but there’s nothing in here you can’t buy from a grocer’s spice rack.”

  The tourist seemed relieved. She bought the Nightmare Eraser and—to Ivy’s amusement—the Love Potion Tea, with its mix of jasmine, ginseng, and rose hips. When she left, Ivy shook her head and entered the purchase in her ledger. She’d told the scared, silly woman the truth. Nothing in the ingredients she sold were magic. If Ivy had a way with plants, that was from her father. And if she had a way with making teas and tinctures… well, she did have her mother’s forest blood.