Hear Me by Viv Daniels Read Free Book Online

with a nod. “So give me your answers.”
    She thought carefully, trying to figure out his trick and learn what info he was trying to glean. “It’s not true. I have lived in this town, in this building, across from these bells, but it does not define who I am. It doesn’t define any of us, unlike the forest folk, who would rather risk death than live anywhere else but the dark forest.”
    “What makes you think that?”
    It was Ivy’s turn to smile. “Question three.”
    He scowled now, and Ivy couldn’t help but thrill at it. She breathed true for the first time since she’d first caught a glimpse of his cursed eyes. She was the hero of an old story. She knew what she needed to know and she hadn’t even used her third question. Dangerous he might be, and even dark with magic, but—thank heaven, if heaven there was—he was still Archer.  
    His sly, tricky forest folk demeanor was a mask he wore, and everything else—well, he was just trying to scare her. A monster wouldn’t ask questions about her past. A monster wouldn’t care so much what she thought. A monster wouldn’t have gulped down her cocoa like it was going out of style. He was a man, not a monster.  
    But that didn’t mean she could trust him.
    “I think it,” she exclaimed, “because you forest folk didn’t leave the woods when you had the chance. You knew there were dangers. We warned you, and you chose to stay — your lifestyle was far more important to you than your safety.” She gestured at him. “Look how well that’s turned out.”
    He glared at her, his jaw tight, every muscle in his arms and shoulders tensed. Every trace of humor, every shade of humanity, every detail that had convinced her that—whatever else had befallen her friend—he was still the Archer she’d loved as a teen, had left his face, leaving nothing but fury behind.  
    “Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “You’re a townie, root to stem. And you know nothing . You sit here day after day and you put your flowers in their little plastic prisons, as if they are yours to own, to live or die as you see fit. And your town did the same to us with their hellish cage of bells.”
    “We had to protect ourselves!” she cried. “It’s not our fault you wouldn’t leave! It’s not our fault you didn’t care enough to save yourself from dark magic.”
    His brow furrowed. “Don’t speak to me of dark magic, Ivy Potter.” He pointed behind her, toward the door and the street and the forest beyond. “That barrier is the blackest enchantment the forest has ever known. Believe me when I tell you that the blackest of magics are those that men wrought themselves. Whatever evils are in the depths, they have been there longer than history’s telling, longer than towns or villages or men and women. They belong to the Earth the same as you and me. Those bells of yours are evil of a different sort. There is nothing in the forest that can compare, and nothing that poses so dire a threat.”
    “Not true!” Ivy exclaimed. They’d been bombarded with stories in those final weeks before the bells had gone up. Terrible beings, excruciating curses, babies and families and lives lost to enchantment. Even her father had told stories of the horrors he’d seen, there in the town square, on the podium where all could see and hear. And Ivy had stood in the square and listened, her skin crawling as she remembered the nights she’d spent in Archer’s bower, high at the top of a forest tree, her heart racing as she wondered what darkness had borne witness to them. Who—or what—had watched them have sex?
    Archer was lying. He had to be. Either that or he’d gone so dark he couldn’t even see it. Would a practitioner of black magic think what they were doing was evil? “There was a horrible evil coming from the forest,” she insisted now. “Maybe you never saw it coming. Maybe it’s what’s hurting you now.”
    He thrust his hand toward the windows of her shop. “The only