Hear Me by Viv Daniels Read Free Book Online Page A

thing hurting us is those damnable bells. You, who taste of the redbell flower, can you say they aren’t what’s killing you, too?”
    She looked away. She’d answered three of his questions already. She didn’t need to tell him more.
    “Your protection—whatever cowardly townie thing it is you think you’re saving yourself from—is not worth the price we all pay.”
    Ivy swallowed her words, for they would have been a question. She knew how much her neighbors and their scatterings of forest blood were injured by the bells. How did they torture those in the forest, full-blooded folk like Archer who couldn’t move away? She recalled the things he’d shared with his kiss. Sick children, empty huts… “It must be stopped, or we’ll lose them all.”  
    All these years, she’d listened to the council’s dire warnings and worried the forest folk had been wiped out by dark magic. Perhaps they had. Only it wasn’t brambles and stone that had defeated them. It was the bells.
    What can fight dark magic but more of the same?
    And now they had stopped, and he was here. It hurt to breathe. If Archer had turned to dark magic, it was the town what drove him to it.  
    She looked at her first love again, at the scars crossing his skin, at the defiance in his eyes, at the resentment which poured off him like fever sweat. And she couldn’t blame him.  
    “You still have one more question.”
    That she did. And now she didn’t care about the woman and the children. She only wanted the truth. “What are you doing here?”
    He chuckled. “I told you, you don’t want to ask me that question.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because, Ivy Potter,” he said, and his voice was full of sorrow, “you won’t like the answer.”

CHAPTER SIX

    “There are many things I don’t like about this night,” Ivy said, as bravely as she could. “But that’s my question, and according to your own rules, you’re bound to tell me.”
    Ivy could think of three possibilities, and each one scared her more than the last. Perhaps he was escaping, since the evil in the forest had grown so dangerous that no one could withstand it, no matter what dark arts they practiced. Or maybe his task was to bring down the barrier and let enchantment flood the town.  
    Option three was the most terrifying of all. Maybe he had come for her at last. There were times, especially that first year when her father was still alive and the barrier was making her sick, that she used to dream of it. To imagine Archer breaking the barrier and coming for her. She’d picture him scaling the sheer sides of the gorge or digging tunnels below the earth or bringing down the barrier, bell by wretched bell, to gather her in his arms and tell her that nothing— not dark magic or the town’s disapproval, would ever keep them apart.
    Those dreams died slowly years ago, worn to tatters by loss and illness and the neverending din of the bells.
    Ivy didn’t speak again, and she didn’t back down. These were the rules of the game.  
    Archer relented, his shoulders slumping. “We need your father’s help. The redbells in the forest are dying out. You must know what that means for us.”
    She did. Without the flower, they’d never survive the bells’ effects. “But my father’s gone.”
    He nodded. “And you run his shop now.”
    Archer’s plan came crashing into view. He’d come for her father, to save the redbells. But her father was dead, and the tea was Ivy’s invention.
    That meant he had come for her.
    Once, it would have been all she wanted. To live with Archer in the forest, to be young and free and wild in a place filled with love and enchantment. But Ivy knew better now. She knew the truth of the dangers that the forest held, she knew her place in the modern world, and she knew, most of all, that Archer was not hers. There was that girl in his mind. There were those children. There were the years between them, and most of all, there was the darkness he’d allowed