The Wolf Tree by John Claude Bemis Read Free Book Online Page A

Kansas?”
    “We’ll find out.”
    She leaned forward, hugging him tightly. “I don’t want you to go,” she whispered.
    “I’ll be okay.” Ray held her a moment before saying, “I need you to do something for me, Sal.”
    She pulled back. “What? Look something up in the
Incunabula
? I could find out if—”
    “No, it’s something I need you to keep.” He opened the buttons at his collar and pulled up the toby. “The rabbit’s foot.”
    He took out the golden foot. Mother Salagi had told Ray to keep it safe. He could not risk bringing it with him into the Darkness. If the foot was to be safe, it should stay at Shuckstack.
    “Remember what’s in this rabbit’s foot?” Ray asked.
    “A lodestone?”
    “From Father. He gave it to me before you were born, the last time I saw him. He told me the lodestone would lead me back to him. It did. It led me to him when it became the rabbit’s foot. Now I’m giving it to you so you’ll know that I’ll return safely. Will you keep it safe?”
    “Of course.” She leaned forward once more, hugging him, squeezing him like she wouldn’t let him go. “I’m scared,” she said.
    “Don’t be.”
    Her soft cheek was pressed against his. She smelled of Shuckstack, of a nice wood fire and spring flowers and the spicy herbs drying in Nel’s room. She smelled of the sweet smell of his home.
    “But Father …,” Sally whispered. “He never came back.”
    “I’ll come back.”
    She released him enough so that she could see his face, her large eyes searching his. “You will? You promise?”
    Ray put the rabbit’s foot in Sally’s cupped palm, closing her fingers over it. He squeezed her hand. “I promise.”

4
THE SLEEPING GIANT
    C ONKER SLEPT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL .
    Five fathoms deep and filled with clear green spring water, the well was known to the sirens as
Nascuits ai Élodie
or Élodie’s Spring. It was a place of healing—secret, secluded, and sacred.
    Élodie’s Spring lay in a recessed marsh surrounded on three sides by rock outcroppings. To a wanderer, the base of the bluff would look overgrown with a wild tangle of ferns and cattails and the skein of jeweled spiderwebs. No spring could be seen bubbling from the rock. And even if a wanderer had chanced upon the overgrown corner of the wild, he or she would have felt inexplicably compelled to continue traveling. Unless that traveler was a siren.
    When Jolie had at last found the spring, she had pulled Conker’s body down into the healing waters. She wove ablanket of reeds to cover him and pinned the edges with large stones to keep him from floating to the surface.
    There he slept. Jolie did not know how long it would take for him to heal.
    When she had first reached the spring, the woods were green with high summer. Soon autumn fell, and red and copper leaves blanketed the silver outcropping surrounding the well.
    Jolie watched and waited, swimming down several times each day to check on Conker. He slept, and she could only hope he was healing.
    The winter brought little snow but cold nights, and Jolie often slept in the spring’s waters by Conker’s side. His body was beginning to mend. She could feel it as she touched his chest and muscles and bones. But he did not wake.
    And at last—after so long on Jolie’s lonesome watch—spring arrived. And with it so did her first visitor.
    Electric green leaves wove a canopy over the well. In the shade, Jolie sat mashing cattail tubers that she had boiled for her evening meal. Something or someone was watching her.
    Were the months of isolation driving her to invent worries? She considered it even as she listened for a footstep or a snap of a twig. All she heard was the chatter of the birds, the cedar waxwings and martins, gathering at the siren spring’s headwaters.
    She turned her head a fraction and sniffed as she continued to crush the warm white tubers with the whittled spoon. She could smell nothing unusual to the sheltered spring. Hersenses