Luna Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Luna knelt over the row long after Basil's whistling faded. Thirteen seeds in the dirt. No leaves yet. The clearing sat wide and bare under the moon, and the library's cracked wall behind her did nothing to hide the ground. A scout from above would see the disturbed soil from a hundred feet up. She had bought hours, maybe a night. She needed cover, and she needed it before dawn. She walked the edge of the clearing three times. Pine, thin brush, a stump. Nothing that would grow fast enough to shade a garden. She pulled the notebook from her coat and wrote: no canopy. She underlined it. Then she remembered the witch. Hazel Thornwick lived in a leaning cottage an hour east. Luna had met her once, trading a jar of beet pulp for a tincture that steadied her hands. Hazel catalogued plants. Hazel might know something that grew overnight. Luna ran. She kept off the road and cut through the pines. When she reached the cottage, Hazel was already outside, sorting cuttings on a plank by candlelight. Flowers hung in her hair. A leather apron sagged with vials. "You're bleeding pine sap on my step," Hazel said, not looking up. "I need something that grows fast. Tonight. Thick enough to hide a bed of seeds from the sky." Hazel set down her knife. "Nothing grows that fast. Not without a caster, and I'm not one." "Then something that looks like cover. Anything." Hazel studied her. "Vampire." "Yes." "Not drinking." "No." Hazel nodded once, like she was filing it. She went inside and came back with a clay bowl. Red liquid moved in it, thick, flecked with something that caught the candle. "Glitterblood. Old batch. It's not real blood. It's sap and iron and mica. Hunters use it to fake kill sites and throw off tracking hounds." "I don't want to fake a kill." "You want to fake a nest. Pour a ring of this around the clearing. Anything above will read heat and copper and move on. It won't hide the soil. It'll hide what the soil means." "How long does it hold?" "Three nights. Maybe four." Hazel handed her the bowl and a second jar. "After that, you need real cover. I don't have that." "Where would I get it?" Hazel wiped her hands. "There's a manor west of here. Gothic thing, spires. It takes in strange guests. Vampires. Ghouls. Some of them have gardens indoors, under glass. You could ask." "Ask who?" "Whoever answers the door. That's your next problem, not mine." Luna carried the bowl back through the pines, holding it level. She poured the ring at dawn. The clearing shimmered red, wet, wrong. From above it would look like a slaughter no vampire would waste. She wrote in the notebook: three nights. Then she looked west, toward the spires she had never let herself walk toward, and knew she would have to.