Maddie O’day's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Maddie waited by the door until the dragging stopped. The porch went quiet. Tank stood between her boots and the threshold, chest low, ears back. She held the new amulet in her fist and felt it pulse once, then dim. A candle where she needed a bonfire. If she opened the door now, the dark would eat her light in a breath. "We can't stay," she whispered. "The amulet needs a real sun to feed on. There isn't one in the sky anymore." "Then find one on the ground," Tank said. She thought of her notebook. Every working spell traced back to her, and her pendant, and one other thing she had not written down until now: the woods behind the cottage still had color. She had seen it two mornings ago through the kitchen window. A patch of green that refused to gray. Something in the trees was still holding light. She packed fast. Salt in a jar. Notebook. Shears. She tied the weak amulet to her wrist so both hands were free. She cracked the back door, checked the yard, and slipped out with Tank pressed to her leg. The cottage stood behind her in the dark, its window boxes colorless, its yellow door the only warm thing left on the block. The green pulled her deeper than she wanted to go. Tank growled low the whole way. Then he stopped. A doe stood in a small clearing, lit from inside. Vines wound up her legs and along her ribs, leaves still bright as summer. She should not have been visible in this dark, but she was, because she was making her own daylight. Maddie's pendant went hot against her throat. "Don't move," Tank said. "That one's older than the curse." Maddie knelt. She did not reach. She unclasped her sun pendant, laid it in the moss, and set the weak amulet beside it. Then she pressed her bleeding thumb — reopened with the shears — to the ground between them. "I'm not taking," she said. "I'm asking." The doe walked forward. Leaves brushed Maddie's knee. The doe lowered her head until one antler tip touched the amulet on the moss. Light climbed the vines. It ran down the antler into the amulet and did not stop. The metal grew hot enough to sting. The weak ring on Maddie's wrist flared, held, and stayed held. Her pendant answered, steady now, a third sun in the chain. Three lights, joined. The doe lifted her head and stepped back into the trees. The green went with her. Maddie stood. The amulet on her wrist burned bright and even. It would break a sky. Tank's growl came back, closer this time. Behind them, in the direction of the cottage, something large moved through the brush. The light had called it. It had followed her in.