Luna Nightshade knelt in the dirt behind the old cracked library and pressed a blood-red seed into the soil. Twelve seeds now, in a neat row. If any of them fruited, she would never have to bite anything again. She was a vampire. She had not tasted blood in nine months. She kept a small notebook in her coat pocket where she wrote down what beets did to her hunger, what kale did, what a handful of dark cherries could hold off for an hour. None of it was enough. She needed the fruit itself. She needed something that fed the part of her that still wanted to hunt. A twig snapped in the pines behind her. She did not turn. She knew the weight of that step. It belonged to the one they had sent last time, the one who had laughed at her door. He was scouting for the coven again, and if he saw the seeds, he would tell them. They would come. They would drag her back or leave her for something worse in the woods. She covered the row with her palm and stood. Her boots were pastel pink and streaked with mud. She walked away from the seeds, toward the smell of onions cooking on a grill at the edge of the clearing. The grill sparkled. Gold leaves ran along its base. A green-skinned boy in an orange hoodie stood over it, turning slices of mushroom with a stick. Sores dotted his cheek. His red eyes lifted to hers, then past her, to the trees. He was the vegetarian zombie who had let her share his fire two nights running. He had not asked her name. She had not asked his. She only knew he did not eat what most of his kind ate, and that was enough. "Someone behind me," Luna said. "Old friend. Not a friend." Basil Greenleaf turned a mushroom. "How close." "Fifty steps." "Sit down. Eat." "He'll smell what I am." "He'll smell me first." Basil pulled his hood back. The sores on his neck were fresh and wet. "Hunters follow the loudest wrong thing. That's me." She stared at him. "Go tend your row," he said. "I'll walk the other way. He'll come after me a mile before he figures it out." "They'll hurt you." "They already do." He handed her the stick with a mushroom on it. "Nobody's asked me to stay anywhere. Might as well be useful leaving." He walked north into the pines, whistling, snapping branches on purpose. Within a minute Luna heard the scout's step shift and follow him. She went back to her row and pushed a thirteenth seed into the dirt. Her hands were shaking. The scout was gone, but he had seen her face out here, in the open, near the library. He would tell the coven where to look. And she had just let a boy she barely knew take her scent into the trees to die for a garden that had not sprouted yet.

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.