Twenty-Eight
Splice sat in the armchair by the apartment’s picture window. He did not sleep. Instead, he spent hours cataloging the mundane magic of Goldie’s apartment: the grumpy purr of Maeve from her post at the foot of her mistress’s bed. The faint shimmer of wards on the windows. The soft, near-silent thump of Oberon leaping from a bookshelf.
Then, as a clock chimed midnight, something changed. The low, rhythmic hum of the apartment's latent magic didn't stop, but it thinned, stretching into a keening note that slid under the bedroom door and coiled into the living room.
Splice was on his feet before a conscious thought could form. The air had gone cold, charged with the scent of damp moss and something coppery and ancient.
He moved to the doorway of her bedroom and eased open the door.
His breath caught. Goldie was standing, her back to him, silhouetted against the city glow filtering through her window. When she moved, it was not the stumbling gait of a sleepwalker waking from a dream. She flowed with the serene, unnervinggrace of a tide being pulled by the moon. Each step was deliberate, silent, and purposeful.
Splice’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. The vines beneath the skin of his forearms coiled and uncoiled, a restless, physical manifestation of the war raging inside him. A part of him screamed to act.Wake her. Shake her out of it. Protect her from this.
But the Assistant, the part of him built for observation and duty, held him fast. He had promised her he would watch. He had promised Mycor he would learn. To interfere would be to fail them both.
She drifted past him, so close he could feel the unnatural chill radiating from her skin. Her eyes were open but utterly vacant, focused on a point in space he could not perceive. Her usual scent of cinnamon and bergamot was gone, replaced by something far more elemental: the smell of freshly turned earth after a hard rain, and underneath it, the sharp, metallic tang of blood.
Without a sound, she opened the apartment door and stepped into the hallway.
Splice hesitated for only a heartbeat. Then, with a quiet resignation that felt like defeat, he followed.
The streets of Bellwether lay wrapped in a midnight hush, the air cool and still. Splice shadowed her, maintaining a careful distance—too far to touch, but close enough to intervene.
Goldie moved with an unwavering, fluid purpose, her sneakered feet making no sound on the pavement. Her fingers trailed along a crumbling brick wall as she passed, leaving a faint, phosphorescent trail of light that pulsed once before fading away.
A few blocks later, she stooped to pluck a broad-leafed weed from a sidewalk crack, which she crushed between her palms.The scent that bloomed on the night air was peppery and wild, a key and a password, a ward and a calling all at once.
He recognized the perimeter of the Green Holdings by the shimmer of police wards layered over mundane caution tape. To Goldie, they might as well have been morning mist. She passed through without hesitation, the magical barriers parting for her as if she were a long-lost daughter returning home.
Splice followed a breath behind. The wards prickled against his own essence, a crackle of static electricity that recognized him as kin to the land, although foreign to its current purpose.
The path was a twisting, shadowed maze, its air thick and heavy with the scent of rot and loam. The trees themselves seemed to lean in, their branches parting to clear a path for Goldie. The land was drawing her inward, not with brute force but with reverence. Each step she took was welcomed.
At last, the trees opened into the heart of the Grove Core. The air here was thicker, humming with a pressure that made Splice’s head ache. As Goldie crossed the threshold, her movements changed, the drift of a sleepwalker sharpening into the focus of a ritual. She bent, tugged off her shoes and socks, and pressed her bare feet into the damp earth. The ground seemed to exhale beneath her touch.
With unnerving precision, she began to pace slow, deliberate patterns into the soil, toes carving shallow grooves that glimmered faintly. The gnarled hawthorns that ringed the circle leaned inward, their thorned branches creaking, as if bearing witness.
A low, melodic hum slipped from her throat that was nothing like Goldie’s bright, sparkling, normal cadence. Her hands lifted, moving with eerie precision, and hovered over the patch of earth where Marlow Truckenham’s body had lain. The soil itself seemed to flinch, darkening, recoiling as if remembering pain.
The hum cut off. Goldie’s body went unnaturally still. Splice stepped forward, vines rippling under his skin as if ready to lash out and drag her away.
With slow, deliberate grace, she turned to face him.
Her eyes, once the warm brown of fertile earth, now glowed with a cold green-gold light. The ancient, vast, and hungry Grove Core now looked at Splice with a piercing gaze.
“The Thornfather’s graft,” it intoned, the voice resonant and velvety, vibrating deep in Splice’s chest. “I am pleased you followed.”
The ground answered with a subtle tremor, a green pulse rippling through leaf and root as the Grove Core echoed its avatar’s voice.
“There are bones in me,” the voice continued, a layered melody of sorrow and patience. “A wound I share with your god.”
The avatar took a step toward him, closing the distance with that same unnerving, fluid grace. Its hand rose, and its fingers, cool and gentle, traced the line of his jaw.
“An unusual binding,” the voice whispered, the chorus of sounds dropping to a single, seductive murmur. “Your god’s pain sings in my soil. But your presence is a different song. It stirs me.”
The glow in its eyes deepened with an ancient, terrifying hunger. The very air in the clearing grew thick, heavy with the cloying scent of pollen.
He could feel a distant, echoing thrum through his bond with Mycor as his god stirred. It was a feeling of approval, of urging, and it warred violently with the new, fragile, human part of Splice that was screaming in silent horror.
