A hand grabbed my wrist, preventing me from taking another step. “Don’t,” Trey warned, his gaze narrowed on the field. “He said not to get too close.”
Maximus crouched a few feet away from us. He’d found a single stray flower away from the rest. “Spikey as in needles,” he told Fitz. “Like a nettle.”
Fitz flipped through the pages, scanning the book’s contents before moving on to the next section.
Delilah dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through the dirt. “Buggy, buggy, buggy,” she murmured, chasing something through the grass, already forgetting her earlier concern about centipedes.
Trey tugged on my arm insistently, trying to drag me backwards. “Wilde, come on.”
I turned on him and grabbed his face with one hand, holding his jaw firmly and pulling his head down so he had to look me in the eye. “You don’t have permission to give me orders.”
“Found it!” Fitz called. “Somnus ecrosia. The locals used to grow it for its various medicinal properties. The flowers are used in perfumes, the leaves are boiled into a sedative tea, and the roots can be ground into a salve for wounds. The different colors indicate which properties they’re better for. The redder varieties have the strongest scent, the bluer have the thickest roots. This is probably an old field that could finally thrive once the curse broke.”
He stared at the book for a long time, then said, “Where did it go?”
“Where did what go?” Angelica asked.
Trey tried to pull my hand off his face, but I wasn’t finished scolding him yet. “Apologize.”
“Wilde, what the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded. He finally pried my fingers away from his jaw. I would have protested, except then he intertwined our hands, and that was sort of an apology. I squeezed his hand and pulled it toward me, pressing it to my heart.
“The book is gone,” Fitz said, looking up at Angelica with all the sadness in the world.
She stared at him for a moment before saying, “It’s in your lap, Fitz.”
He looked down again and screamed, “My lap is gone!”
Trey started to walk away. Panic displaced all the air in my lungs. If he walked away now, he wouldn’t come back. The next time I found him, it would be with another damn tree through his chest.
“Stop,” I ordered, grabbing his hand with both of mine and holding on with all my might.
He looked over his shoulder in exasperation. “I’ll be right back—”
I hooked my foot around his ankle and pulled. His eyes widened in shock as he fell backwards. Since we were still holding on to each other, I went down with him. I didn’t mind, as long as we were together. I landed on top and pinned his shoulder to the ground with my free hand. “Stay.”
Angelica had gone to see what Fitz was shouting about. Good, let her deal with the problem. Trey could stay here with me.
“Mushroom,” Maximus said.
Trey tilted his head back as he tried to see what was going on. Jealousy blazed bright and hot in my chest as he looked at someone else. I needed him to look at me, see me, remember me. I shifted forward until our faces were only an inch apart, my hair creating a white curtain around us, shielding us from the rest of the world.
“Wilde—”
I kissed him while my name was still on his lips. He softened, silently submitting to my demands and allowing the kiss to deepen. It’d been too long since the last time I’d tasted him. For some reason, he tasted like apples, honey, and sour oranges. I wanted the real taste of him, beyond the surface, and plunged my tongue deeper. Teeth scraped along my tongue, biting down hard enough to flavor the kiss with blood. Better than the sickly sweetness. It would have been better yet if the blood was his instead of mine, so I bit him back to return the favor.
He shoved me off him and I rolled away, away, away, right over a cliff and into the sweet-smelling rainbow depths.
Chapter Thirty-One: Trey
Midafternoon
A Field of Dangerous Flowers
Bleeding and Confused
“Trey, we have a problem.”
No shit.I wiped Wilde’s blood off my lips. My tongue ached from the bite and his aggressive kiss. He lay a few feet away from me, black eyes half-closed, bloodstained lips parted as if in a gentle sleep.
