Page 63 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Transplant it,” she repeated.

“If it comes to that.”

“Garrick.” She uncrossed her arms and put both hands on the table, leaning towards him, her voice very level. “There are only a dozen stands of that lily in the whole state. You know why? Because it won’t grow anywhere else. It needs cold water coming up through the rock all summer, and sun on it, and air moving past it, and ground that stays wet and drains at the same time. You can’t build that. The place is the plant. Take it out of that seep and you don’t have a rescued lily, you have a dead one and a very expensive hole.”

He absorbed that, and adjusted his plans. “Then you don’t transplant. You protect it in place. Buffer, fence, redesign the⁠—”

“It’s not about the fence.” She pushed off the table and turned away, not looking at him at all and that bothered him more than he wanted to admit. “You’re doing it again. You’re handing me solutions. You’ve got a dozen of them and they’re all reasonable and every single one of them starts from we’re going to build the resort. You haven’t once—” She stopped, and sighed, and finally turned back to him. “You haven’t once asked whether the resort should be there at all.”

She was right. His mind had gone straight to how do we build it around this, and it had never once stopped on the question underneath. He was quiet for a long moment.

“I’ve got two hundred thousand dollars of my firm’s money in that bid,” he said. It wasn’t a defense. He just wanted her to have the numbers he had. “Design work, geotech, the survey, three months of a team’s time. If we don’t submit, that’s gone. If we submit and win, it’s the biggest contract this company’s booked in two years. I don’t say that to argue. I say it so you understand what I’m actually weighing.”

“I understand that.” Her expression softened a fraction. She had never once pretended money didn’t matter. “I’m not asking you to set fire to two hundred thousand dollars because a plant is pretty. I’m asking you to come look at it with me and Aidan before you decide anything else.” She held his gaze. “You keep telling me you listen. So come listen to the ground.”

He looked at the file. Three months of work. A team’s time. The board on a call from Atlanta, waiting for a number.

“Tomorrow morning,” he agreed. “Before the light gets high.”

Her shoulders came down. She hadn’t been sure he’d say yes. That stung more than he expected—after the rug and the fire and the wing folded over her all night, she’d still been braced for him to choose the file.

He’d have to fix that too. Later, and not with a list.

Hollow Ridge sat twenty minutes out of town, past the last of the falls, where the county road turned to gravel and then to a rutted logging track. Doris complained about every yard of it and his wings hit the roof with every bump, but he very carefully refrained from pointing out that his truck had four-wheel drive and better suspension. Aidan met them at the gate in his ranger’s green, leaning against the government pickup with a thermos. He had the unbearable cheerfulness of a male who’d been awake for hours and enjoyed every one of them.

“You came.” He handed both of them a cup of surprisingly good coffee from the thermos. “I owe Ben ten bucks. He bet you’d send an underling.”

“I don’t have underlings. I have employees.”

“Ben’s going to be devastated.”

They went up on foot. The track gave way to real forest—oak and hickory just beginning to turn colors, the ground soft with fallen leaves. He walked it with a builder’s eyes despite himself, reading the slope and the way the land shed its water and the places a road would have to cut and fill. Maris walked it differently. She stopped to touch things, naming them under her breath. She crouched next to a fern he wouldn’t have looked at twice and said, in a reverent voice, that’s a bulblet fern, that only grows where the water’s clean.

The seep was near the top, on the cold north face of the ridge, where the trees thinned and the ground turned to a slick dark shine that wasn’t quite a stream and wasn’t quite solid ground.

They found the lilies. More of them than Aidan had counted, though there wasn’t a flower left on the hill. Only the stems, rising thin and straight out of the moss with their leaves gone yellow, and a dry pod at the top of each one where the red had been in July. Maris froze for a moment, then went down on her knees in the wet moss, and the sound she made was almost the one she made in the dark.

“Don’t touch,” she breathed. “God. Just look at them.”

He looked. And because he’d promised to listen, he made himself stop reading the slope like a builder. He let her tell him why this one patch of hillside was the only place in ten thousand acres the lilies could live. She read it from the soil and the moss and the color of the water.

Then he put his hand on the outcrop above the seep, and he read it too.

It came to him the way stone always came to him, as a kind of knowledge that ran up his arm and settled in his chest, older than language. Rock had a voice for his kind and this one told him where the water came from. He could feel the rain falling on the broad shoulder of the ridge above, threading down through fractures in the bedrock, and running cold and slow along a tilted seam for a hundred yards underground. The whole hill fed this one wet square of moss. Break the seam anywhere and the water would find a new way out somewhere lower, and this ground would be dry inside a season.

She read the soil. He read the rock. For one long moment, crouched in the cold with his hand on the stone and hers in the moss, they were doing the same job.

“You can’t build up-slope of this,” he said, his own voice sounding strange to him. “Anything you do to the top of the ridge changes where the water comes out. It won’t matter how far back you set your buffer. Cut the recharge and the seep’s dead inside a year.” He took his hand off the rock. “The place is the plant. You were right.”

She didn’t gloat. She just looked up at him from where she knelt, the knees of her jeans soaked through.

Aidan cleared his throat.

“Long as we’re up here,” the werewolf said, and the cheerfulness had turned into something drier, “that’s not all of it.” He pointed back the way they’d come. “The only access is that grade we drove up. You’d have to widen it and cut it deeper, and half of it runs along a slope I wouldn’t trust in a hard rain. It slid twice that I know of.”

“When?”

“Once when I was a pup. Once the spring before last, lower down. That one took out a stretch of the old logging road and nobody thought it was worth putting back.”