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The Midnight Arrow
BY ZOEY DRAVEN
Marion enjoys her quiet life in the shadowed woods, selling her healing potions in the village by day and tending to her otherworldly garden by night. But then she saves a devilishly handsome Kylorr, with his powerful wings and sharp fangs, shot through with an arrow and bleeding to death one moonlit night. Her mysterious Kylorr awakens new desires—but she fears he might be hiding dark secrets of his own…
Chapter
One
There was a dead glowfly poking out of the wrathweed hive.
The entrance hole, no bigger than a marble, was clogged up with its plump body. Outside, in the brisk night air, glowflies circled. Agitated and concerned. And if I wasn’t careful, I might get stung. And if I got stung, I’d be bedridden for two days, even with the help of wrathweed to dilute the poison of their venom.
The light in the glowfly’s body had burned out. I’d been noticing him for three nights, studying the way the cerulean blue in his translucent abdomen kept flickering.
“Let me help,” I whispered, waving my hand in front of the hive in practiced, slow motions. The glowflies darted away, though they hovered close by, their wings silent as if they waited with bated breath.
I pinched the glowfly’s large wings between my fingertips and gently pulled. His body popped from the entrance, and a stream of wrathweed glowflies wiggled themselves out in his absence.
I set him in the circle of my palm, thinking that I could grind his body into a powder once it dried out and use it in a sleeping potion for the market day. Then I sighed, the thought of a greedytongue and loud swallow drinking his body down not sitting well with me.
I was the keeper of these glowflies—five different varieties. Theonlykeeper of all five glowfly hives on Allavar, and there was a trust that pervaded all else, except perhaps in matters of life or death.
The wrathweed glowflies followed me to their section of the night garden, casting me in bright blue light with every hushed step on the soft green earth. I laid his body at the root of a smaller wrathweed plant and covered him in fragrant, black soil. I stared at the small lump he made as his hive mates fluttered past me, landing on the long, sturdy leaves of the plant. They shook their bodies, their blue dust covering the wrathweed, trickling to the soil beneath.
Then they flew off and went about their business…and I went about mine. Death was a natural part of this garden—an important part.
Dusting the soil off my hands, I picked up my gathering basket and walked to the fire-cup bed. The fire cup glowflies bled orange light through their bodies. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine it was the sun casting shadows over my lids—that was how brightly they burned.
“Harvest night,” I announced. “So don’t get cranky with me, you little heathens.”
A fire cup glowfly whizzed past when I pulled out my shears, an inch away from my nose, its wings brushing my eyelashes.
I huffed but strode forward. Mercifully, though the fire cup glowflies were the most aggressive of my collection, their stings did only that—sting like fire. It was the wrathweeds’ sting I needed to be wary of, though luckily, next to the shadevine glowflies, they were among the calmest of their species and didn’t spook easily.
“Let’s see how well you did this moon cycle, shall we?” I asked, crouching down by my raised beds, my knees digging into the softened ground.
Inspecting a fire cup, I touched the velvety softness of its petals. The flower was the brightest of reds, and its golden-yellow stamens gleamed from the glowflies’ magic. Streams of orange light pulsed from within the petal, like waves in a calm ocean.
“Beautiful,” I declared, grinning, just as a glowfly landed on the back of my hand. I placed my shears an inch below the flower, snipping the stem cleanly. “Well done.”
As if he understood my praise, my glowfly companion preened, letting out a small buzzing noise before darting away.
I harvested three additional fire-cup blooms, though this section of my garden was nearly full of them. I only needed three for the healing cream I would bottle and take to the market. The sale of them alone would be enough to pay for the materials to repair the eastern window of my cottage before winter. There might even be enough money left over for fabric to make a new dress, a warmer one.
It was nearing midnight when I finished tending to the garden. With the first bite of winter, the fire cups would begin to hibernate, as would their glowfly counterparts. Only the shadevine and the wrathweed would continue to produce during the snowy season. But I would need to start preserving the brightbell and the death needle before their last leaves dropped in the coming months.
Exiting my garden, I closed the squeaky waist-high gate behind me. With a lingering glance over my shoulder, I admired the myriad of colors the glowflies made as they weaved and buzzed, a vibrant and brilliant kaleidoscope of magic, like multicolored shooting stars in an inky night sky.
When I reached the gray cobblestone path that led up to the door of my cottage, I stilled, my eyes snapping to the darkened forest beyond the edge of my property.
The glowflies’ gentle humming ceased, and a chill went down my spine.
Being watched was not a new sensation. There was a reason no one dared to live in the Black Veil, the forest in which I’d made my permanent home like the crazy human fool I was, as the villagers oftentskedat me on market day—Allavari, Kylorr, and Ernitians alike.
Fear was not a new feeling. I’d been afraid nearly my entire life.
But the Black Veil was the entrance to the Below. No one knew where it lay within the forest, just that the Severs roamed these woods and, occasionally, snatched a villager or two to take Below with them.
