“Like I said,” Jin murmured, taking her hand, “we can do this another day.”

  Holly stared at the track, her hands trembling. She remembered it as an oppressive place, empty yet crowded at the same time. The air had been heavy with an unseen weight, and her skin had prickled with the sensation of being watched by an invisible force. Not to mention she’d been partially possessed, attacked, and forced to take part in a blood sacrifice within the confines of the historic minefields…and that was only scratching the surface.

  It stood to reason that some of her hesitation would be because of psychological trauma, but also, it was the unknown…and the fear of the legacy her family had in this place.

  Would she be tempted by the power resting underneath her feet, just like Hazel had? She’d channelled it twice now and knew the possibilities that kind of magic held. Despite her desire to do good, Holly knew that with power like that, corruption inevitably followed.

  “No,” she said with a shake of her head. “Until we can understand the bloody thing and know its limits, it’s just sitting there, ripe for the taking. Anyone can just come along and tap into it.”

  “Okay.” Jin plucked the map out of her fingers. “We can head across the creek and take the trail north and head in a clockwise direction, or we could go south towards the highway. The diggings continue across the road another twenty-five kilometres.”

  She groaned. “I didn’t realise they were so big. The map makes the area look tiny.”

  “From what I remember, the bush out that way is pretty dense, with lots of ridges and gullies. Great for gold, less so for hiking.” He chuckled. “The human development may have contained it, or it may never have gone that far anyway, but I wouldn’t worry. If you get tired, I can always carry you.”

  Holly rolled her eyes and crossed the bridge. The moment she stepped into the diggings, she felt the static charge rise through the clay and quartz to meet her.

  “There it is,” she said as Jin joined her at the fork in the trail. “I was worried I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to sense the anomaly, but it feels familiar. Like the feeling in the garden.”

  “You channelled it there,” he reminded her. “Maybe it remembers you.”

  “Bloody hell, don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It implies this thing has intelligence, and that’s just way too much.” She shivered and blew a raspberry. “It’s one crazy thing too far. No, thank you!”

  The vampire chuckled and looked up and down the track. “Which way?”

  “North.”

  They followed the trail as it snaked along the edge of Moonlight Creek, enjoying each other’s company. It was so strange to feel so content after so much turmoil, and Holly almost felt guilty. Her thoughts turned to Hannah, Samantha, and Sarah, then to all the other souls taken.

  A new cycle was beginning, but it felt rather lonely with only two witches and two vampires to witness it.

  “When I returned, the first thing I noticed was the silence,” Jin said as they walked. “It was different from the silence in the mine.”

  It was the first time he’d mentioned his imprisonment in the Union Reef Mine in an ambivalent way. He’d always held such a heated anger towards it, which she definitely understood, though now it almost sounded like he was at peace with it.

  “Different, how?” she asked, though he didn’t seem to register her question.

  “Listen,” he murmured. “What can you hear?”

  At first, Holly could only hear the telltale signs of how unfit she was—her ragged breaths and blood whooshing in her ears—but as she calmed, other sounds reached her ears.

  Autumn had definitely given way to winter, but even the cold didn’t stop every animal from venturing out. A pair of rosellas soared overhead, their red and blue bodies backdropped against the slate-grey clouds hanging in the sky. A crow cawed in the distance, and the undergrowth rustled as an unknown creature fossicked for food in the scrub.

  Most other animal life seemed to have already begun hibernation, though. Wombats huddled deep in their burrows, inquisitive kangaroos and wallabies laid low, and the snakes and little lizards had disappeared until they felt the warmth of the spring sunshine return to the countryside.

  “The animals are returning,” Holly whispered, spotting a blue-faced fairy wren flitting about in a scraggly wattle bush.

  Jin nodded. “Hopefully they’ll stay.”

  She took out the map and marked the edges of Moonlight Creek. “The static is fading here. I think we should move away from the water now.”

  They headed off trail and into the scrub. The bracken ferns were thick here, and their boots crunched on leaf and bark litter hidden underneath the rusty-coloured fronds.

  The static ebbed, the force of the anomaly reaching out towards her. When she saw the surrounding gums had twisted into odd shapes, she knew they’d strayed away from the border and were heading towards the centre.

  “We’ve gone too far now,” she said, looking around. “Damn it. I thought this’d be easier.”

  “Then we go back to the creek and retrace our steps.”

  A low snorting sound echoed in the shadows, and she turned, her heart leaping into her throat.

  Jin whirled around, his eyes widening. “What’s wrong?”

  Holly froze, the snorting sound morphing into a deep growl that vibrated through her bones. “Do you hear that?”

  Jin frowned and scanned the surrounding bush. “Hear what?”

  “You’ve got super hearing and you’re telling me you didn’t hear that?” She jabbed a finger in the direction the growling had come from.

  “Holly, I can’t hear anything.”

  “It was a growling sound…snorting and growling.”

  “No. I heard nothing.” Jin shook his head. “But there are feral pigs around.”

  Holly’s expression fell. “Feral pigs? Really? Wait…actually, I’m not surprised.” Like with most livestock, she figured they were introduced by European settlers, then some got free, and here they were. But why didn’t Jin hear it?

  “The diggings feel normal now,” the vampire said. “Before, they were wrong. Like this whole area existed in another place…or reality.”

  “The vortex must’ve made the wall between life and death thin,” she mused. “Now it’s gone, it’s just like any other bit of bushland.”

  “Animals are returning,” he went on. “It stands to reason they’d be just as curious as we are about what’s going on here.”

  “Even the wild pigs?”

  “Even the pigs.” Jin laughed. “Let’s head back to the creek.”

  Glad he was feeling confident about all this, Holly nodded. “Good idea. If there’s a pig out there, I want nothing to do with it.”

  “What about bacon?”

  “Oh, shush.” She rolled her eyes and threaded her arm through his. “Get moving. I don’t want to be out here all day.”

  As they headed back through the scrub, Holly glanced over her shoulder one last time.

  Force of habit, she supposed.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was just on sunset when Fiona turned her Jeep off the country highway and onto a lonely dirt road.

  She’d been surprised to hear from Patrick so soon after the funeral. Though the news of a strange blight infecting the crops just outside of Dunloe’s town limits was worrying, it gave her something else to focus on.

  All the goings-on with the anomaly had been tough, but it’d taken her mind off the fact she’d lost an entire month of her life being possessed by Hazel Burke. Now that the spirits were gone, it’d all flooded back in.

  Diving headfirst into her Legacy—and ridding it from the taint of the anomaly—seemed like a good idea. Growing things, and now solving a potential outbreak of blight, was the best thing to rid herself of the corruption that’d ruled Hazel’s afterlife.

  She’d lost an entire month and then some to that witch—she’d been fired from her job and her rent was dangerously overdue. Luckily, she still had some money left in her bank account, but even that would run out eventually.

  Horticulturalist would’ve been the perfect job for someone like Fiona, but then there was the whole magic thing. How could she explain her unnatural talent with growing plants as ‘science’ when it was clear something more was going on? It was like winning a Nobel prize, only to be exposed as a fraud.

  She could develop all natural fertilisers powered by Legacy, which would help plants grow even in the harshest of climates. Bloody hell, with enough Legacy, she could even help reverse climate change. But it’d always been like that for her. Frustration that her lofty goals would never come to fruition because of humanity.

  Fiona sighed as she slowed the Jeep alongside the potato crop to her left. Witches could do so much good in the world, but would humanity truly embrace them or do the complete opposite and let the fear of something different drive them to destruction? After what’d happened in the diggings, she supposed they’d have every right to be afraid.

  Finding a place to park, she pulled into a copse of gumtrees at the edge of the field and killed the engine.

  Overhead, the sunset was muted by the gloomy clouds, but there was enough light left to guide her over the fence and to the edge of the crop.

  Having a rather large vegetable garden, she knew the basics of growing potatoes, though agricultural farming on this scale was a little different. Potatoes were harvested after they’d flowered and their leaves began turning yellow. As the plant died off, it signalled to the farmer that they were ready to be dug up.

  But these plants weren’t yellowing.

  Fiona knelt next to the edge of the crop, studying the wilting plants. Blackish-grey spots coated the oval-shaped leaves and the veins, which should’ve been a pale green, looked like they’d been injected with slimy black ink.

  Whatever was messing with Ed Holland’s potato crop certainly looked like blight, but there were several differences that puzzled her. The blotches were usually dark brown and appeared from the outside of the leaves, shrivelling and rotting them as fungal spores developed. The final stages happened in the potato itself. Left untreated, the blight would rot the vegetable from the inside out.

  The disease she was seeing now was happening backwards.

  She pulled on her bright yellow rubber gloves and ran her fingers over the blight. The blackish spots smeared as the spores smudged across the wilting leaf, leaving behind a strange shiny trail. It was as if the fungus was wet, like the goop a snail left in its wake.

  Fiona wrinkled her nose and wrapped her hand around the base of the plant and tugged. Ed Holland wouldn’t miss one little diseased plant on the fringes of however many hectares that lay before her.

  The potato popped free, and instantly, she saw something was wrong. Instead of a small, solid vegetable, it looked like a sack of liquid.

  Placing it in her palm, Fiona poked the outside with a gloved finger and the skin broke open. The liquified insides spilled through her hands, the blackish remains of the potato oozing onto the disturbed soil. It looked like tar and smelled a bit like it, too—like gasoline mixed with rotting flesh.

  “Gross,” she muttered, almost dry-heaving at the putrid stench.

  Dropping the plant, she wiped her glove on the grass, smearing the rotted potato. Then she prodded it with her Legacy, reaching out to see if she could sense any magical signature…and instantly recoiled as a wave of nausea threatened to bring up her dinner for a second go around.

  “Nope.” Fiona stood, peeled off the glove, and headed back to her Jeep. “Nope. Nope. Nope. Just…nope.” Definitely needed further analysis, but she’d need her grimoire, some herbs and crystals, and more focused magic that wasn’t suitable to perform out in the open.

  Grabbing the bucket from the boot, she headed back to the crop, careful not to tread on the surrounding soil. Cross-contamination was a thing, and she’d have to hose her boots off when she got home. The last thing anyone needed was for her good intentions to spread to all the potato crops in the state.

  Plucking a plant from the very edge, Fiona dumped it into the bucket to take home for further study. Surely, her Legacy could tell her more. If this was magical, then she could do something about it. If not, then maybe she could tip off some government biosecurity agency to come look. It could be some exotic virus introduced from overseas, which could devastate the plant life not only here, but across the entire country.

  The other glove came off, and she slipped them into the white plastic bucket, then slapped on the lid, sealing away the stench. No one needed to smell that. It was the kind of stench that’d permeate her Jeep and never leave. No amount of air freshener could counteract that…whatever that was.

  Loading her sample into the back of the Jeep, she took out her phone and called Patrick.

  “Hello?”

  “I think we might have something here,” she replied. “It’s blight, but there’s something backwards about it. I’ve got a sample to take home and study.”

  “Damn,” the vampire muttered. “Did you check the canola?”

  “Not yet, but whatever this is, it’s likely to be spread through contaminated soil. My bet is it’s there, too.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “No, I—”

  A snorting sound echoed from amongst the low-lying potato crop, cutting her off.

  “Fiona?”

  “Sorry, I…” She swept her gaze across the darkening field. The temperature was plummeting, her breath vaporising in plumes of white. “It’s freezing out, so I’ll check the canola another time.”

  “It’s probably linked anyway, right?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Okay, well, let me know if you need any help.”

  “Yeah…” She frowned as she studied the crop, but nothing stirred the blighted leaves, not even the wind. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  “Thanks for doing this, Fiona.”

  “Sure. I don’t mind. It keeps my mind busy, you know?”

  Patrick was silent for a moment, then he said, “Drive safe.”

  Fiona slid her phone back into her pocket just as the snorting sound echoed again, this time a little closer.

  She let out a frightened squeak, rushed around to the driver’s side and flung herself into the Jeep.

  It’s probably a feral pig, she told herself. Stop being so jumpy.

  Turning the key in the ignition, she brought the Jeep to life. Doing a hasty U-turn, she took off down the dirt road, where the safe lights of Dunloe glowed through the winter gloom.

  Holly sat by the fire in the cottage, scribbling on the edges of her printed out map. She refined the estimated borders of the anomaly, erasing her messy pencil lines and sketching in points where she thought she might anchor some kind of magical tripwire.

  “We should really go back out with a GPS,” Jin said. “Or at least a mobile phone with Google Maps.”

  She lifted her head and smirked. “Look at you. And you say you’re not up with the technical jargon.”

  He rolled his eyes. “There’s a car coming up the driveway.”

  “How…” Holly shook her head. Sometimes she forgot he was a vampire and had to do a double take.

  Getting up, she peered out the window just as Fiona’s silver Jeep came to a stop behind her own little sedan.

  She headed outside as the witch lifted a white bucket with a lid on top out of the boot. Curious, she headed down to meet her.

  “What’s with the bucket?”

  “There’s a problem with blight out at some of the farmland just outside of town,” Fiona explained. “Patrick asked me to look into it.”

  Holly eyed the bucket, but the lid was firmly in place so she couldn’t see inside. “What’s blight?”

  “It’s a disease usually caused by fungus and mildew. Rots the vegetables.”

  “Don’t farmer’s spray for that kind of stuff?”

  “Usually, but this is a particularly resistant strain.”

  “And Patrick asked you to look into it? Why?”

  Fiona shrugged. “He thought it might be magic-related.”

  “Please don’t tell me we have to worry about plant viruses now,” she said with a groan. “I’ve barely got my head around there being an anomaly on my doorstep.”

  “Well, we let loose a lot of magic,” Fiona said with a laugh. “Sometimes there are side effects.”

  She groaned. “Just when I was hoping to have a sleep in, along come the ‘side effects.’”

  “Every action has a reaction. It’s magical science at its finest.”

  Holly nodded at the bucket. “Let’s have a look, then.”

  “Are you sure?” Fiona asked. “It’s pretty putrid.”

  “I want to help you with this stuff,” she replied. “I know you’re the Earth witch with all the plant smarts, but looking after this town is a team effort. It’s only fair.”

  “Okay…” The witch reached for the bucket. “Ready yourself.”

  The second the seal cracked open, Holly recoiled. Pinching her nose, she exclaimed, “Bloody hell. It reeks.”

  The cottage door flew open, and Jin appeared. “What died out here? I can smell it in the house.”

  Fiona sealed the lid and smirked. “Told you so.”

  “It’s a rotten potato,” Holly said. “Some kind of fungus.”

  “Blight,” Fiona corrected.

  “Why did you bring it here, then?” the vampire asked, trying to seal his nose with his shirtsleeve.

  “I’m trying to see if there’s anything magical about it,” the witch explained. “Whatever this blight is, it’s acting different from normal.”

  “Different how?” Jin asked.

  “The fungus is growing from the inside out, and instead of rotting the vegetable, it’s liquefying the core while the skin remains intact.”

  “It smells like a dead animal soaked in petrol,” Holly stated. “That can’t be right? Can it?”

  “It’s not.” Fiona shrugged. “I’m running some experiments, but so far, my Legacy bounces off the virus like oil and water. It’s weird.”