Bindweed and Strawberry - Patreon Exclusive!

If she’d seen the teeth first, this might have been a different story. Aiga knows enough to be afraid of curving, sharp, glistening teeth, but it’s the gentleness of the hand curled around the bindweed blossom that catches her eye.

She knows enough to be afraid of claws too, but she’ll tell herself it was too dark to see them until the day she dies.

“My professor says it’s a weed,” she says to the creature standing in the flower bed. There’s eggshells under her feet and her hands are stained with the coffee grounds she’d been sowing amongst the strawberries. “We’re supposed to pull them tomorrow.”

The white petals flutter in the breeze, catching the light of the full moon. The creature watches her with eyes that shine unnaturally and says nothing. She notices that their feet--narrow and arching where she’d expected to see hooves, honestly--are carefully placed so as not to crush the plants marching past in rows.

“I like them,” she confesses. “It’s not the flower’s fault it’s stronger than most everything else. Besides, most would call strawberries invasive if we couldn’t eat the fruit. Not so different, really, bindweed and strawberries.”

The creature is darker than the night sky, lines of fur along their silhouette, eyes, claws, and nothing else. She feels like she’s whispering secrets into a blackhole, dropping wishes into a cosmic well that will never cough them up. It’s purifying, in a way, even as the hair on the back of her neck stays sticking straight up and gooseflesh is creeping up her arms to the hollow of her throat.

“You should probably stick to the northside of campus,” she tells them. She dusts her hands of the last of the coffee grounds and takes a step back, careful to stay in the furrows. “They’re building sustainable housing in the woods this fall and I hear they’re putting cameras up to catch the riff raff.”

The creature doesn’t move as she backs away, eyes like beetle’s on her back as she makes her way back into the heart of her dorms. 

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By mid semester, the bindweed problem has become a Bindweed Problem. Aiga’s professor dedicates half of practical to rooting through the rich earth, tracking down roots like criminals, convinced that if he can just find enough of them, the entire network of strangling vines will disappear.

“Why don’t we poison them?” one of her classmates asks, foreheaded beaded with sweat, glaring at his third pair of working gloves this year.

The professor’s eyes are wild as he looks up from where he’s hunched over a suffocating rose bush. “Anything strong enough for them will kill the whole garden. Including,” he hisses, “the strawberries.”

Aiga picks at the nettle that’s coming up in the shadow of the fence bordering the garden. She doesn’t hate nettle, but it doesn’t mean anything to her either. The bindweed flowering along the wooden post, she leaves alone. 

“I don’t know how you do that without gloves,” a classmates tells her, coming to stand in the limited shade the woods offer. She nods to Aiga’s fingers, wrapped around the stinging weed. “My hand swelled up for like a week just from tomatoes.” 

“Practice,” Aiga says and tosses the nettle into the bag at her side.

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She sees the creature again when Mercury’s in retrograde.

“Mercury’s in retrograde,” she tells them. She grins. “Careful, careful, right?” She doesn’t ask what the creature is doing so close to campus, tucked into the shadows being drawn from the library tower to the steps of the admissions office. There’s a tree planted in the middle of this space, a trio of birch become one, and they’re twisted through the trunks. Serpentine.

They extend one arm from the knot they’re in and a long, thin claw points down to her bare feet.

She keeps her grin on her face, but she’s no longer behind it. It’s anchored there by string, by conditioning, and she’s shrinking back for the first time. She’s so very tired. “Shoes?  Overrated. Real witches like to feel the earth beneath their feet.”

The creature puts their hand on the ground and crawls out of the tree. She can see their shoulders now, heavy and powerful, like a bear. Aiga doesn’t move even as they brings their face close enough to hers that she can see the teeth peeking out from underneath a curled lip. They exhale, breath curling in the cold night air to where the collar of her shirt has been stretched and ripped.

She stays because she wants to hide and she looks the creature in the eyes because she wants to close hers and she raises her chin because she wants to cower. “Leave it.”

They huff, the warmth of their breath harsh against the chill in her skin, and flow forward. Even crouched as they are, they’re bigger than her, taller than her, and she lets her head drift up as they rise. Their arms are bracketing her sides, not touching just hovering, and she can see that their knees are articulated more like a human’s than she’d first thought.

“I’ve had one fight tonight,” she tells them. She’s still smiling and the force of it opens her split lip again. “I’d really prefer not to have another.” She can feel the jagged edges of her power snarling at the confines of her skin, undulating and biting where her control is slipping. Her eyes flash. “Especially when I’m not sure who would win.”

The creature brings one of their massive hands up to the exposed curve of her throat, slowly, so she can feel it happening. Testing. The tip of a claw touches just over her pulse point, searing, somehow, and freezing.

She can still feel the hands and the fists and the magic lashing against her body from earlier. She can still hear the snarls of the coven, telling her to leave, telling her she’s not welcome on their land. She can still feel the fear as she did her very best to tear them apart.

Grinning, Aiga pulls the night through her back like wings and throws the wail of the stars and the howling of the moon into the very essence of the creature like daggers. The rush of power bellows against her channels after a night of spells, but it hurts them more.

The creature is sent staggering back, coughing out a growl that’s less angry than Aiga would have thought. Their arched feet barely making any noise as they fling themself back into the birch, leaves quaking long after they’ve pressed themself flush against the bark.

“Mercury’s in retrograde,” she tells them and hears the way the coven had said the same words, all laced with panicked apology. “No one’s acting the way they should.”

She carries the glint of curved teeth all the way back to the dorms with her.

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The coven leader, a sharp-faced young woman named Samantha, limps up to her before Aiga’s last class of the week. It’s been a month of avoidance, of hexes placed furtively on her belongings, of curses being thrown haphazardly against her shields.

Aiga twitches when the other woman stops barely two feet away from her.

“This isn’t your land,” Samantha tells Aiga. 

“So,” Aiga says, “you’ve said.” Samantha’s got spell backlash clinging to her right arm, a gift from Aiga that blocks her channels for a good long while. Aiga stares at the sling Samantha’s got on. “I didn’t break it.”

“You might as well have,” Samantha says. “Look, we were willing to let go of your trespassing so long as you kept to yourself.”

“You kidnapped me out of bed,” Aiga says. “And beat the shit out of me.”

“You’re stirring up things in the woods,” Samantha says. “Meddling with things a good witch would have known better than to meddle with in a coven’s territory.”

“We’re not werewolves.” Aiga shifts her backpack to both shoulders so that her hands are free. She can sense Samantha’s coven mingling with the other students behind her, trying to blend in. “We don’t have territories.”

Samantha ignores her. “If you don’t drop out and move by the end of the semester, you’ll regret it. Our coven leader’s coming back from abroad and she already know all about you.”

So she’s the defunct coven leader. Makes sense with the level of power she has. 

Aiga raises an eyebrow. “But Mercury won’t be in retrograde then. What excuse will you hide behind when you can’t get me to leave?”

The hex is expected and Aiga’s witches’ ladder--sewn carefully into the back padding of her bag--catches it easily. 

“End of the semester,” Samantha tells her. “Or else.”

Aiga watches her go and resists the temptation to send anything wicked in her wake.

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“Apparently,” Aiga says that night, feet pacing the line between garden and woods, “you usually sleep a lot more.”

The night is still and silent around her, all that she has for company the sound of the wind through the trees and the gentle hum of the waning moon above her. She knows they’re there anyway and waits.

The creature emerges from the depths of the trees slowly, hunched forward so that their crown doesn’t hit the low branches. She can see more of them now, the way their fur slides down their back and tangles with moss and growing things, the way their hair breaks at the top of their head to dark, leathery and glittering black gems along their brow and cheek, the way their jaw elongates enough to accommodate heavy teeth.

They’re beautiful in a way she only thinks of plants as beautiful. She presses her lips together.

“I didn’t want trouble,” she says. Her hands curl into fists. “I just wanted to get my degree in peace. Find my own way in the world without people like them.”

The creature drags shining, ebony claws through the earth, gouging out thin lines. 

“I want to grow things,” she says. “Not destroy them. Why do people always ask for destruction?”

Bindweed curls around them and, even in the pale light of the waning moon, she can make out the clashes of strawberry that refuse to give up ground. She loves this part, the fight and the prevalence, the lunge for survival and the slow twine of vines around roots. She loves the vitality and the violence when, in the end, everything grows.

Humans never grow.

“They think I woke you up,” she tells them. She pauses, fingers tapping along her thighs as she stands her ground ten feet from the treeline. “I don’t think something like you is capable of sleep.”

There’s more amusement now that she can see them clearly. It’s tucked into the corners of their beetle eyes, in the gentle huff of their chest, again in the flash of their teeth. They’re as much part of the woods as anything can be, forming out of the mud and the detritus, a monument in their own right to the secret powers that line the trees.

It makes something ache in her to understand them for what they are. For what she (one day) might be. She feels the night plucking at her skin, the fading moon whispering in her ear, the draw of the ground underneath her feet. She feels trapped in her own skin on nights like this and it’s gotten worse since she met them.

Her nails cut into her palms. A reminder. “Why were you pretending to be asleep?”

The creature sways forward, eyes fixed on her face, unblinking. There’s something amused in the flash of their teeth and the rolling of their shoulders. They tilt their head and Aiga knows.

“They weren’t what you were looking for,” she echoes. She waits for the creature to nod and she scoffs. “And I am?”

The creature holds out an arm, beckoning. Let me show you.

She stays where she is. “I’m too young.” She can feel it in her bones, her youth, how it’s taken her this long to adjust to the dark and see. She can feel it in the bruises planted along her ribs and her own rash of spell splash creeping along her legs. “Too human.”

Then grow, the creature says, still beckoning. Their claws flex. Grow.

And maybe she should hold out more. Maybe she should cling to her own skin like her life depends on it, bind her power to the feel of the earth against the soles of her feet and not in her feet. Maybe she should cleave to the idea of human like her mother had once begged her to.

She’s so very tired of binding.

“Okay,” she breathes and lets go.

She explodes out of herself with such ferocity that the echoes of it ripple through the night sky. Her power snakes into the ground, deeper and deeper, spreading and rooting until she’s everywhere. She’s where the edge of the garden begins, she’s in the wires and pipes of the dorms, she’s under the roadway where the dirt carries memories of green. She’s between the bindweed and the strawberries, where the creature is, and she’s more real here than she’s ever felt with her hands in the dirt.

When she opens her eyes, the night is looking out of them, all stars and black and beauty. It feels natural there, like a puzzle piece sliding into place after years of being half-complete.

At some point her legs must have lost strength because she’s half on the ground, blades of grasses curling along her calves, and the creature has their arms around her. There’s a vibrating sound coming from their throat, a cross between a rumble and the sort of crooning a dove makes over her nest. 

The forest rises above them and it occurs to her that she may never step outside the treeline again. Somehow, she doesn’t feel trapped.

Somehow, she feels as if she has room to grow.

Welcome, the creature whispers to her, welcome to magic.

Aiga, a creature herself, laughs and stands.

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Samantha stands between the school and the garden, hands wringing as her eyes follow the back of her coven leader. Scarlet is tanned from her semester abroad and somehow more than Samantha remembers, all squared shoulders and strong legs. She seems to have no problem strolling into the treeline though Samantha has been haunted for weeks now with the images of teeth and claws everytime she looks in its direction.

“Ah,” Scarlet says. “Okay.” She wipes at her hands as if dusting them and half turns, shielding her eyes from the sun.

“What?” Samantha calls, brow pinching. “Did you get something?”

“Your problem friend,” Scarlet calls back. She starts picking her way through the garden, back to where Samantha is anxiously waiting. “She didn’t leave.”

Samantha blinks. “Yes she did. The school says she never showed up for the new semester.” Realizing, she scowls. “And she was never my friend.”

“Things like them don’t really care for school,” Scarlet says, ignoring the denial. She sighs and rubs the bridge of her nose. “I told you to stay out of the woods, Samantha.”

“I did,” Samantha says, folding her arms. She doesn’t like this new Scarlet, confident and cryptic. She wants the Scarlet she knew in high school, back when they both wore those god-awful robes from Etsy. “I made sure everyone did.”

“No, you didn’t.” Scarlet watches Samantha and doesn’t like the stubborn set of her jaw. “You pushed that woman right into them. And now there’s two of them out there.”

“Two of what?” Samantha asks, voice snapping with irritation. “You’re not making any sense.”

Scarlet looks at her and sees all the ways she’s failed. “Yeah, I am. You’re just not hearing it.” She sighs again. “I shouldn’t have been gone for so long. This is one problem I can’t fix for you, Samantha.”

“What problem? Why can’t you?” Now there’s alarm creeping into the other witch’s voice. “Why can’t I go into the woods?”

“She doesn’t want you out there,” Scarlet says. “And so neither does the other one. You’re better off not going in there ever again.”

Samantha’s jaw drops. “We do initiations in there! Half of my classes require I go in there!”

“Then maybe you’d better look into transferring,” Scarlet says. She brushes by the other woman, rolling a cramp out of her shoulder. She can still feel the wild edges of the magic against her aura and she desperately wants to center herself. “Or else.”

“Or else?” Samantha scrambles to keep up. “Or else what?”

Behind her, the woods echo with laughter.