Page 3 of Those Fatal Flowers
“Wh-who are you?”
My mouth splits open instinctively to let my song pour out, but my throat is too raw to make music. The sound that escapes instead is ghastly—it’s wind blowing over dead leaves, it’s the beating of locust wings. The man hears death in it and runs back into the woods without another word. If he returns, he won’t be alone.
Good. I need more than one.
The stars above don’t have time to move across the vault of the heavens before I hear them, a whole mob, and I lie back down and close my eyes. My lips fall open just so, as if asking for a kiss. Even without magic, men are easily manipulated.
“S-see! I t-told ya!” the familiar voice rattles. I picture him pointing at me with a victorious smile splashed across his reddened face. “But she was…she was awake!”
A different man guffaws. “Are you mad, John? I’ll concede that there’s indeed a woman here, but look at her! She’s dead. You let the alcohol get the best of you. Again.”
“I didn’t, Thomas. I swear it,” John says, but even I hear the hesitation that now laces his voice.
“See all the treasure?” Rocks crunch beneath Thomas’s feet as he draws closer. “This is a funerary ship.”
Gods, I can feel him standing over me, feel his eyes examining the sight before him. Somehow, my parched mouth grows even drier.
“A funerary ship?”
“Of course. The Vikings used to send their dead to sea with all sorts of riches. Perhaps the Croatoans do as well.”
The boat creaks as Thomas grabs hold of its edges to lower himself beside me. He scrapes together a handful of coins and gems and lets them slip through his fingers slowly, reveling in theclinksandtingsthey make as they fall into place among the other treasures in my hoard. Then he touches me.
His caress is light at first, but it still burns through mygown. Cold fingers flatten into a heavy palm that takes its time crawling up my midsection. Suddenly, I’m that young girl again, and it’s the first time sailors arrived on our shores, all those unknown hands grabbing for me—except now I have no way to protect myself from him. From them.
How much of me would he feel entitled to explore if there wasn’t a crowd behind him?
His palm finally settles atop my heart and finds what he wasn’t expecting—a beating organ; his shock is revealed by the slightest hitch in his breath.
“She’s…she’s alive!” His voice is now clipped, controlled. “Quick! This woman is alive!”
Murmurs erupt through the crowd, and a few seconds later, a gentler hand lifts my right wrist to find the artery at its base.
“We must get her inside.”
Though her speech is hurried, it still sounds like music, like the lyres that graced the halls of Ceres’s palace. The glittering sound is both a balm and a blade—I never considered that women might be caught in my plans.
“Hurry!” she says, and the lyres play louder. How would our lives have been different if I’d followed their notes instead of sneaking from the palace that fateful night? If I’d joined my sisters in the throne room to sing songs so beautiful they made the gods weep? Would our voices have been even half as lovely as this woman’s? I don’t think so. It sends stars exploding across the blackness behind my eyes, and when they fall, the shadows in their wake are heavier than they were before. It’s all so strange, confusing, but I can’t make sense of what’s happening to me, can’t open my eyes, can’t breathe—
Then the music is gone, too, and all is dark and quiet.
I can save them.
She speaks, drawing my consciousness forward again. It’s my stolen princess, Proserpina, rousing me with the voice I’ve been so desperate to hear.
“Are you awake?” This voice is different. The lyres have returned—the woman from the beach. A fire crackles gently behind her music. I’m warm. Cramped and sore, yes, but no longer cold.
I don’t know,I say, or I think I say, but all I hear is a groan that emerges in place of words.Am I? You tell me.
“Who are you?”
I don’t have an answer for her. Someone—no, something—scarred by loss, a monstrous shell that once held a girl. But that’s not exactly true, is it? It’s not the loss that wears on me. It’s that face, those hands. And, above all else, it’s my traitorous finger revealing her location to him.
We were children. I was scared. I didn’t mean to—
Mean to. Mean to. Mean to. A bitter laugh racks my chest. How little intention matters when the consequences are so great. No, it’s not the loss that destroyed me. It’s the guilt. I’d hoped that the years, the centuries, would wear down its edges into something softer, a stone at the bottom of the riverbed. But instead that ever-present weight in the pit of my stomach grew teeth and talons of its own.
It’s mutated into rage.