Had Mom known who I was? She’d gone to great length to hide me, isolating us here. She homeschooled me, kept the wider world a distant rumor. The amulet she’d placed around my neck had concealed my very presence from Hades, my true mate.
She must have known, but she’d taken her secrets into the earth.
It didn’t matter anymore. I had to leave this past in the dust. What mattered now, with an urgency that burned in my blood, was harvesting Mortis Bloom that could cure Nero.
I pressed my palm flat against the cold stone one last time, pale light from the new moon on my shaking fingers. “I love you, Mom,” I whispered. “But I have to go. I have to save him.”
I pushed myself to my feet, wiping the tears from my cheeks.
Morrigan stood several paces back, a silent sentinel. She’d given me space, offering no comment, no false comfort. I was grateful for that. I needed the distance, and she understood.
I turned away from the garden, from the grave, from the cabin that had once contained my entire world, and nodded at Morrigan.
“Let’s go.”
I led the way toward the tree line, Morrigan a quiet presence at my back.
The forest loomed ahead, dense and dark and even menacing. The locals claimed it was cursed. I was never afraid of it.
I’d walked these paths a thousand times, gathering plants that grew nowhere else. It had never harmed me. I found the old trails by memory.
The temperature plunged as we crossed beneath the canopy. The air grew sharper, smelling of damp earth and leaves. Frost crackled underfoot.
“How far?” Morrigan asked.
“Not far,” I said. “There’s a lake about a quarter mile in. That’s where Mortis Bloom grows.”
That was the place Mom had forbidden me to enter alone. She’d always accompanied me to harvest there, calling it too dangerous.
Now I understood. That fragile point in the veil between realms—it must have been what drew her here. What made the forest feel cursed to ordinary people, who sensed the wrongness even if they couldn’t name it.
We walked in silence, our breath ghosting in the cold. No birdsong, no rustle of life—only the brittle crunch of frost and leaves underfoot.
Then I spotted the lake.
And there, beneath its dark surface, something began to glow. Softly at first, then brighter—a submerged star stirring in the deep.
Mortis Bloom.
Chapter
Twelve
Morrigan
The Siren's Betrayal
Bloom glided along the path as if it were a map on the back of her hand. The girl had grown up here, isolated and unaware. Plants bowed toward her; the very frost seemed to retreat from her passing. Even without the memories of her past lives, the affinity remained—the goddess of spring, whispering to the roots in the dark.
Morrigan had never walked this part of the world before. In this timeline, Demeter had hidden Persephone in a forgotten French town, nestled against a forest that clung to its old magic. The place was remote, steeped in enough whispered curses to deter the mortals from looking too closely.
Demeter had chosen well.
But Hades had sensed the girl. He always did, eventually.
Bloom led her to a lake, its surface a dark mirror staring back at the sky.
Morrigan halted at the water’s edge and gazed down. Her own reflection stared back.
