It was real. Every terrible inch of it was real.
I told you,the voice whispered, vindicated.You were here. She showed you what she felt when she died. And now you know what he did to her and what he plans to do to you.
I snatched the journal up with hands that had gone unsteady and began flipping through the pages—research notes in dense script, observations about growth rates and sap properties, detailed drawings of the vine’s cellular structure and the conditions under which its bioluminescence intensified. There was page after page of what appeared to be the original documentation, the vine’s earliest study, its first extractions, and the painstaking accumulation of data.
My companion surged forward suddenly, stilling my hands on the page with the vine drawing with a force that locked my fingers in place. I stared at the rendering, my pulse quickening as its attention poured through my veins. Woundaround the vine’s main structure was a thinner tendril, fine as thread, bearing tiny flowers that wove themselves through the Verdant Vespera, as though the two plants had grown into each other over time.
My hands lifted the journal closer to my face without my consciously directing them to, bringing the image into sharpening focus. My vision narrowed to the drawing, and then an image forced itself through the surface of my thoughts with the violence of something that had been held down too long.
The small white flower glowing softly in my cupped palm, its petals pulsing with that yellow-green glow, alive with something I had spent months trying to classify and failed. My fingers moving over the smooth petals, feeling the warmth of them, and watching the light strengthen beneath my touch.
Then I was in the greenhouse, and the flower was still in my hand. I held it above the waste bin. A devastating sadness moved through me so completely that my chest ached with the weight of it, a grief with no clear origin, mourning something I had not yet lost but understood I was about to.
I let go of the flower.
It dropped in slow motion, turning once as it fell, its petals catching the lamplight, glowing briefly and beautifully in the dark air of the greenhouse before disappearing into the bin.
The greenhouse door opened with a creak that fractured the vision into splinters.
I spun around, my heart slamming against my ribs. The pen and the flower and the warm light dissolved at once, replaced by the cold moonlight streaming through dirty glass—and a rage so consuming that it stole my breath.
Dr. Ambrose stood inthe doorway.
Chapter 22
My vision whitened at the edges as I stared at him, the anger swelling inside me, hot and relentless, until I forgot how to breathe properly.
The flower.
The flower discarded into a bin that I now needed with a desperation that settled somewhere beneath thought, in the oldest and most animal part of me.
My feet moved before I had decided to allow them.
I crossed the greenhouse in several strides, the journal still in my grip, and drove it hard into his chest with both hands. He stumbled back a step and I pressed forward, the words tearing out of me with a ferocity I did not recognize as my own.
“Where is the flower?”
He stared at me, his face all shadows and hollow planes in the moonlight, and the expression moving across it was one I had never seen from him before. Shock gave way to a desperate assessment, his gaze searching my face as though he no longer recognized it.
“Camellia…”
“The flower!” My fingers tightened on the journal until the leather bit into my palms. My companion wanted me to reach for his throat. The impulse rose through my arms like heat conducting through iron, and I funneled it into my grip on the journal instead, holding on to the object like it was the only solid thing remaining. “What did you do with it?”
“What flower?” he said carefully. He reached for the journal, his hands closing around it, and my companion surged at the contact. A wave of scalding heat surged up through my wrists and into my chest so violently that I released the journal simply to keep my hands from doing something I could not take back.
He stepped away, looking down at the page.
“Did you read this?”
“Yes,” I spat, “and I know what you did to your wife. You—”
My companion closed around my thoughts like a fist, and the sentence collapsed in my throat.
The flower,the voice seethed.FIND THE FLOWER!
It did not care about M. or the diagram or the answers I had spent weeks searching for—or what he planned to do to me. It only cared about that small luminous bloom I had watched drop into a waste bin in a vision. The hunger for it was a pulling sensation deep in my sternum, straining toward an absent thing, reaching across the distance between the present moment and the moment M. had let it fall from her palm.
I pressed my hand to my chest and breathed through my nose until the fist loosened its grip enough that I could think clearly.
