If a story required a hero in order to reach its conclusion, Agnes would be the gallant savior in mine.
I had awoken flat on a table, my throat raw and stinging beneath a fresh bandage where the green ribbon had concealed ruined skin for so long. The air had smelled of blood, alcohol, crushed leaves, and the sharp green scent of opened stems. Lantern light swung overhead, turning the ceiling into a blur of gold and shadow. For several moments, I had not understood where I was or why every part of me hurt as though I had been taken apart and placed back together by hands too hurried to be gentle.
Then I remembered.
Hawthorne’s throat beneath my blade.
Nicholas stepping toward me, his voice breaking around my name.
My hand lifting again.
The knife opening him.
I remembered the terrible heat of his blood across my fingers. I remembered the shock and grief in his eyes—so profound it seemed to hollow him from within as he reachedfor me anyway. I remembered thinking, with some distant and monstrous calm, that his throat opened more easily than I had expected.
Then nothing.
When consciousness returned, Agnes was hunched over Nicholas, who lay on a separate table beside mine. His bare chest was exposed, his skin pale and gray beneath streaks of dried blood, and a clean dressing had been wrapped tightly around his throat.
For one suspended moment, I could do nothing but stare at him, the world narrowing to the small movement beneath his ribs. Rise. Fall. Rise. Fall. Each breath seemed too delicate to survive observation, like a moth trembling in cupped hands.
Agnes looked up when I moved.
Her face was drawn and terrible with exhaustion. There was dried blood on her apron, blood along one cheek where she must have wiped at tears with the back of her wrist, and a smear of green sap darkening the cuff of her sleeve. Her hand had trembled when she pressed it to my forehead, her fingers gently stroking the hair from my damp skin.
“Do not try to speak,” she said at once, her voice rough. “Do not move either or I will tie you to this table.”
I tried to ask what she had done, but my throat refused to form the words.
Agnes understood anyway.
“I did what I had to do,” she said.
There was no pride or triumph in the statement, only weariness, and beneath that, a grief too complicated to be named cleanly.
Nicholas had been dying. Hawthorne’s severed vine had already begun to blacken. I had been failing too, though differently I suppose. My incomplete graft had turned inward upon itself, consuming what little strength remained. And Agnes had found herself alone among three impossible bodies and a room full of notes written by two brilliant fools who had never once considered that the woman they underestimated might be the only one capable of saving them.
So she had done what we would have done.
She had chosen the monstrous thing.
She grafted the vine and flower into Nicholas first, because his blood was leaving him too quickly and there was no other way to keep him. Then she opened me across the scar my own hands had created, and placed the missing bloom inside the chamber my body had been starving for since the day I woke beneath the hospital ceiling with my memories gone and death still clinging to my skin.
Hawthorne had been more complicated.
“That is too complex for me,” Agnes confessed later, with more bitterness than I had ever heard in her voice. “You and Dr. Ambrose will have to fix what you’ve done when you are well enough.”
And so once Nicholas and I had healed enough to repair what I had nearly destroyed, we had reconstructed Hawthorne.
Together.
We had spread every note across the worktable, argued over each step, and pieced our child back together hour by exhausting hour.
When he opened his eyes again, Agnes dropped an entire tray of instruments.
The sound had been magnificent.
Now, weeks later, the manor held no evidence of that terrible night except what remained beneath our skin, and the horrible memories I wished we could all forget.
