Blood and Roses🔥

Chapter 2: The Root Beneath the Soil

Dawn came thin and colorless, filtering through the grime on the cabin windows like light poured through dirty water.

Liora had not slept. She had spent the hours between midnight and morning sitting cross-legged on the moth-eaten mattress, her back pressed against the cold wall, staring at the door. The blood drops on the floor had dried to a rust-colored stain, five small circles marking a path she refused to follow with her eyes for longer than a few seconds at a time. Every time she looked at them, her thumb throbbed, even though the cut had vanished hours ago.

She had inspected her hand a dozen times by candlelight. Turning it over. Pressing the pad of her thumb where the thorn had sliced her open. Nothing. Smooth skin, unbroken, not even a scar. That scared her more than the bleeding itself had.

At some point in the deep stretch of night, the forest sounds had returned. An owl called twice from the eastern ridge. Wind rustled the bare branches near the woodpile. Ordinary noises. Restorative noises. She had latched onto them like a lifeline, repeating to herself that whatever strangeness had gripped the meadow was over, finished, a trick of exhaustion and grief. People saw things in the mountains all the time. Hikers reported ghost lights. Hunters swore they heard voices in empty clearings. The thin air did something to the brain. She had read about it once, in a magazine at the library where she used to work, an article about altitude psychosis.

She clung to that explanation the way a drowning person clings to driftwood.

When the grey light of morning finally strengthened enough to touch the windowsill, Liora unfolded her stiff legs and stood. Her body ached from the cold and the awkward position. The cabin's woodstove sat dormant in the corner, a squat iron beast she had not yet learned to tame. Her grandmother had left a pile of split logs beside it, along with a tin of matches and a newspaper from 1983. Liora had laughed when she first saw that newspaper, a brittle relic announcing some long-forgotten county fair. She was not laughing now.

She needed fire. She needed coffee. She needed to walk back out to that meadow and prove to herself, in daylight, that the rose was just a rose.

The boots went on first. Her grandmother's boots, scuffed brown leather with laces that had been replaced at least three times, judging by the mismatched colors. They were too large, but she had stuffed the toes with newspaper of her own, a trick Margot had taught her when she was twelve and growing too fast for hand-me-downs. The memory surfaced without warning, sharp and tender. Her grandmother standing in the kitchen of their rented apartment, kneading dough with flour-dusted hands, telling Liora that newspaper was the poor woman's wool. Stuff it in your shoes, stuff it in the cracks of the windows, stuff it anywhere the cold tries to get in.

Liora swallowed the lump in her throat and laced the boots tighter.

Outside, the morning was brutally cold. Her breath plumed in thick clouds as she stepped off the sagging porch and into the yard. The frost had thickened overnight, transforming the meadow into a sheet of white glass that crunched beneath her weight. Every step announced itself. Every breath carved a small, temporary shape in the air before dissolving.

She walked toward the collapsed garden wall with her fists clenched inside her coat pockets, telling herself that she was being ridiculous. Roses grew in cold weather sometimes. There were varieties bred for hardiness, winter blooms that stubborn gardeners coaxed from the frozen earth with mulch and hope. Her grandmother had been a gardener once, before she left this place. Perhaps the rose was a relic, a descendant of some ancient rootstock that had survived decades of neglect through sheer botanical stubbornness.

The explanation was reasonable. Rational. Completely impossible, but Liora clung to it anyway.

She rounded the corner of the collapsed wall.

The rose was gone.

Not wilted. Not dead. Gone. The lattice of dead briars still twisted through the fallen stones, grey and brittle and unmistakably lifeless. But the bloom itself, the blood-red petals that had stood so vividly against the frost, had vanished. There was no stem. No fallen petals on the frozen ground. No sign that any flower had ever grown there at all.

Liora stopped walking. Her breath caught in her throat and stayed there, trapped, while her mind scrambled for a foothold.

Animals. Some animal had eaten it. A deer, maybe, desperate enough to chew through thorns for something green. But there were no tracks in the frost. No hoof prints. No disturbed soil. The ground around the collapsed wall was a perfect, unbroken sheet of white, as if nothing had walked there since the snow fell.

Except her own footprints.

She turned in a slow circle, scanning the meadow. Her tracks led from the cabin porch to the garden wall and stopped exactly where she stood. No other marks. No indication that anything living had crossed this ground in hours.

The article about altitude psychosis surfaced again in her thoughts, less comforting than before.

She should go back inside. She should light the stove, boil water, eat something. She should call the solicitor and ask if there was anything her grandmother had failed to mention about the property, anything at all, no matter how strange. She should do a dozen practical things that a practical person would do.

Instead, she knelt.

The spot where the rose had been was disturbingly ordinary up close. Just a patch of frozen soil beneath the briars, crusted with frost, unremarkable in every way. Liora brushed her fingers across the surface, half expecting to feel something, a residual heat or a vibration or that terrible pulse she had sensed the day before.

Nothing. Cold dirt and dead leaves.

She exhaled, a long shaky release of tension, and sat back on her heels. Maybe she had imagined the whole thing. Maybe the grief was finally catching up with her, manifesting in hallucinations her exhausted brain could not distinguish from reality. It happened. She knew it happened. She had read about widows who heard their husband's voices, mothers who saw their lost children in crowds. The mind under strain could conjure anything.

A flash of red caught her eye.

Not in front of her. To the left. Deeper into the treeline, where the pines grew dense and the morning light struggled to penetrate.

Another rose.

Liora rose to her feet slowly, her heart beginning to knock against her ribs. This bloom was larger than the first, its petals darker, closer to the color of dried blood than fresh. It grew from the base of a gnarled pine, its stem winding up the trunk like a vein, and it was not alone. Beyond it, further into the shadows, she could see another. And another. A trail of crimson blossoms leading into the forest, marking a path that had not been there yesterday.

The pulse returned.

Not in the ground this time. In her chest. A dull, insistent throb that matched the rhythm she had felt through her boots the day before. It pulled at her, a physical sensation like a hook behind her sternum, tugging her toward the treeline.

Every rational instinct told her to run. Every ancestral instinct, something older and deeper and buried in the marrow of her bones, told her to follow.

Liora took a step toward the trees.

Then another.

The roses did not sway. There was no wind to move them. They simply stood, perfectly still, waiting.

Deep in the forest, something shifted. A sound that was not a footstep and not a voice but something in between, a low rustle that carried the weight of intention. It was the sound of something turning its attention toward her. Something that had been asleep for a very long time and was now, slowly, beginning to wake.

Liora's hand drifted to her injured thumb. She pressed the pad of it hard against her thigh, feeling for the wound that was no longer there, and whispered her grandmother's name into the frozen air.

"Margot."

The forest did not answer.

But the roses seemed to lean closer.