Blood and Roses🔥

Chapter 8: Number on the Card

Liora did not call the number. Not at first.

She spent the remainder of the morning pacing the cabin's single room, the floorboards groaning beneath her weight, the journal clutched in one hand and the white card in the other. Back and forth. Window to door. Door to stove. Stove to window. The roses outside had not receded. If anything, they had multiplied further, their crimson heads pressing against the meadow grass like an audience waiting for a performance to begin. She could feel them watching, even through the grime on the glass. She could feel them breathing.

Her grandmother's words circled her mind in an endless loop. The roses are the danger. They have been waiting for the right Thornwood woman to feed them. Margot had written that entry forty-two years ago, on the night before she finally fled. She had known the truth and had chosen to run anyway. She had packed her daughter into the car and driven until the mountain was a memory, and she had spent the rest of her life pretending Ashwood Hollow did not exist.

But the roses had not forgotten her.

They had waited. Patiently. Silently. Blooming only when a Thornwood woman drew close enough to bleed on them. And now Liora was here, and her blood was in the soil, and the circle was tightening around the cabin like a snare.

She stopped pacing. The white card sat on the table where she had tossed it, its plain surface catching the thin winter light. A phone number. No name. No address. Just ten digits printed in black ink, the paper slightly textured, as if it had been handmade rather than manufactured.

A friend of your grandmother's. Someone who knows more about Ashwood Hollow than I do.

Sheriff Bryce's words. She had not trusted him. She still did not trust him. But he had given her this card with an urgency that felt genuine, and right now, genuine was in short supply.

She picked up her phone. No signal. Of course there was no signal. The mountains blocked everything, and the cabin might as well have been on the surface of the moon.

But she remembered the gas station in Thornwood. The one with the single pump and the peeling paint. There had been a payphone mounted on the side of the building, an ancient thing with a coiled metal cord and a receiver that looked like it had survived several decades of hard weather. She had noticed it in passing because payphones were nearly extinct, relics of a world before cell towers, and seeing one had struck her as quaint.

Now it struck her as necessary.

She pulled on her grandmother's boots, laced them tight, and grabbed her keys from the hook by the door. The sedan coughed to life on the third try, its engine rattling in protest, and she backed down the gravel drive with her eyes fixed on the meadow. The roses did not move. They simply stood in their perfect, patient circles, their petals glowing crimson against the grey afternoon light.

The drive to Thornwood took twenty minutes. The roads were empty. The trees pressed close on either side, their bare branches interlocking overhead like a lattice of bones. By the time she pulled into the gas station lot, the sun had begun its slow descent toward the peaks, and the air had taken on the brittle quality that promised another hard freeze before morning.

The payphone was exactly where she remembered it. Mounted on the side of the building, beneath a flickering fluorescent light that buzzed like a trapped insect. She parked the sedan and walked toward it, the white card pinched between her fingers, her breath pluming in the cold air.

The receiver was ice against her ear. She fed coins into the slot, the metallic clink of each quarter oddly satisfying, and dialed the number.

It rang once. Twice. Three times.

On the fourth ring, someone picked up. There was no greeting. No hello. Just the sound of breathing, slow and steady, and the faint crackle of a connection that had traveled a very long way.

"I got your number from Sheriff Bryce," Liora said. "He said you knew my grandmother."

A pause. Then a voice, female and low, roughened by age or smoke or both. "Margot Thornwood's girl."

"That's right."

"You're at Ashwood Hollow."

It was not a question. Liora felt a chill that had nothing to do with the mountain air. "How do you know that?"

"Because you're calling from the payphone at Ed's gas station. It's the only one left in fifty miles. And the only reason anyone uses it is because they're staying somewhere the cell towers don't reach." Another pause. "The roses are blooming, aren't they?"

Liora's grip tightened on the receiver. "Yes."

"Then you don't have much time." The woman's voice sharpened, shedding its roughness like a blade shedding its sheath. "Listen to me carefully. Your grandmother came to me before she left. She told me things. Things I promised to keep secret until the day another Thornwood woman came asking. That day is today. So you're going to listen, and you're going to do exactly what I tell you."

"I don't even know who you are."

"My name is Elara Voss. I'm the woman who should have been buried in that grave instead of Malrik."

The words landed like a punch to the sternum. Liora's breath caught. The fluorescent light above her flickered violently, buzzing louder, and for a moment the whole world seemed to tilt.

"I don't understand," she managed.

"Of course you don't. You've been listening to the wrong story." Elara Voss exhaled, and the sound was heavy with three centuries of exhaustion. "Malrik was not the monster. Malrik was the bait. The thing that buried him used him to draw Thornwood women to that land for generations, feeding on their blood, growing stronger with each one. Your grandmother figured it out. That's why she ran. But running doesn't break the cycle. It only pauses it."

"What is the thing? The thing that buried him?"

"It doesn't have a name. It never needed one. It was here before the Puritans. Before the mountains. Before anything human walked this continent. The witch trials were just a convenient excuse. The townspeople thought they were executing a demon. They were actually doing exactly what the darkness wanted them to do. Burying a protector. Silencing the only voice that could warn anyone."

Liora pressed her forehead against the cold metal of the payphone. Her mind was a storm of fragments. Malrik, not a monster but a protector. The roses, not his but his cage. The darkness, ancient and nameless, feeding on Thornwood blood for centuries. Her grandmother, running not from Malrik but from something far worse. And herself, standing at a gas station payphone, talking to a stranger who claimed to have been alive for three hundred years.

"How do I stop it?" she asked.

"You can't. Not alone. That's why Malrik was imprisoned in the first place. He was the only one who could hold the darkness back, and when they buried him, they removed the only barrier between it and the world. Every Thornwood woman who bled on that grave fed the darkness and weakened Malrik further. He has been fighting it from beneath the soil for three centuries, but he is almost out of strength."

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Free him." Elara's voice was iron. "Your blood bound you to him. Only your blood can break the cage. But you have to do it willingly. You have to choose it. If you run, the darkness will follow you, just like it followed Margot. It followed her to the city. It followed her to your mother. It followed her to you."

Liora thought of her mother, dead in a car accident when Liora was an infant. A crash on a clear night, no other vehicles involved, no explanation ever found. She thought of her grandmother, dying slowly of an illness no doctor could diagnose, her body failing one organ at a time for no discernible reason. She thought of herself, drawn to Ashwood Hollow by an inheritance she had never asked for, pulled by a pulse she could not explain, bleeding on a rose she should never have touched.

The darkness had been following her family for forty-two years.

It had already found her.

"How do I free him?" she asked.

The line crackled. Elara's voice dropped to a whisper. "Go back to the grave. The real grave, not the one marked on the map. The roses will try to stop you. They are the darkness's eyes, its hands, its teeth. You will have to bleed again. More than last time. Enough to break the circle."

"And then?"

"And then you will see him. Not a voice in the earth. Not a shadow in the trees. Him. And you will have to make a choice. His freedom or your safety. You cannot have both."

The line went dead.

Liora stood frozen, the receiver pressed to her ear, listening to the silence where Elara Voss had been. The fluorescent light flickered once more and then steadied, its buzz dropping to a low hum.

She hung up the phone. Her hands were shaking. Her thumb, the one that had healed so impossibly fast, was throbbing again.

She drove back to Ashwood Hollow as the sun sank behind the mountains and the sky turned the color of a bruise. The roses were waiting for her. She could see them even in the fading light, their petals glowing faintly, phosphorescent, feeding on something that was not sunlight.

She parked the sedan and walked toward the meadow. The circle of roses had tightened further. The path to the collapsed garden wall was narrower now, the blooms pressing inward, their thorns interlocking like barbed wire.

At the center of the circle, the ground was no longer still. It shifted. Breathed. Cracks spread outward from the unmarked grave, and through those cracks, a faint light pulsed. Not red. Not gold. Silver. The color of moonlight trapped beneath the soil.

Malrik was there. Not a voice. Not a shadow. A presence, pushing against the barrier that had held him for three hundred years.

And the roses were pushing back.

Liora knelt at the edge of the circle. A single thorn caught her sleeve, then her skin, drawing a line of blood down her forearm. She did not pull away. She looked at the pulsing light beneath the earth and spoke his name aloud.

"Malrik."

The ground shuddered. The silver light flared. And somewhere deep beneath the soil, a hand pressed upward against the roots and the thorns and the centuries, reaching for her.