Blood and Roses🔥

Chapter 5: The Room Under the Eaves

Liora did not leave Thornwood that night.

She told herself it was because the mountain roads were treacherous in the dark, that her grandmother's sedan would not survive another trip up the winding gravel drive without headlights she halfway trusted. She told herself it was because she needed time to think, to process, to separate the facts from the folklore and the old man's warnings from her own fraying nerves. She told herself a dozen sensible things, and none of them were true.

The truth was simpler and far less comfortable. The truth was that she could not leave because something in her did not want to.

She drove back to Ashwood Hollow as the sun bled out behind the mountains, staining the sky a deep, bruised purple. The sedan coughed its way up the drive, its headlights cutting weak cones through the gathering dark. By the time she killed the engine beside the cabin, the last light had vanished entirely, and the forest was a wall of blackness pressing in from every side.

The rose was still on the passenger seat. She had forgotten about it during the drive, her mind too full of execution records and unconsecrated graves and a name that tasted like ash on her tongue. Malrik. She had said it aloud twice on the drive home, just to feel its shape in her mouth. Both times, the car's radio had crackled with static. Both times, the temperature inside the sedan had dropped sharply enough to fog the windows.

She left the rose in the car. She did not want it inside the cabin. She did not want it anywhere near her while she slept.

Sleep. As if that were possible.

Inside, the cabin was freezing. The stove had burned out hours ago, and the cold had seeped into every surface, turning the air sharp and brittle. Liora moved through her evening routine mechanically. Kindling. Matches. The newspaper from 1983, its brittle pages curling into ash. The fire caught on the third try, and soon the stove was humming with warmth, casting flickering orange light across the bare walls.

She ate a can of soup cold because she was too tired to heat it. She drank water from the tap, which ran brown for three seconds before clearing. She checked the lock on the door four times. She wedged a chair under the handle for good measure.

Then she climbed the narrow stairs to the loft.

She had not explored the upper floor yet. The cabin was small enough that she had not needed to. The main room contained everything essential. A bed, a table, a stove, a sink. But there was a second space up here, tucked beneath the sloping eaves, and tonight it called to her with the quiet insistence of an unanswered question.

The stairs groaned under her weight. At the top, she found a narrow door made of unfinished pine, its handle a simple iron latch. It opened without resistance, swinging inward to reveal a room she had not known existed.

It was small. A child's room, or perhaps a servant's quarters from a century when such distinctions mattered. The ceiling sloped so sharply that she could only stand upright near the door. A single window faced the forest, its glass filmed with decades of grime. Beneath it sat a wooden trunk, its lid closed, its iron hinges dark with rust.

Liora knew that trunk. She had seen it once before, in her grandmother's apartment, tucked away in the back of a closet and never spoken of. Margot had caught her touching it when she was eight years old and had pulled her away with a sharpness that Liora had never forgotten. That is not yours to open.

But Margot was gone now. And everything in this cabin belonged to Liora.

She knelt before the trunk. The iron latch was stiff, corroded by time and neglect, but it gave way when she applied pressure. The lid creaked open, releasing a puff of air that smelled of lavender and dust and something else. Something older. Something that reminded her of the forest floor.

Inside, she found her grandmother's secrets.

Letters, dozens of them, bundled together with twine and yellowed with age. A silver locket, tarnished black, containing a curl of dark hair that could not possibly have been her grandmother's. A small leather journal, its pages filled with handwriting Liora recognized immediately, the elegant, slanted script that Margot had used all her life.

And beneath all of it, a photograph.

Liora lifted it with trembling fingers. The image was old, sepia-toned and fading, but the figures in it were unmistakable. A young woman, no older than twenty, stood beside the collapsed garden wall. She was beautiful in a sharp, wary way, her dark hair pulled back from a face that was Liora's own face, or close enough to be unsettling. Her hand rested on the shoulder of a child. A girl, perhaps five or six, with solemn eyes and a crown of wildflowers in her hair.

The woman was Margot. The girl, Liora realized with a jolt, was her mother. A woman she had never met, who had died in a car accident when Liora was an infant, who existed in her memory only as a handful of photographs and the faint, lingering scent of jasmine that her grandmother had worn until the day she died.

But it was not the woman or the child that made Liora's breath catch in her throat.

It was the figure standing behind them.

He was tall, even in the photograph, his form half-obscured by the shadows of the garden wall. His face was turned away from the camera, as if he had refused to be captured, but his outline was sharp and unmistakable. Broad shoulders. Dark hair. A posture that radiated coiled stillness, like a predator waiting for the right moment to strike.

Liora knew him. She had seen him in the forest. She had felt his pulse beneath the frozen ground.

Malrik.

The photograph slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the floor. She scrambled backward, her heart hammering, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He had been here. He had been here while her grandmother was alive, while her mother was a child. He had stood in the garden, in the light, as real and solid as anyone else.

And Margot had known. All those years, all those warnings, all those secrets. She had known.

Liora's hand closed around the leather journal. She opened it to a random page and began to read, her eyes racing across the slanted script.

June 14th, 1978

He spoke to me today. Not in words, not at first. He speaks in silences, in the spaces between heartbeats. I have started to understand him. I don't know if that frightens me or comforts me. Perhaps both.

He says the roses are his voice. As long as they bloom, he can reach me. He says I am the first Thornwood woman to listen in three hundred years. He says that makes me special. He says that makes me his.

I know I should leave. I know what he is. But the roses keep blooming, and I keep listening, and every night I tell myself tomorrow will be different.

Tomorrow never is.

Liora turned the page.

August 3rd, 1978

I am pregnant. I don't know if the child is his or if that's even possible. The things I've read in the old records, the things the townspeople whisper when they think I can't hear. They say he was executed for consorting with darkness. They say he was not human, not fully. They say he planted something in the Thornwood bloodline, something that would outlast his own death.

I should be horrified. Instead, I am writing in this journal while a dead man watches me from the garden, and I am not afraid.

What have I become?

Liora's hands were shaking so violently that the words blurred. She forced herself to turn another page.

September 19th, 1978

I am leaving. Tonight. I have packed the trunk and the locket and the letters. I will take the child and go somewhere he cannot follow. The roses have stopped blooming. I think he knows. I think he is angry. The ground near the garden wall has started to c***k open. I can feel him beneath the soil, waiting, reaching.

He told me once that a Thornwood woman's blood was the only thing that could free him. I will not bleed for him. I will not let my daughter bleed for him. I will not let any daughter of this family ever set foot on this cursed ground again.

God forgive me for what I am leaving behind.

God forgive me for what I am taking with me.

The entry ended there. The remaining pages were blank.

Liora closed the journal and set it down with the careful, deliberate motion of someone handling a live grenade. Her mind was a storm of fragments. A dead man watching from the garden. A pregnancy she did not understand. A bloodline that might not be entirely human. Her grandmother's flight, her mother's death, her own inexplicable pull toward this place and the roses and the thing in the forest.

She thought of Malrik, standing in the photograph, his face turned away. She thought of his voice, speaking her name through the frozen soil. She thought of the pulse in her chest, the one that answered his, the one that felt less like a heartbeat and more like a summons.

She was a Thornwood woman. Her blood was the key.

And she had already bled.

Downstairs, the fire in the stove crackled and popped. Outside, the wind had risen, moaning through the pines. Liora sat on the floor of the little room under the eaves, surrounded by her grandmother's secrets, and listened to the darkness pressing in.

A soft thump sounded against the window.

She did not want to look. Every instinct screamed at her to stay still, to pretend she had heard nothing, to wait for the sound to pass.

But she looked.

The window was fogged with cold, its glass clouded and opaque. Through the haze, she could make out a shape. A hand. Pressed flat against the other side of the glass, its fingers splayed, its palm broad and pale.

The hand of someone standing on the roof.

The hand of someone who had climbed up to the highest point of the cabin, to the window beneath the eaves, where no ladder reached and no tree branch extended.

Liora did not scream. She had moved beyond screaming. She sat frozen, staring at the hand, watching as the fog on the glass began to change. Letters formed in the condensation, written by an invisible finger, one deliberate stroke at a time.

F.

I.

N.

D.

Find.

M.

E.

Me.

The hand withdrew. The fog began to fade. And Liora, trembling, pressed her own fingers to the glass, tracing the letters that remained.

Find me.

She had already found him. She had found him the moment her blood touched the soil. Now she only had to decide what she was going to do about it.