Blood and Roses🔥

Chapter 6: Sheriff's Warning

Morning arrived with a knock at the door.

Liora jolted awake on the floor of the little room under the eaves, her back stiff and her neck crooked at an angle that promised hours of pain. The journal lay open beside her, its pages crinkled where she had clutched it in her sleep. Pale light filtered through the grimy window, and for a disoriented moment, she forgot where she was.

The knock came again. Three firm raps, spaced evenly, the knock of someone accustomed to being answered.

She scrambled to her feet, swaying as blood rushed back to her limbs. Her reflection in the window glass was ghostly. Hair tangled, eyes shadowed, a faint crease across her cheek where the floorboards had pressed into her skin. She looked like a woman who had spent the night wrestling with ghosts. She looked, she thought grimly, exactly like her grandmother must have looked forty-two years ago.

The stairs groaned as she descended. The chair she had wedged under the door handle was still in place. She stared at it for a moment, then at the window where the hand had pressed against the glass, then at her own fingers, which still remembered the cold shock of tracing those letters. Find me.

She had not dreamed it. The words were still there, faint but legible, etched in the frost that had not yet melted from the windowpane.

Another knock. Harder this time.

"Miss Thornwood. Sheriff Callum Bryce. I'd appreciate a word."

The voice was male, deep, carrying the flat vowels of someone who had lived his whole life in these mountains. Liora straightened her shirt, ran her fingers through her hair in a gesture that accomplished nothing, and pulled the chair away from the door.

Sheriff Callum Bryce was not what she expected. She had pictured someone weathered and grizzled, a man carved from the same granite as the mountain itself. The man standing on her sagging porch was younger than that, perhaps forty, with dark hair cropped short and a jaw that looked like it had been shaped by years of clenching. His uniform was crisp, his badge polished, his eyes the color of winter river water. Grey-blue. Cold without being unkind.

He was not alone. A deputy stood behind him on the gravel drive, a gangly young man with a notepad and an expression of profound boredom. The deputy's gaze drifted toward the treeline and stayed there, as if the forest were more interesting than anything the sheriff had to say.

"Miss Thornwood," the sheriff said. It was not a question.

"That's me." Liora gripped the doorframe, blocking the entrance with her body. She had no intention of inviting him inside. "What can I do for you, Sheriff?"

"Callum is fine." He said it absently, his attention already moving past her, scanning the interior of the cabin. His eyes paused on the woodstove, the unmade bed, the stairs leading to the loft. Cataloguing. Filing. "I heard you were in town yesterday. Edie's diner. Henry Calder's office."

"News travels fast."

"Small town. Fewer than two hundred people. News is about all we have." He shifted his weight, and she noticed for the first time that he was holding something. A manila folder, worn at the edges, stuffed with papers. "Mind if I come in?"

"I do, actually."

The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "Fair enough. I'll be brief. I knew your grandmother. Margot. She was a good woman. Quiet. Kept to herself, mostly, but she helped people when they needed it. Paid for old Mrs. Harlowe's prescriptions for three years and never told a soul. I found out anyway, because that's my job. Finding things out."

"I'm aware of my grandmother's character, Sheriff."

"Callum."

"I'm aware of it, Sheriff."

This time, the twitch became something closer to a real smile. It vanished quickly. "I'm not here to cause you trouble, Miss Thornwood. I'm here because Margot would have wanted someone to warn you. And since she's not around to do it herself, that someone is going to have to be me."

Liora's grip on the doorframe tightened. "Warn me about what?"

Sheriff Bryce opened the manila folder. Inside were newspaper clippings, some yellowed with age, others crisper and more recent. He pulled one out and handed it to her.

The headline read: LOCAL MAN FOUND DEAD NEAR ASHWOOD HOLLOW. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

The date was March 14th, 2003.

"There have been incidents," the sheriff said, "on that property. Stretching back longer than anyone in this town cares to remember. Hikers who went missing. Hunters who came back wrong. People who got too close to the old garden wall and were never quite right afterward. Most of it got written off as accidents, or animal attacks, or the kind of thing that happens when city folk wander into the backcountry without knowing what they're doing."

He handed her another clipping. SEARCH CALLED OFF FOR MISSING COUPLE. NO TRACE FOUND IN THORNWOOD NATIONAL FOREST. 1997.

A third. TEENAGER SURVIVES NIGHT IN WOODS, CLAIMS "SOMETHING IN THE TREES" WATCHED HER. 2011.

"This last one," the sheriff said, tapping the third clipping, "was my daughter. She was sixteen. She and her friends dared each other to camp near the old Hollow. She was the only one who made it through the night. The others ran back before midnight. She stayed because she was stubborn, and because she didn't believe in ghost stories." He paused. "She believes now. Hasn't set foot in the woods since."

Liora stared at the clippings. The paper felt greasy beneath her fingers, as if the ink itself were tainted. "Why are you showing me this?"

"Because you're a Thornwood. And Thornwood women have a bad habit of thinking they're immune to what lives on this mountain." His grey-blue eyes held hers, steady and unblinking. "You're not. Margot wasn't. Her mother wasn't. Whatever arrangement your family made with this place, it doesn't protect you. It owns you."

The word landed like a slap. Liora's chin lifted. "I don't belong to anyone."

"Maybe not yet. But you're staying here. You're digging into things. You went to Henry Calder and asked about the executions. That tells me you've already seen something. Something you can't explain." He leaned closer, lowering his voice. "Let me give you some advice, Miss Thornwood. Free advice, because I owe your grandmother a debt. Sell the land. Sell it to the county, sell it to a developer, sell it to anyone who'll take it. Then get in your car and drive until Thornwood is nothing but a dot in your rearview mirror."

"And if I don't?"

The sheriff was quiet for a moment. Behind him, the deputy shifted uncomfortably, his gaze still fixed on the treeline.

"Then you should know that the roses are blooming," Callum Bryce said. "They bloomed in 1978, right before your grandmother left. They bloomed in 1954, when a surveyor went missing on the property. They bloomed in 1891, the year the old Thornwood mansion burned to the ground with three people inside. Every time those roses bloom, something happens. Something bad. And the last time they bloomed in November was three hundred years ago, when the town executed a man on your property and buried him in the cold ground."

Liora's blood chilled. She did not ask how he knew about the roses. She did not ask how he knew about the execution. She already understood that in Thornwood, the past was not past. It was present, it was watching, and it was growing out of the frozen soil in shades of crimson and black.

"Thank you for the warning," she said, her voice flat. "Is there anything else?"

The sheriff studied her face. Whatever he found there made his jaw tighten. "You're not going to leave, are you?"

"No."

"Then at least take this." He pulled a card from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. It was plain white, with a phone number printed in black ink. No name. No title. "If something happens. If you see something you can't explain. If those roses start doing things they shouldn't be doing. Call that number. Day or night."

"Whose number is it?"

"A friend of your grandmother's. Someone who knows more about Ashwood Hollow than I do." He stepped back, straightening his uniform. "Be careful, Miss Thornwood. This mountain doesn't forgive. And it doesn't forget."

He turned and walked back to the patrol car. The deputy scrambled after him, throwing one last nervous glance toward the forest. The engine rumbled to life, and the car crunched down the gravel drive, leaving Liora alone on the porch with a handful of newspaper clippings and a white card that felt heavier than it should.

She looked at the card. Then at the forest. Then at the roses she knew were still blooming somewhere among the trees, waiting for her to follow them again.

She went back inside. She did not call the number.

Not yet.

First, she needed to read the rest of her grandmother's journal.