In my past life, I was a vampire

Chapter Two · Bestowed and Chosen

On the first morning after the fever broke, Linda was woken by birdsong outside the window. She opened her eyes and stared for a while at the unfamiliar ceiling above her before slowly remembering that she was in the bedroom upstairs at the flower house. Sunlight streamed through the slats of the blinds, laying bands of gold across her quilt; the air was full of tiny drifting dust motes, and of a faint sweetness that seemed to float upon it—the mingled breath of dozens of potted flowers in the shop below, a scent she had always found as familiar as her own skin, yet this morning it made her throat tighten a little.

She touched her forehead. Cool. The fever was finally gone. The memory of those three burning days floated behind a veil of water, blurred and indistinct: her mother weeping at the bedside, bowl after bowl of rice porridge and bitter medicine, and the broken, fragmentary dreams. In the dreams there was a valley, and moonlight, and a figure standing far off whom she could never quite make out—only a pair of eyes, watching her across years she could not count. Linda shook her head to drive the fragments away, and then her heart gave a sudden leap—the flower! Where was Moonlit Blue? Before she had fainted it had turned into a mass of dark red light, as though it had caught fire, and her mother had kept wanting to carry it away…

She did not stop to wash or dress. Barefoot, she pushed open the nursery door. Morning light was flooding in through the gauze window, filling the little room with brightness. There, on the windowsill, the pot was still there—but her heart sank at once. The plant she had tended so carefully, the plant that used to k****e its faint blue sheen each night, now drooped limply over the rim of the pot, its five petals crumpled into a withered, wrinkled knot, their edges scorched yellow and curled, as though someone had passed a flame over them; the stem that had once stood proud now bent softly, and the leaves, drained of moisture, hung lifeless over the edge of the clay. The whole plant was grey and listless, wearing the dull, despondent air of a thing that is dying.

“No… it can’t be.” Linda threw herself to the windowsill, her voice trembling. Gently she lifted the pot; the fingertip that touched the stem went cold, and the leaves rustled dry as paper. She ran to fetch a jug of clean water and poured it slowly around the soil. The water sank in at once, so she poured another jug, nearly soaking the whole pot through. But the plant only swayed feebly, its leaves still hanging soft and limp—if anything, it looked even more lifeless than before. Linda crouched before the pot, her eyes burning with panic. Then she remembered the legend her mother had spoken of—that this flower lived on moonlight and on blood. Water. Perhaps water was the one thing it did not want at all.

She bit her lip, turned, and rummaged out a sewing needle from a drawer, and a small bottle of alcohol from the medicine box. She held the needle’s point over the flame of an alcohol lamp, then wiped it twice with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. Taking a deep breath, she shut her eyes and pricked the pad of her left index finger. A round, glossy bead of blood swelled instantly from the tiny wound, red as a little agate.

Linda did not hesitate. She held her fingertip above the wilted flower and squeezed gently. The bead trembled, then fell—straight onto the middle of a dry, curled petal. At first nothing happened. Linda held her breath and could almost hear her own heart pounding like a drum. Then, at the very edge where the drop of blood was slowly spreading, a tiny, thread-fine red light flickered up, like a single spark fallen among dead grass.

The spark spread swiftly. The point of red crept along the petal’s veins like a living thing, and wherever it passed, the scorched, yellowed edges slowly uncurled, turning soft and full again, sheened with a warm luster. The shrunken stem straightened inch by inch; the drooping leaves lifted themselves one by one, their color rising from dead grey to deep green, the fine teeth along their edges sharpening anew. At last the five petals, as though someone had woken them from sleep, opened slowly, slowly, in the morning light—not with the bewitching dark red of the night, but a deep, quiet, passionate red, so deep it verged on purple, like aged wine, like charcoal burned to its utmost in the depths of a stove. The whole flower trembled faintly in its clay pot, as though stretching its limbs and bones.

Linda knelt on the nursery floor, tears streaming down her face before she even knew they had come. She wiped them away with her hand and looked at the plant, renewed and alive, laughing and crying at once. She pulled out her phone and, with trembling fingers, filmed the moment—the morning light, the clay pot, the flower burning red as fire, and her own left index finger, still bearing the needle’s mark and beaded with blood. In the video her own voice could be heard, thick with tears: “It’s alive… it really came alive…”

In the days that followed, Linda tried every remedy she could think of. She combed through the gardening magazines and plant encyclopedias the flower house had accumulated, and searched the internet with countless phrases: blue plants that bloom under the moon, flowers that live on moonlight, blossoms watered with blood, glowing orchids… She flipped through dozens of pages of search results, dug through old threads on plant forums, even wrote to professors of botany at several universities, attaching photographs. The replies were either polite regrets—“unfortunately we cannot identify this specimen”—or silence. The flower in the photographs was simply too strange: there was no record of it when it was blue, and none when it was red, as though it had never belonged to any botanical catalog in the world.

She went to the town library, too—a small red-brick building that had once been an old bank. Mrs. Baker, the librarian, kindly helped her drag out whole shelves of botanical atlases and page through them one by one, from field guides to the wildflowers of Texas to old European gardening manuals, even to facsimile editions of handwritten botanical notes left by nineteenth-century pioneers. On those yellowed pages were drawn many wildflowers that had long since vanished, but never the one she sought. Mrs. Baker adjusted her reading glasses and said apologetically: “Child, I’ve worked here for over thirty years and never seen a flower like this. Why don’t you ask a botanist?” Linda thanked her, carried the stack of atlases out of the library, and stood on the steps with a sudden strange feeling: that the flower had deliberately hidden itself from every record in the world, choosing to live only in the mountains, only under the moonlight, only in the memory of one person—her.

On a weekend afternoon, Linda switched off her computer, rubbed her sore eyes, and suddenly remembered an old woman who lived at the eastern edge of town. The old woman’s name was Palmer—Mrs. Palmer, as everyone in town called her—said to be over ninety, the longest-lived soul for dozens of miles around. She had lived in Oak Springs her whole life; in her youth she had traveled widely with her father and knew many plants that no one else could name. When the town’s children were bitten by snakes or scratched by poison ivy, the grown-ups always said: “Go and see Mrs. Palmer.” Linda’s mother had mentioned her when Linda was small, but after all these years away, studying and working, she had simply forgotten the name.

She found the old wooden box, picked out a paper bag of oatmeal cookies she had just baked, tucked her phone with the flower’s photographs safely away, and drove toward the east end of town.

Mrs. Palmer lived in a lane that branched off the far end of Main Street—an old farmhouse painted white, with two rocking chairs on the porch and a wind chime hanging from the eaves that sang a little jingle whenever the breeze passed. Linda parked by the roadside, climbed the steps, and had not yet knocked when the door opened by itself. In the doorway stood a small, thin old woman, her silver hair coiled in a bun at the nape of her neck, wearing a floral cotton dress and a shawl; the wrinkles on her face were as deep as walnut shells, yet her eyes were clear in a way that did not belong to a woman of her years. She looked Linda up and down without a word of greeting and asked outright: “You’re the girl who runs the flower house, aren’t you? I heard you were sick for three days. Are you well now?”

“Quite well, Mrs. Palmer, thank you for thinking of me.” Linda held out the paper bag. “I baked these cookies myself. Please try them.”

The old woman took the bag, but set it on the low cabinet by the door and turned toward the house. “Come in and sit. You didn’t come here to deliver cookies.”

The room was dim, full of old furniture and old books, with a faint scent of lavender and dust floating in the air. Mrs. Palmer sat down in the rattan chair by the fireplace and gestured to the sofa across from her. When Linda was seated, she lifted those clear eyes and looked at her steadily. “Tell me. What did you meet?”

Linda’s heart jumped, and the words she had been holding back for so long almost burst out by themselves: “Mrs. Palmer, have you ever seen a flower that blooms at night and gives off light—blue light, as though it had drunk the moonlight in?”

The old woman did not answer at once. She lowered her eyelids, her fingers absently tracing the cloth on her knee, and only after a long while said quietly: “In my ninety-three years, I have never seen one with my own eyes.” She raised her gaze and let it rest directly on Linda’s face. “But I have heard of it from my mother. And my mother said her own mother spoke of it too—in our family, that legend has been passed down at least four generations.”

Linda’s heart beat faster. “Then what… what is it, really?”

Mrs. Palmer did not answer the question directly. Instead she asked: “When you saw it, was it near the full moon? Were you in the mountains, somewhere near water? Was the light blue, too bright to seem real? And when you reached out to touch it, did you feel as though it were looking at you?”

Linda nodded again and again. “Yes. All of it. It was growing in a crack in a stone bluff in the mountains to the north; the moonlight fell on it, and its blue light rose in layer after layer. I dug it up and kept it for days, and then one of its thorns pricked me, and a drop of blood fell on it, and it turned red and began to glow dark red, and that very night I ran a fever for three days…”

“It pricked your hand, tasted your blood, and changed color…” The old woman murmured the words over to herself, and her eyes suddenly brightened, as though some long-doubted thing had at last been confirmed. She rose, walked to an old oak cabinet in the corner, opened a drawer with trembling hands, and searched for a long while before drawing out a faded tin box. She opened it. Inside, on yellowed velvet, lay a single petal dried almost transparent, its color long since beyond reading—nothing left but the faintest, dessicated stain of deep red.

“My mother left me this.” Mrs. Palmer cupped the petal carefully in her palms. “When she was young, she herded sheep with my great-grandfather in these mountains, and one spring, by a stream, she saw a flower like this. My mother said it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life—so blue it was like a piece of the sky had fallen and lain down in the grass. She wanted to dig it up and plant it, but the moment she reached out her hand, the flower vanished into thin air—leaving only a ring of gleaming damp on the ground, as though it had never existed at all.”

Linda was stunned. “It vanished?”

“Vanished.” Mrs. Palmer put the petal back into the box. “My mother said that flower cannot be seen by just anyone. If it is willing for you to see it, then you see it; if it is not, you may walk right past it and it is nothing but ordinary air. The flower in our family—my great-grandfather saw it first. He called my mother over, and only then did she see it; when she reached out to dig it up, it disappeared again. Later my great-grandfather said the flower was waiting for someone—and the one it was waiting for was not my mother.”

“Waiting for someone?” Linda’s voice went tight. “Waiting for whom?”

Mrs. Palmer was silent for a while before she spoke. “My mother called it Twilight-Blood. The legend says it is one of the oldest flowers in the world—older than this country, older than the pioneers’ plows and their railroads. It rarely appears—perhaps once every forty years, in the years when people on earth can see those seven stars in the sky. Do you know the Seven Sisters?”

“The Pleiades?” Linda said. “I learned about them in astronomy class in middle school. They’re also called the Seven Sisters.”

“Yes, those.” The old woman nodded. “Our family has passed down this saying for generations: Twilight-Blood appears only in years when those seven stars are nearly lined up. In such a year it sprouts quietly somewhere in the mountains, waiting for the night when the moon is brightest, to open a single flower. It lives on moonlight, and it lives on blood—the legend says it loves human blood, and the purest kind of moonlight.”

Linda thought of that night, of kneeling in the cold damp earth gazing at the flower for a very long, long time, and suddenly a wild thought rose in her heart: “Then how… how does it choose its person?”

Mrs. Palmer looked into her eyes and spoke slowly, word by word: “The flower sheds spores—you cannot see them, unless they choose to let you. The spores drift in the air, and on bright moonlit nights, if a person passes by the flower, they gather around that person and circle him, and then, in one instant, they all come down together and blossom where they fall. In that moment, the flower has chosen. My mother said that the one who is chosen is often a person with an empty place in the heart—empty enough to hold the things no one else can see.”

A chill ran down Linda’s spine. She remembered that night, when she had parted the ferns and walked toward the light—under the moon, the air had indeed seemed full of countless extremely fine, glittering motes of dust, like fireflies and yet not like fireflies. She had taken them for insect dust rising in the dark and paid them no mind; but now, looking back, those glittering things had clearly been circling around her…

“You mean…” Linda’s voice trembled. “It chose me?”

Mrs. Palmer did not answer. She only looked at her and said: “My mother could not keep the flower, because she was not the one it was waiting for. But you dug it up, you kept it alive, it tasted your blood, and it lived again—Linda, have you ever wondered: after all those years in the big city, why was it on that particular night that you thought of going up into the mountains? Why did you take that particular path, the one you did not usually take? And why, of all things, did you see it?”

Linda opened her mouth, but could not bring out a single word.

“I don’t understand those ghostly, godly things,” Mrs. Palmer said, and suddenly sighed, her tone softening a little. “But in more than ninety years of living, I have slowly come to understand one truth: some things do not come looking for you—rather, you were already prepared to meet them. You came back to open a flower shop. You went running into the mountains. You grew all those flowers. Perhaps all of it was simply so that, on that one night, you could walk to the place where that flower stood.”

Linda was silent for a long time. Outside, the wind chime rang a few more times, and the light in the room grew dimmer. She looked down at her left index finger, at the small, healed-over needle mark, and suddenly it seemed to her like a tiny mark that glowed.

“Mrs. Palmer,” she asked in a low voice, “what happens to the one who is chosen?”

The old woman shook her head. “I don’t know. My mother didn’t know, and her mother before her didn’t know, either. The legend only says that the one who is chosen will see what others cannot see, will dream what others cannot dream—and will set out on a narrow path from which there is no turning back.” She paused, then added: “But since the flower chose you, it means that in your heart there must be something it needs.”

When Linda came out of Mrs. Palmer’s house, the sun was already low in the west. She parked by the roadside and gazed at the rolling hills in the distance, her heart in a turmoil. A forty-year bloom cycle, the Seven Sisters, Twilight-Blood, spores choosing their master… the words rolled about in her head like a handful of loose beads, refusing to string themselves together. But one thing she grew more and more certain of: what she had seen that night was not merely a flower that glowed. What she had seen was a door.

By the time she drove back into town, the sky had darkened. Linda parked at the door of the flower house and was about to get out when her phone rang—the screen lit up with “Mom.” She answered, and her mother’s voice came through with its usual concern: “Back already? Where have you been, coming home after dark like this.”

“I went to the east end of town to see Mrs. Palmer.” Linda paused, then decided to keep back everything about the flower. “She told me some old stories. Quite interesting.”

Her mother was silent for a moment on the other end of the line, as though she wanted to say something more, but in the end she only sighed. “Linda, Mama knows your temper—once you set your heart on something, nothing can stop you. That potted flower… if you truly can’t bear to part with it, then keep it, and keep it well. But you must promise Mama: if ever a day comes when something feels wrong, when your body runs hot again, you tell Mama first thing. Do you hear?”

Linda’s nose stung. She answered softly: “I hear you, Mama.”

“All right. Go and get yourself something hot to eat. Mama still has the bone broth she simmered this morning; I’ll bring you a jar tomorrow.”

“Good. Good night, Mama.”

“Good night, my girl.”

After hanging up, Linda sat in the car for a while before pushing open the door and stepping into the flower house. The night had fallen completely dark by then, and through the crack of the nursery door seeped a line of warm, dark red light.

Back at the flower house, dusk had already dimmed into night. Linda pushed open the nursery door, and moonlight came pouring in through the gauze window, falling upon the potted plant. After the blood she had fed it that dawn, the flower seemed to have come fully alive—by day it stood bright and vigorous, and by night it shone more brilliantly than it ever had before; only, what it gave off now was no longer that cool, remote blue of long ago, but a warm, dark red light, like a slow-beating heart warmed by the moon.

Linda stood in the doorway and looked at it for a very long time. Then she asked softly: “You chose me… so what is it you want me to do?”

The flower, of course, did not answer. But in the very instant her words fell, the halo of dark red light swelled the faintest degree, as though it were answering her. Linda could not help laughing, and almost crying at the same time. She walked over, crouched down, and shifted the pot a little farther into the moonlight, so that it might drink in more of the silver glow.

“All right, then,” she said, her voice very soft, as though making a promise to herself. “I’ll wait, and watch, and see what it is you mean to tell me.”