Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
Bloom
Mortis Bloom
Nero slept more now. When awake, he was wrapped in silent agony, yet he never complained. He pretended that everything was fine, but the gray undertone to his skin, the deliberate slowness of his movements betrayed him. The curse was drinking him down, drop by drop.
And we couldn’t let our enemies see his weakness. Any sign, and Kingsley would strike.
I found Morrigan in the hallway outside Nero’s penthouse.
“I need your help,” I said, no preamble. “We need to go to France.”
Her knowing eyes held mine. “For the cure.”
I nodded. I shouldn’t be surprised. She was always perceptive.
“Dante and Orren will never agree,” she said. “Nero placed your safety above everything.”
“That’s why I need you. We have to go now, while he’s unconscious. While he can’t stop us.”
Morrigan was silent for a long moment, the only sound the distant toll of a bell. Then she gave a single, sharp nod. “I’ll help you. If there’s a chance, I’ll do whatever it takes.”
We moved quickly. Saturday morning arrived, a day without classes. Morrigan invited Dante and Orren to a private breakfast in the Victorian house they shared. She had prepared everything.
The tea was laced with a sleeping draught.
Guilt twisted in my chest as I watched Dante and Orren drink the tea, their trust in her and in me a weight in the room. But this was for Nero. They would understand.
Within five minutes, both were slumped in their chairs, breathing deep and even. The draught would hold them for hours.
“We need to move,” Morrigan urged. “As soon as they wake, they’ll come for us.”
She had prepared everything. We slipped out of the academy. When the plane landed at an airfield in France, a van was waiting.
Morrigan took the wheel. She knew the route without my direction—she’d been the driver when Orren and Dante kidnapped me from my garden. We passed by the French town in a blur. Morrigan pulled the van to a halt near the cabin where I’d lived nineteen years of my life and killed the engine.
“We’re here,” she said. “You take the lead now.”
I stepped out, and the cold seized me. December in France was a blade. The wind sliced through my jacket, but I ignored it.
My old cabin looked smaller than I remembered.
The wooden walls were weathered to a dull gray, paint curling away.
The windows were filmed with dust. The back door hung crooked on its hinges—I remembered its familiar, protesting squeak.
We’d never had the oil to fix it, not after Mom’s medical bills spiked high.
For nineteen years, it had been just Mom and me in that tiny space, holding the world at bay.
I didn’t go inside but walked around to the once beautiful garden. Now, nature had reclaimed it. Weeds choked the paths. Vines ensnared the fence. The plants I’d cultivated had either withered or burst their boundaries in an untamed sprawl.
And there, at the garden’s edge, encircled by a ring of stones, was Mom’s grave.
The marker was simple, a flat stone I’d carved myself with shaking hands the day after I buried her. The wind here was quieter, as if even the air respected this small, hallowed ground.
Sara Aurelius.
Walks Among Forgotten Gods
And Never Forgotten Here.
I dropped to my knees before the stone.
A sob tore from my chest. The grief returned, fresh and raw as the day she’d left me. I pressed my palm against the cold, rough surface.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I left you here alone.”
For nineteen years, I had believed it would always be just us. That when she died, I would remain in this cabin, tending her grave, keeping watch over her memory until my own end. I never imagined leaving. Never dreamed I would have a reason to.
But then they came and hurled me into Reaper Academy, into a world of gods and magic and danger.
And I found him.
My king. My mate across every lifetime.
Had Mom known who I was? She’d gone to great length to hide me, isolating us here. She homeschooled me, kept the wider world a distant rumor. The amulet she’d placed around my neck had concealed my very presence from Hades, my true mate.
She must have known, but she’d taken her secrets into the earth.
It didn’t matter anymore. I had to leave this past in the dust. What mattered now, with an urgency that burned in my blood, was harvesting Mortis Bloom that could cure Nero.
I pressed my palm flat against the cold stone one last time, pale light from the new moon on my shaking fingers. “I love you, Mom,” I whispered. “But I have to go. I have to save him.”
I pushed myself to my feet, wiping the tears from my cheeks.
Morrigan stood several paces back, a silent sentinel. She’d given me space, offering no comment, no false comfort. I was grateful for that. I needed the distance, and she understood.
I turned away from the garden, from the grave, from the cabin that had once contained my entire world, and nodded at Morrigan.
“Let’s go.”
I led the way toward the tree line, Morrigan a quiet presence at my back.
The forest loomed ahead, dense and dark and even menacing. The locals claimed it was cursed. I was never afraid of it.
I’d walked these paths a thousand times, gathering plants that grew nowhere else. It had never harmed me. I found the old trails by memory.
The temperature plunged as we crossed beneath the canopy. The air grew sharper, smelling of damp earth and leaves. Frost crackled underfoot.
“How far?” Morrigan asked.
“Not far,” I said. “There’s a lake about a quarter mile in. That’s where Mortis Bloom grows.”
That was the place Mom had forbidden me to enter alone. She’d always accompanied me to harvest there, calling it too dangerous.
Now I understood. That fragile point in the veil between realms—it must have been what drew her here. What made the forest feel cursed to ordinary people, who sensed the wrongness even if they couldn’t name it.
We walked in silence, our breath ghosting in the cold. No birdsong, no rustle of life—only the brittle crunch of frost and leaves underfoot.
Then I spotted the lake.
And there, beneath its dark surface, something began to glow. Softly at first, then brighter—a submerged star stirring in the deep.
Mortis Bloom.