Chapter 25
The secondary greenhouse was transformed as I watched Nicholas and Agnes move about the space, prepping for the surgery.
Tables had been cleared and repositioned, creating a central work area illuminated by multiple oil lamps hung from hooks in the ceiling beams. The warm light cast everything in sharpness, driving away the shadows that usually gathered in the corners and turning every surface amber and gold.
Clean white sheets covered the largest table, the fabric pulled smooth and tucked at the edges—a bed prepared for someone who would not be climbing into it voluntarily.
Beside it, smaller surfaces held surgical instruments arranged in glinting silver rows, each one catching the light and making my stomach turn within my gilded prison.
The greenhouse looked more like an operating theater, though the plants surrounding us on all sides gave it an unsettling quality, their leaves pressing toward the lamplight with arboreal hunger, their roots visible through the glass containers that lined the shelves, pale and reaching and entirely too close for my own comfort considering what I now knew about their possible ambitions.
My companion had installed us in the corner with my arms crossed over my chest, wearing my body like a coat it had borrowed with no intention of returning.
Its restlessness built with the slow insistence of pressure inside a kettle ready to scream—accumulating and spreading with each passing minute.
"How much longer?" I heard myself say, my voice colored with barely contained annoyance I would never have directed at either of them.
Agnes looked up from the lamp she was adjusting, her gaze sliding sideways to Nicholas before she returned to her work without answering. Her fingers trembled slightly as she smoothed a wrinkle from the sheet.
She knew.
Whether Nicholas had told her everything or she had simply understood something was wrong about me, I could not be sure.
But the wariness in her movements when they brought her near me, the extra distance she placed between herself and my hands, how she angled her body away without appearing to, told me he had said enough for her to be afraid of me.
"Soon," Nicholas said, without turning from the instrument tray he was arranging.
My companion exhaled through my nose and fixed my gaze on Agnes, watching her work. I felt it happening before the images arrived—the slow gathering of obscene hunger, the restless energy seeking an outlet and selecting her the way a predator selects from a herd.
The image came all at once, cold and cruel, pressed into my vision—Agnes's skull split cleanly along the crown, the bone folding back to reveal gray matter glistening wet in the lamplight, soft and yielding.
How the bone would crack beneath my hands.
How I could clear the cavity with my fingers and press dark cemetery soil into the hollowed space.
I could push seeds down into the warm wet matter and watch the luminous flowers root there, growing through the gaps where her thoughts had been, beautiful and inevitable.
Copper and earth flooded my tongue and I recoiled from it, forcing myself back from my eyes until her face was distant and blurred.
Stop, I screamed, from somewhere deep inside myself. Please stop.
The vine laughed, the sound reverberating through my skull, contained entirely within me.
Hawthorne appeared in the doorway, his hand closed around something I could not make out from where my body was positioned.
My companion's attention snapped toward him, every other thought abandoned in an instant. My eyes moved without my direction, tracing his path from the threshold to the center of the room, and then beyond him, to the two flower containers sitting on the far workbench.
Panic filled my throat, my pulse quickening, my breathing coming in small, short pants as my gaze tracked his movement toward them.
The white blooms seemed to glow brighter in my vision, their pulse brightening.
The vine inside me responded to their proximity with a yearning so enormous it briefly crowded out every other sensation.
Hawthorne moved closer, his own vine reaching for the flowers, urging him to touch them. My heart ached for him with a tenderness that had no place to go, but the vine inside me did not share the sentiment.
Every muscle in my body tensed as his free hand slowly moved toward the flower, his fingers barely grazing one of the petals before the rage exploded behind my ribs.
My vision shifted, a red wash bleeding across everything until the world looked like something burning from the inside.
My feet began to move, my body stalking across the greenhouse before I had registered the impulse.
No, I screamed, slamming myself against the glass. No, he is not going to take it, he does not know what it is. He is only looking. Please!
The vine inside me repeated its single thought over and over inside my mind, drowning me out entirely.
THE FLOWER IS MINE! THE FLOWER IS MINE!
Nicholas turned. I watched through the red haze as his eyes moved between me and Hawthorne, taking in my trajectory and the set of my body and the expression I was wearing.
I pressed my palms against my eyes with every ounce of force I could manufacture, trying to make him see past the vine's face to the person behind it.
His brows furrowed. The instruments in his hand clattered to the tray.
He moved quickly, but it was not enough, because the vine was not moving my legs at a natural speed. The moment his hand reached for my arm, the rage surged with renewed force that obliterated the vine's remaining restraint, and my hands drove into his chest with a strength I had never possessed.
Nicholas stumbled back and collided with the table, instruments scattering across the floor in a cascade of metal that rang against the stone like a struck bell.
Agnes cried out, the sound sharp and involuntary, and I screamed at her in the silence of my own mind to run, to get out, to put walls between herself and my hands.
My feet slowed for one half-second.
My fingers closed around a scalpel from the floor.
I felt the handle settle into my grip, and from somewhere very deep and very small inside myself I understood what was about to happen and began to sob without tears, without sound, the grief of it pressing against my prison in long silent waves.
Behind me, Nicholas was already scrambling upright, calling my name over and over, his voice the only real sound in a room that had otherwise gone terribly silent.
My companion refused to hear him.
It continued repeating its single thought and I repeated mine, begging it to stop. Hawthorne turned to face me, his large, dark eyes finding mine with an expression I had not allowed myself to see before.
Recognition. Adoration. Love.
He unfurled his hand, holding a single red rose cradled in his palm, offering it to me.
I stared out, tears already choking me from within. He watched me back, as though waiting—hoping—I would remember him.
The vine inside me snarled at the offering, swatting it away before my hand brought the blade across his throat in one swift, clean motion.
The sound embedded itself into my brain, a wet gurgling tear that sliced through something that was neither entirely flesh nor entirely plant but the terrible seam between both.
Green-gold sap welled up immediately, luminous and warm, pouring through the incision and running down Hawthorne's neck, soaking the collar of his shirt in spreading concentric stains that glowed in the lamplight.
The vine inside him emerged slowly, the tendrils that made up his circulatory system pressing through the incision as the pressure of the cut opened the seam between his constructed throat and the botanical matter beneath.
They were thick and pale and luminescent, threaded through with the dark tracery of sap channels, writhing slightly as air touched their severed roots.
Hawthorne stood very still for a moment, his dark eyes still on mine, widening with confusion and hurt as his hand came up to touch the wound with those long, gentle fingers, feeling the strange protrusion of his own interior.
Then his legs went.
He collapsed sideways with the slow, terrible patience of a tree finally giving way after a long felling.
From behind the glass, I came apart.
I had built him. We had built him—Nicholas and I, night after long night in the greenhouse with our lamps and our journals and our reckless, magnificent certainty that we could do something unprecedented.
I had named him. I had argued for his consciousness when Nicholas doubted it, had watered him and watched him tend his plants and felt something I had no clinical language for whenever he brought roses to me.
He was mine and I had loved him.
I pressed myself flat against the back of my own skull and shook as sobs wracked my internal body.
Nicholas's arms wrapped around me, dragging me backward from where I stood over Hawthorne's crumpled form, and my body wheeled in his grip. My arm swung before I could brace for another blow to my broken heart, the scalpel still clutched in my hand, the blade sliding across his flesh.
He went very still.
His face filled my vision—eyes gone wide, fixed on me with an expression that contained everything at once, shock, fear, grief, and love.
His lips parted, a strangled gurgle rising up from his chest as his mouth formed my name.
Blood trickled onto his white linen shirt, soaking, then spreading through.
His hands came up to his neck, fingers squeezing around the wound, desperately trying to stop the bleeding.
I stared from inside my mind, unable to scream or cry or do anything except watch his life slip between his fingers drip by drip.
The monster watched too, uncaring that I could not breathe or even feel my heart beating anymore. My body was shutting down, refusing to live without the pieces of me that kept me alive.
My feet turned away, the vine orienting my body toward the flower, reaching with my free hand to cradle the pot to my chest.
A flash of glass and gold liquid caught the lamplight from the corner of my eye, and then a needle pressed into my throat, finding the gap beside the ribbon.
The vine turned my head sharply.
Agnes’s trembling hand dropped away, her feet scrambling back quickly to put a safe distance between us.
The compound entered my bloodstream with a warmth that spread in every direction simultaneously.
The vine fought it, pulling against the mixture with everything it had, the fury still drumming through my nervous system even as the muscles that had been executing it began to lose their rigidity.
It tried to hold on, pressing at every surface of my mind, raging against the dissolution of its control with the desperation of something that had been interrupted at the most critical moment of its plan.
Then it released me.
The clay pot slipped from my fingers and hit the floor, splitting it with a sound that echoed through the space like tiny bones cracking. Soil scattered, the flower spilling free—a grave-bed hastily spread at my feet.
My legs went out, the cold stone rising to meet me.
The last thing I saw was Nicholas. His face lay against the stone mere inches from mine, the flower’s pulsing glow catching in his lifeless amber eyes.
My fingers twitched at my side, aching to touch him one last time, but I could not move.
Darkness pulled me under and his voice moved through my mind one last time.
“The human body is such an optimistic arrangement, considering how easily it comes apart, and how quickly it begins to rot. You have three minutes, perhaps, before the brain begins to fail without oxygen. Five, if fortune is feeling generous…”