Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
ZRYNOK
Icatch her before she falls.
The Abbot’s grip releases when my blade opens his arm from elbow to wrist, blood spraying across the pavilion floor in patterns that match the flowers blooming all around us. Arwen stumbles free, and I’m there—arm around her waist, pulling her away from the monster, putting myself between them.
The vial arcs through the air. Tumbles end over end, crimson essence glowing within.
Hits the stone floor.
Shatters.
The concentrated Bloom explodes outward like liquid fire—spraying across the pavilion, coating the nearby cultivation beds, saturating the air with spores so thick they’re visible as a crimson cloud. The essence hits my boots, my legs, seeps through leather and fabric to reach the skin beneath.
And the Garden screams.
Not a human sound. Something deeper. Something that seems to come from the flowers themselves, from the transformed bodies in the cultivation beds, from the very soil that’s drunk blood for three hundred years.
The Bloom flowers convulse—petals shuddering, stems writhing, the human-hybrids in the beds thrashing with sudden, terrible awareness.
“The essence is destabilizing.” Arwen’s voice cuts through the chaos. “The whole Garden is going to—”
She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to.
The first flower explodes outward, sending petals like razors in every direction. I shove Arwen down, cover her body with mine, feel the petals slice across my back in lines of fire. More flowers follow. The careful cultivation of centuries is tearing itself apart.
But the Abbot is still alive.
Clutching his ruined arm. Retreating toward the pavilion’s rear exit. Screaming for Keepers who are too far away to help.
I push myself up. Find my sword where it fell. Meet Arwen’s gaze.
“Go.” Her hand presses against my chest—quick, a touch that says everything words can’t. “I’ll handle the Garden. You handle him.”
I don’t argue. Don’t hesitate. Just press a fierce kiss to her temple—goodbye and promise and everything we haven’t had time to say.
Then I turn and follow the Abbot into the dying Garden.