27. White Flowers Unfolding
27
White Flowers Unfolding
Calliope
T here it is. She’s said it. Rory tears his focus from the road, his eyes lingering on her a second too long before he’s forced to look away. The fear she’s been holding onto since she left her husband unspools in her belly. “My husband—”
“You don’t—don’t have to explain if you—” Rory is saying, eyes trained on the road again. His grip on the steering wheel is so tight, she worries he’s going to bend it in half.
She shakes her head, fingering a torn edge in the lining of the seat. “Seems fair, considering what you just shared.”
His shoulders relax, just a fraction. From her angle, she can see his jaw unclench. “It’s different. You deserved to know why we left Lyon’s Cross like that.” His eyes dart over and she’s sure he’s looking at the dried flakes of blood around her nose. “You don’t have to tell me this, if you don’t want to.”
“I want to tell you.” She looks out of the window again. “I need to tell you. I had nothing to do with his death.” She turns back to him, twisting in her seat so that her shoulders are facing him. “But he’s not dead. He’s a warlock. A powerful one. Who used my magic and the magic of others to fuel his work. His business deals were always shady and usually ended in death, but not his death. Never his death. He had…precautions against such things.” And then before Rory can ask, she adds, “I don’t know what precautions. There’s not much that can cheat death, but I know he isn’t dead. And I’m sure he’s looking for me.”
Rory’s jaw clenches again. “Any idea where he would be then?”
“No. But I doubt he could trace me to Willow Lake. I hitchhiked there, took a weird route.” She returns to fiddling with the split fabric, pushing the torn vinyl with her thumbnail. “I feel safe at the house. And with Kane and…with you. You make me feel safe.”
Rory sighs, finally relaxing his grip on the wheel. He reaches over and squeezes her knee. His fingers are cold and heavy. Comforting. She wishes her dress wasn’t so long, so she could feel his skin against hers. He doesn’t say anything, but, then again, he doesn’t need to.
The car speeds along the highway and the silence that envelops them is tender and soft. Vines spread across the forest floor of her Mind’s Eye. White flowers unfold under a dark velvet moon.
She wipes again at her nose, feeling the dried blood flaking off. It had dripped down her chin and trailed down, soaking into the neckline of her dress. The fabric feels cold and stiff against her skin. She was honest when she told Rory she didn’t know why this use of magic caused a nosebleed, though she wonders if it has to do with the fact that she wasn’t trying to create an illusion for Officer Burton. It simply happened. The Ether knew she needed help and it opened itself to her command.
But what she did with the gate was enacted with purpose. She had a goal, and she pulled what she needed from the Ether, too quick to ask, too frantic to wait for the Ether to do it itself. She hopes she didn’t pull too hard. She wants to slip back in, to make sure she didn’t do any damage—to the Ether or to herself—but when her eyes slip shut, she finds sleep taking her instead.
* * *
She wakes when Rory pulls into the driveway. The sun is just beginning to set, and the house is awash in pale blues and golds. Kane greets them by the door, as if he’s been standing sentry on the banister all day.
“Is that blood?” he caws .
Calliope looks down at her dress with a frown. “I need a bath.”
“What happened?” she hears Kane ask as she makes her way up the stairs.
“Long story,” is Rory’s reply.
She turns into the hallway and makes her way to her room, trailing her fingers along the wall. The lights flicker. “I’m happy to be back, too.”
Despite her nap, exhaustion still sits heavily in her body. She undresses slowly, running a finger over the dried blood on her collar. The stain is already set, and she doubts she can wash it out. She is too tired to try anyway, and she lets the dress fall to the floor before turning on the taps of the claw-foot tub. She drops in some lavender and eucalyptus oil, and then, after a moment of consideration, she adds a drop of vetiver, smiling at the image of Rory that it conjures in her mind.
She’s glad she told him about Maddox—that he’s still alive and probably looking for her. It’s not the full story, of course. She doubts she’ll ever be able to share it all, even with time stretching endlessly in front of them. Still, it’s as if something between them has cracked open.
That man is not Maddox Grey , she thinks. H e’s a far better man than Maddox Grey could ever be.
She’s not foolish. She knows that Rory has far more blood staining his skin than even her husband, but Rory has something the warlock never had and probably never will: remorse. His past circles around her, like a ringing echo of a bell on the wind. A ripple on a lake. He trusted her with his story, and she’ll hold it carefully in her heart like the precious thing it is.
She slides into the water, submerging herself up to her chin. Rory is a good fella , her grandma would say. Sad soul, but a good fella.
Calliope agrees. She didn’t have to talk herself into using the Ether to escape the guards, even though she had no reason to believe that they would trifle with her. It just made sense to help him, because it was helping them both. They were—are—in it together. A team. A family, even.
With a delicate smile playing on her lips, she slips below the surface of the water. She visits her Mind’s Eye first. Hun is there, though she slumbers peacefully. Calliope leaves her curled up in the soft soil, and lets her consciousness slide down farther, through the ground and to the nothingness of the Ether.
The impenetrable blackness consumes her vision. A thin layer of ice begins to form on the bath water, though she hardly notices. Her mind is fully enmeshed in the Ether, her attention on the thin, hairline crack of light, made catastrophic by the contrast of the darkness around it.
“I’m so sorry.” Her voice echoes back at her.
Although she is still tired, her nap has restored some of her energy. She rallies what she has left, every last honey-sweet drop of energy, and she begins to pour it all into the Ether, an offering to the haven gifted to her by an ancestor long ago. Thank you. She doesn’t say the words out loud—doesn’t need to, because the Ether knows her. It’s a part of her. Like calls to like. She hadn’t truly recognized it before, but now, as she pours herself into it, she hears the soft bird call of her Mind’s Eye, and a bright green tendril of life springs out from the crack, suturing the ends of the tear together.
With one last burst of energy, Calliope smiles at the darkness with its shock of green.
* * *
She comes back to the present in lukewarm, blood-tinged water. She wipes at her face, realizing that she’s crying. She is overwhelmed with emotions, but perhaps it is mostly exhaustion. She puts a hand over her mouth to stifle the sounds, chest heaving with a breath it doesn’t need.
But the Ether is healed, which is a comforting thought even as her febrile skin heats up the water around her, even as her body feels heavy and limp. She’s not sure how long she’s been in the bath—vampires don’t get wrinkled fingertips it seems—but she’s sure her absence has been longer than expected. She lifts herself heavily out of the water, grabbing the clean towel that’s suddenly appeared on the small table next to the tub. As she slips into the soft, well-worn cotton dress, she can’t help but wonder about its previous owner. It fits her perfectly, just like all the other dresses the house has provided. The house , she thinks, who needs protection from vengeful vampires .
“I’ll make sure you’re protected,” she whispers, pressing a hand to the door frame. “Don’t you worry.” The lights buzz brighter in response.
She leans heavily on the banister as she makes her way downstairs, but when she reaches the bottom, she pauses to catalog her body, letting her awareness travel down her torso, expand out to her limbs. She squares her shoulders, straightens her spine, pushes her exhaustion out through her fingers and the tips of her hair. She has a kelpie to help, after all.
“Sorry I took so long,” she says, pushing through the kitchen door.
Rory looks up from the cauldron on the stove. “It’s okay. How are you feeling?”
“Better.” She yawns. “I could sleep for days though.” She sits at the table, glancing out the window to see Kane perched on the railing, keeping watch on Effie, who is but a pale green mist swirling in the center of the lake. She’s getting restless. Calliope can feel it—can almost hear the flair of nostrils and the high-pitched noise.
Rory frowns. “We don’t have to do this now.”
“No, I want to. Effie needs her bridle.” She smiles and it must be convincing enough because Rory nods and turns back to the stove .
“I’m almost done with the base,” he says, picking up a glass stirring rod.
“How can I help?”
He removes the stirring rod from the cauldron, placing it down on a dish towel spread out on the counter, before turning around to face her. “The main thing about our dear friend Griselda is that she is very specific about ingredients but not so much about quantities, preparation, how and when to add them. I’m making some assumptions here. The rosemary will stay whole, since it needs to be tied together. But I think we should muddle the forget-me-nots and the poke berries together.”
“And the cowslip?” she asks, holding up the bundle of yellow buds.
Rory leans against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. For once, he’s wearing a short sleeve t-shirt, showing off his broad shoulders and sculpted arms. “Ground up into a powder.”
“Why ground up, instead of muddled with the other ones?” she asks, with genuine interest. For someone making assumptions, Rory seems perfectly at ease making such deliberate decisions. Alchemy must be more like potion making than she thought.
Rory’s answer confirms this. “I broke it apart like an alchemical experiment. The Common Base is neutral. Nothing in it will react negatively or positively with the ingredients. But we still need them to combine in the cauldron to create a cohesive solution. Cowslip can increase the absorption of other herbal ingredients—I don’t know if that’s why she included it, but I think adding it, not only first, but as a powder will help it spread throughout the base more evenly…” His voice fades, and he arches an eyebrow. “Why are you smiling like that?”
She lifts a shoulder. “I like listening to you talk about this stuff.”
He cocks his head to the side, his eyes glittering. “Oh yeah? Maybe after this, we can try our hand at another Griselda concoction.”
“I’d like that.”
Rory smirks, showing off a canine tooth that is just a little too pointy to be human, and she remembers how he looked as they stood by the roadside. Warmth floods her cheeks, and she ducks her head down, pulling the mortar and pestle to her.
They work in companionable silence, Rory bent over the cauldron on the stove as he prepares the base. Calliope grinds the cowslip, the sound soothing in its regularity. In its mundanity.
They move around each other with ease. Calliope is comforted by the space that Rory takes up, in the shapes they make when they stand next to each other. At some point, there is a tapping sound at the door, and it swings open to admit Kane. A flutter of wings and he’s perched on the chair opposite her.
Calliope looks up from her work. “How is Effie?”
“She hasn’t spoken to me. Or maybe she can’t?” He twists his head to the side, golden eyes calculating. “There’s something different about her though.”
Calliope glances out of the window, where the green mist swirls against the smooth surface of the lake. “She’s restless. I think so, anyway. She hasn’t spoken to me. I think she can only speak to me in the Ether.”
Kane begins preening his wings and Calliope returns to her mortar and pestle, grinding the poke berries to squeeze out their juice. Beside her, sits a strainer, balanced over a bowl. As she pours the berries into the strainer, she blinks against something in the corner of her vision. She even absentmindedly brushes away a curl, only to find there’s nothing physically there.
She looks up at Kane, whose focus is still on his wings, and Rory, whose back is turned as he checks the consistency of the potion. She turns back to the strainer, but the spot appears again, a soft yellow that’s asking for her attention. She stills, tilts her head, keeping the glow in her peripheral vision.
And then she blinks, because the glow has solidified into a shaft of light pointing right at her. She looks down at her chest.
“Everything okay?”
She looks up. Rory has turned around, eyebrows knitted together.
“Yes.” Her voice comes out rough. She clears her throat. “Yes, sorry. Still a little tired.”
His frown deepens as he steps toward her. A gentle, cool hand is pressed to her forehead. She can’t see his face because she realizes, with mild alarm, that the shaft of light aimed at her chest is also aimed at his, an ethereal pathway of illumination that connects them.
“You’re burning up,” she hears him say.
“I’m always burning up.” She gently clasps his hand and pulls him down to her level so she can see his face.
He obliges kneeling in front of her, the lines on either side of his mouth etched deep. “You can go to bed early. I can finish this up here.”
The sun is just beginning to set, and a breeze blows in through the window, bringing with it the smell of rain. “Okay, thank you.”
She begins to leave the kitchen, the tendril of light continuing with her. Before the door closes behind her, she turns to look at Rory. His attention is once again on the stove, his gray-streaked hair hiding his face from view as he leans forward. The light is still there, and she reaches out, briefly, to try and touch it. He presses a hand to his chest, where the light connects with him, but doesn’t seem to realize it’s there.
She lets the kitchen door swing shut before he looks up, and as she makes her way up the stairs, she marvels at how the light becomes thinner, pulled taut by the distance she puts between herself and Rory. It’s delicate though. She has a feeling it could snap at any moment.