15. The Flower #2
Mrs. Fray pulled her head out of her hands, and both parents froze at the sight of her. The clock read 11:52.
“Flora?” Mrs. Fray began, fighting the ice. “Oh god, you look like you’ve been crying. What on earth happened now?”
“... and what the hell happened to your room?” her father added. Mr. Fray was seated in the armchair, glasses sliding down his nose as he peered over the screen of his laptop.
Flora sighed deeply and met her parent’s stern gaze with her own. “Mom. Dad,” she said. “Can I… talk to you?”
Her father’s eyes narrowed, but he remained seated. Flora began to recount everything—every new detail of the past few days: Sona, Perri, the blood, the scythe, and how it had poisoned Noec. She recounted the haunting image of Noec laying his lily amidst the procession of light.
When she finished, her mother simply huffed, “I used to think you were just odd because you went to bed fully dressed.” She shared a look with her husband and added, “Does it seem like you’re… ‘safe’ now?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.” Flora wrung her hands, swallowing the panic her own words had drawn out. “I’m afraid that things are only going to get worse,” she admitted. “And every night, no matter what I do, I’m going to wake up right at the center of it all.”
Mr. Fray sat quietly for a moment in consideration, suddenly closing his laptop and standing. “I have something I need to give you,” he said.
“... honey, I don’t think…” Flora’s mother began with a sigh, though she followed him out of the room nonetheless.
Flora’s curiosity was piqued, but she felt uneasy as her father ascended the stairs and her mother glanced back nervously.
When Mr. Fray returned, he held something shocking in his hands.
“Before I give this to you, Flora,” he said, his voice firm, “you have to promise me you’ll shoot him next time you see him.
I still can’t figure out how to put that desk chair back together.
” He paused. “Also—” Mr. Fray gestured with a nod toward the old black radio, which had been left behind by the stairs, “—come on.”
Flora froze, dizzy as she poked the pistol in her father’s hands. “Is this... is this even functional?” The handgun appeared mostly decorative, with a bronze body and white handle.
“Grandmama was… kind of a menace,” her mother replied with a shrug. “Do you remember how to use a gun?”
“Yeah,” Flora replied. Even though the “cowboy” phase of Mr. Fray’s midlife crisis had left his children traumatized with memories of public line dancing, there had been something cathartic about “American family therapy” at the shooting range.
But, there were a few major differences between this cutesy antique and the modern handgun Flora was used to, so Mr. Fray ran through a quick explanation.
He slid the weapon back into the faded white leather holster and sighed.
“From now on, you sleep with this thing. Understand?” he said, handing it to his daughter carefully.
She nodded apprehensively. “It works,” he added. “Found that out the wrong way.”
Flora looked up at the hole over the doorway, then raised a brow.
“Yeah,” Flora’s mother sighed. “That wasn’t there when we moved in.”
Flora held her hands flat as she looked down at the device. “Nice.”
After cautiously tucking the weapon into Noec’s bag, Flora trudged upstairs. The weight of the world was creeping back in, but Heron was right—she didn’t have to hold it all alone.
Davy stood in the hallway, waiting for her with his arms crossed. There was a rare seriousness behind his eyes as, ominously, he muttered, “Glad you made it back this time.”
“He’s going to be okay,” Flora said, almost begging as her tight-jawed smile began to crack. The weight was growing—with every thought, with every step. “I need to believe he’s going to be okay.”
“C’mere,” Davy sighed. He wrapped his sister up in a hug, and they stood in silence for a moment as he squeezed. “I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a gun and thought ‘that’s adorable’,” Davy said as his grip eased away. “But here we are.”
Flora huffed a chuckle.
Davy sighed, looking off. “I don’t know how to help you,” he said. Shifting his lip anxiously, he muttered, “I really hate that.”
With another hug, Flora squeezed a wheeze out of him. “You’re helping plenty,” she murmured into his hoodie as he coughed and chuckled. He lifted her up like a kid, and Flora laughed as, for a moment, the weight of the world wasn’t so unbearable.
Flora’s room still bore the marks of Noec’s rage, with rips in the folded sheets and salvaged pieces of crumpled paintings assembled on her desk.
She gathered the blankets from the floor, vacuumed whatever specks of mirror might have remained in the carpet, taped back together the paintings that mattered most, and discarded the desk chair parts that had been further broken down and angrily thrown in the corner by her father.
Slowly, Flora restored order, and by mid-afternoon, the room was, at best, livable once again.
Flora sat on her neatly-made bed and traced her fingertip across the red seal on Sona’s journal. She recalled what she and Thaola had come to realize.
“Wait,” Thaola had said, having just read page 258. “This can’t be right.” Flora looked up from one of Aria’s letters curiously. “About scythes mimicking forms by consuming human tissue.”
“What do you mean?” Flora asked.
“Elia,” she said. “The scythe in the village was mimicking Elia.”
Flora paused as she soaked in her words. “Who is alive and well,” Flora added, a dawning realization in her voice. “Which means…”
“There’s something else,” Thaola completed her thought. “Some other way they learn to mimic a human. They can replicate a person they’ve never touched—someone they’ve never even seen.”
They were silent for a moment in thought.
“Blonde hair,” Flora murmured.
Thaola’s eyes lifted, blinking in surprise.
“The scythe mimicking Elia was… blonde,” Flora went on. “Like her hair was when Feya was still here. It’s like they’re pulling from an old archive, a memory of a different time.”
“But then… what about the scythe on the road?” Thaola asked. “You said she seemed different, like an older version of Feya.” She paused. “You think she could be…”
Flora swallowed, breaking from Thaola’s eyes as she exhaled a shuddered breath. “I don’t know,” Flora replied. “But I know there has to be some underlying connection between them for different scythes to wear the mask of the same person.”
Now, at the edge of her bed, Flora’s eyes drifted to a photograph of her and Lila on her nightstand from her birthday two years ago. “Copper hair,” Flora murmured aloud. The younger image of Flora had this obscene coral-colored hair, almost copper in the dim light.
She sighed as her fingers traced the gold embellishments of the journal. If only she could tell Noec. If only she could discuss it all with Sona. But she was alone now, and Sona’s journal left her with more questions than answers.
Flora thought about the book on Sona’s desk, The Curse of the Sleepwalker.
What revelations had Sona kept to herself, she wondered, and what secrets had Heron silenced to keep Flora in the dark?
It hurt to believe that she was being lied to, controlled as though she were no more than a child.
Did they really see her as incapable of handling whatever truth was waiting, naive enough to believe there wasn’t more out there?
It hurt to be lied to, but it hurt even more to know that the villagers already saw her as her greatest fear: helpless.
Helpless, she repeated the word in her mind.
Flora glared down at Noec’s brown leather bag, heavy with two strange weapons and a dead cleric’s journal.
Helpless, my ass, she thought.