26. Siren #3
Slowly, she opened the bedroom door. She looked out into the main room, but no one was there. She stepped across the hallway to another tall wooden door and peered inside.
“Oh, hell no,” she whispered as a rush of cold air bit her cheeks.
Behind the door was barely a room. There was a table, or something, where sponges and glass bottles were arranged along the corners, and a set of stone steps leading down into the stream that coursed behind the shrine-home, curving into the room in a horseshoe shape.
There was a folding wooden partition propped up in the peninsula at the center of the horseshoe, and there was otherwise no semblance of privacy between her and the great outdoors.
Steam rolled off the water like her breath rising in the air. She stiffened herself as she stepped out the door, taking one last peek inside to look for Siren.
Now was as good a time as any to run, she thought. Though, she believed his threat that he would sick his mother on her should she leave. His mother, who had been terrorizing the southern borders of Asilia to find her.
Flora looked off into the darkness, tracing the shadows in the trees by the light of the lilies. He wasn’t visible, but she wasn’t going to entertain him if he was somewhere in the dim light.
Flora lifted the skirt of her dress and stepped down into the water.
It was warm and cozy like a breath of summer sun.
She felt herself finally breathe out. Finally, she placed her towel and clothes at the edge of the water.
She submerged herself completely in the warmth of the stream, the skirt of her dress floating up around her arms.
The water sparkled with vague strings of color, much like the water at Lunara’s Spring.
She wondered if this stream flowed out to the waterfall, by then having grown cold with the frost of the forest. The water tingled against the light bruises and scrapes she had acquired through her furious misadventures.
She closed her eyes and enjoyed the warm embrace of the water, her mind finally easing enough to acknowledge her exhaustion. High above, Flora could see little slivers of light beginning to poke through the sky of leaves like tiny stars in the night. It was morning beyond the Forest.
She sighed, looking past the divider one more time.
She held a hand out in front of her and watched as her fingertips cracked and shattered into fire and ash, revealing for her an array of razor-sharp claws.
The fire sizzled beneath the water as she tore the binding of her dress and peeled it away.
She breathed, wondering how long it had been since she had breathed so deeply.
When she stepped back into the house, Siren was leaning against the couch with his arms crossed behind his head, grinning. Always grinning.
“Feel better?” he said.
“Where have you been?” she asked pointedly.
He raised his brow and cocked his head. “To speak with Mother. I thought I ought to let her know you were here. And I figured you might like some privacy.”
Flora’s eyes sharpened as she looked him up and down and huffed.
“You won’t even give me the benefit of the doubt, will you?” he said, stretching and then folding his arms in front of him.
“No. Absolutely not.” Flora looked across the way to the bedroom door. She was exhausted, more so than she had ever been. But she didn’t dare so much as blink in the Shadowkeeper’s presence. “You said the door locks?” she asked.
He sucked in his lips and nodded. “Yes.”
She continued to look at the door, but couldn’t yet make the decision to move.
“I can... leave if you’d like,” he said. “I should check in on my people anyway. I need to see who is still accounted for after returning from Asilia.”
“You say ‘people’,” Flora observed.
“Yes,” he replied, a sudden coldness in his eyes. He rocked forward and rose to his feet. “But you already knew that, didn’t you? Even when you shot the scythe in the city, I think part of you knew.”
Flora swallowed. “I didn’t mean to…”
“I know,” he said with a sigh as he opened the grand front doors. “They didn’t mean to, either.”
Flora was still shaken when the door closed behind him. She didn’t know, did she? She had seen Feya, and the way Marco had rubbed against her leg as she passed, as though she was no stranger to him at all. Flora swallowed, her palms growing damp.
“Perhaps the shadow we fear,” Sona had written of her brother, her ink growing thick with pressure as her words trailed on, “has been our own all along.”
Siren was right.
Flora knew.
She knew long before Aria had ever pinned her aside outside her lab. She knew the first time Perri laid his erratic eyes upon her, wearing the same bloodthirsty grin she had only ever seen on the white-eyed woman in the meadow as a child.
Flora knew. And she would kill that scythe again if it meant protecting him.
Flora locked the bedroom door behind her, then pushed a small nightstand in front of it, just in case.
She curled up beneath the soft fluff of the blanket and closed her eyes.