The roots crawled, unwinding from the far corner, revealing a desk and three long, flexible tentacles stretching from the flower to a four-feet-tall cocoon.
With a rubbery menacing strength, the tentacles peeled the cocoon from the wall and brought it across the room, uncurling as they moved. The last coils slid, straightened, and a body fell at William’s feet with a wet thud. The tentacles froze in the air, as solid and unmoving as a cypress stem.
Fuck me.
Hydraulic movement. He’d learned about this during his time in the Adrianglian Legion. The tentacles couldn’t move until the plant replenished its supply of liquid.
William knelt by the body. The corpse lay on its back. A man. Probably. The exposed flesh of its face and neck was unnaturally smooth and swollen, its color the deep swollen purple of a fresh bruise. The cadaver’s mouth gaped open. The puffy eyelids lay half-closed over the milky orbs of the eyes.
A tiny tendril of the root snaked its way onto the corpse’s cheek. The sharp tip of the root, enclosed in a rough, almost bark-like cone, probed the dead flesh, and thrust through it. The skin tore like wet paper. A thick torrent of viscous bloody fluid spilled forth and streamed across the dead cheek to the floor. The nauseating stench of rotting meat erupted from the body. William leaped back.
Other roots reached for the corpse, the vesicles pulsing like tiny hearts. The plant was drinking the corpse’s fluids, consuming them like water.
The petals quivered. The spots of green that flecked them crawled, moving away from the petal’s edges to blend into a single green stain at the base of the flower. The roots kept pumping. Deep red liquid spread through the veins in the petals, turning their gray to red.
William raised his blade. If it tried to drain him next, it was in for a hell of a surprise.
The flower’s veins contracted, pulling the petals apart with agonizing slowness. Something moved with the flower.
With a whisper, the petals snapped open, bright red and stiff like the tail feathers of a posturing peacock. A burst of yellow pollen erupted into the air, floating in the draft like powdered yellow snow. The honeyed odor flooded the chamber.
William coughed. His eyes teared, and he wiped the moisture with his hand.
A body lay within the flower. Nude and bald, frail to the point of emaciation, it rested on its back within the lower bell-shaped petal. Its legs vanished into the flower’s core. The bluish tint of the corpse’s bloodless flesh offered a stark contrast to the petal’s garish crimson.
Another unlucky bastard being eaten.
By now the flower’s whips would have regained the liquid. If he were to strike, he would have to get past them first.
The body opened its eyes. They looked at him in silent plea and for a second he thought he was looking at Cerise.
William caught his breath.
The roots crawled aside, opening a narrow path to the flower.
He took it.
The body’s hands opened, revealing a sunken chest and thin bags of skin where breasts used to be. The blue eyes tracked his movements. If she was younger, if her face had a bit of fat and her skin was smoother. If she had blond hair . . .
“Genevieve,” he whispered and coughed, expelling a mouthful of pollen from his throat.
She stretched her hand to him. He took her icy fingers. The same reddish liquid that had flooded the veins of the petals and leaves was making its way through her torso, bulging the vessels under her nearly transparent skin.
She opened her mouth. A wave of magic smashed against him. William went down to his knees, gasping for breath. A vision of Cerise flickered before him. Her sword was carving Embelys’s flaccid body, cutting Kaldar out. She was in the house. He blinked and the image of Cerise vanished.
Genevieve’s mouth contorted, struggled to form a word. William’s eyes burned from the pollen that swirled in the air about them in a snowfall of tiny powdered stars. It filled his mouth and his nose, it burned his throat. “Before ...” Genevieve whispered. “My daughter ...”
Her whip swung toward the desk and rolled back, twisted about his shoulder with a gentleness equivalent to a caress. A leather journal fell at his feet.
“No choice . . . made me ...”
“She knows,” he told her. “Cerise knows.”
“Tell Sophie ... So sorry ...”
“I will.”
She squeezed his hand. “Kill me . . . Please . . . So Ceri . . . doesn’t have to ...”
The knife felt heavy in his hands, as if filled with lead. He raised it.
She smiled. Her fragile sharp-boned face, her sunken cheeks, her eyes drowning in pain, all of it lit, united and transformed by that weak smile, made radiant and timeless. William knew he would remember it to his death.
He swung. The blade sliced cleanly through her flesh. Her head dropped to the floor and rolled, releasing a torrent of blood from the stump of her neck. It splashed onto the floorboards, and the roots stretched toward it. The vesicles pumped, sucking up the liquid in a cannibalistic cycle even as blood continued to flow from the wound.
William picked up the journal off the floor.
Her head lay on its side. She was still smiling and her blue eyes focused on him. “Thank you,” bloodless lips mouthed.
The pollen had clogged his lungs, sapping his strength. William pushed to his feet and staggered to the door, half-blind, stumbling, exhausted, and weak. His hand found the handle, and he lay on it with his weight. It fell away before him, and he crashed into the hallway. The cool smoothness of the wooden floor slapped his cheek.
The door.
William dragged himself upright, shut it, and sagged against it. His lungs burned. The last whiffs of pollen swirled around him.
William concentrated on the rising and falling of his chest. His hands flipped the journal open on their own. Long streaks of cursive lined the pages, too out of focus. He wiped the last tears from his eyes and brought the journal so close the pages nearly touched his nose.
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