Page 33 of A Serpent in the Garden

Blathilde tapped my nail on it. “A last breath. It can bring someone back from the brink.”

“Whose last breath?”

I watched myself give me a sideways smile. “Someone who no longer has need of it. It’s been collecting dust on my shelves for a long time.”

In a fat-bellied jar, one lone, willowy finger swayed, suspended in some greenish viscous fluid, a black crescent moon at the nail bed. Even as I watched it, the finger crooked ever so slightly, as if it had felt my eyes upon it and wished to call me closer. My heart leaped into my throat as I jerked back.

“From a succubus,” Blathilde said, her hand at my back to steady me. “The parts live on if you don’t leave them to incinerate in the sun.”

“Did you kill it?”

“A very long time ago.” She found a glass no bigger than a thimble and poured out a dose of tonic. “Long before you were ever thought of. Mine is a quiet life these days.”

The tonic went down smooth as mead, but then a hostile aftertaste hit the back of my throat, slowly colonizing the rest of my mouth, and it was all I could do not to bend double, gagging. I felt as if my tongue had turned scorched and black in the wake of it; it tasted like venom and spite, bile and pain.

“Yes,” she said knowingly, my face twisting in sympathy. “You can have some water soon, but it needs a minute to set.”

“You drink this daily?” I gasped.

“If I didn’t, I’d be much worse off.” She corked the bottle, slid it back into place among its fellows. “Nothing sweetens the snakewort, I’m afraid. It’s best just to knock it back and knuckle through it.”

“How long have you been drinking it?”

“Many, many years.” She handed me a glass of water and waited for me to drain it. “I age very slowly. If your daughter came to visit me in twenty years, she would find me very much the same.”

“I will never have a daughter,” I said, as Serich’s slow, deliberate chopping began to fill the cottage.

One of my eyebrows arched delicately, as if she found me amusingly melodramatic. I suppose to someone so old, I could not be anything but. “Oh?”

“A bloodrose told me.”

My own eyes bored into me, a question simmering behind them.

“The moment I touched it, all the petals fell off.”

“That does mean sudden death,” she said, with a little jerk of my head, my eyes dropping to the floor. “Typically.”

She said typically, It said as my heart plummeted, for the hag’s reaction was as good as confirmation of my imminent death. Typically doesn’t mean definitely.

Blathilde looked as if she were casting around for a better answer to give me, though she came up with nothing. “Quick enough that you’d never see it coming, never feel the pain.”

A quick, sudden death was better than a messy, protracted affair, I thought broodingly, while It made an annoyed sort of noise at the back of my mind. “You believe the roses don’t lie, then? What they predict comes to pass?”

“Faeries don’t lie,” she said. “They’re nasty brutes and the only good faerie is a dead faerie, if you ask me, but their blood at least is honest. Their tongues can twist around the truth, but blood has no tongue. If your rose didn’t grow or change before the petals fell, you can expect whatever it means to happen soon.”

Soon. The word hit me like a dart. Soon I might be dead.

Blathilde sat before her ancient looking glass, running my fingers through the crimped waves in my unbound hair as though she’d rarely gotten to do something so luxurious.

“You’re quiet,” Serich said in a half whisper, dragging a chair around the little table to sit beside me.

“Just thinking.” I dropped my gaze and fiddled with the hag’s old hands, tracing the bright green veins. They reminded me of a roadmap, with all their lines and spots. “She told me what the bloodrose predicted will come to pass soon.”

In the back of my mind, It gave a disgusted sigh, as if throwing up his hands in frustration that I kept turning over the topic.

Was that a flicker of fear in Serich’s expression? Whatever it was, it made him sit up straighter. “The more you feed this belief that you will die, the larger it will grow.”

A sensible thing to say, but I couldn’t shake the dread slinking through my skin. “I’m being pragmatic.”