Christina Pirkle's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Christina rested against the archway, the full bottle warm against her chest. She needed to reach her workspace to brew. She started back down the wider passage. Then she stopped. The striped creature blocked the way. It had come around, and now it crouched between her and the stone platform where her flask and stand waited. Its head lifted. It tasted the air and found her scent. It knew her now. She could not throw a petal twice. It would not fall for the same trick. "Stand still," a voice said behind her. A woman stepped from a side gap in the rock. White hair fell past her waist. She wore a pale robe, tied with a blue sash, and walked barefoot over the sharp floor without flinching. Christina had never seen her. She lived somewhere in these hollows, then, close enough to hear the creature hunt. The woman's calm annoyed Christina. Her fingers were dead to the knuckle and a monster stood between her and her cure. "It hunts by smell," the woman said. "Not sight. Cover your scent and you become nothing to it." "With what?" Christina's voice cracked. "I have nothing." The woman lifted a small charm from a cord at her neck. It was pale green and cream, shaped like a smooth arch, worn soft at the edges. She pressed it into Christina's numb hand. "Crush the flowers on your clothes. All of them. The bloom smell hides your own. Hold this and breathe slow. Fear has a scent too." Christina stared at her. It made no sense and every kind of sense. The creature fed on these flowers. It swam in their smell. She had no better plan and her heart was slowing under the venom. She knelt. She grabbed wet petals by the handful, no longer careful, and smeared them down her sleeves and across her chest. The fluid soaked the cloth. Her arms went colder. She gripped the charm and forced her breath long and even, the way the woman held hers. The creature swung its head toward her. It stepped close. Its nose brushed her knee. Christina did not move. She smelled like the flowers now, like the petals it ate. The creature sniffed once more, found nothing worth chasing, and turned away. It slid back into the deeper blooms. The path lay open. Christina walked past the platform's edge and did not stop until she reached her flask and stone stand. She set the full bottle down with both stiff hands. The woman had not followed. When Christina looked back, the passage was empty. She still held the charm, tight in a hand she could barely feel. She had her poison and her workspace both. But the flower fluid now soaked her clothes and her skin. The venom she had fought to bottle was already crawling up her arms from the outside.