Jade Verdance's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The flower still watched Jade through the glass. She turned from the window and looked at the bright hall around her. She needed to study that thing, but she would not touch it with bare hands. She had a notebook, a phone, and a dog. None of that was enough. She started opening doors. Her shepherd stayed close, ears up, as Jade moved through the purple rooms. She passed a glittering pool set into the floor. She passed tall mirrors and velvet chairs. In a dressing room she found a drawer of women's things. Inside lay a pair of long white gloves, stitched with dense silver shimmer. She pulled them on. They reached past her elbows. Thick fabric, sealed seams. They would keep the black seep off her skin. Jade knew studying the flower here was foolish. The dead horse lay a few steps from the stalk. If the sickness could hunt, she needed somewhere quiet and far. She had seen a treehouse on her way in, tucked high in a willow at the edge of the trees. Branches hid it. A ladder led up. Nothing could charge her there. She cracked a side door and listened. The lawn was still. The horse had not moved. Jade crossed to the flower with a garden trowel from the dressing room. Her gloved hands did not shake now. The eye swiveled to follow her. She dug around the stalk, keeping her fingers clear of the black ooze at its roots. The flower shuddered. A thin hiss came from its center. She lifted the whole plant, root and all, and dropped it into a metal pail. "Come on," she told the dog. They ran for the willow. Jade climbed the ladder with the pail hooked on one arm. Inside the treehouse she set the flower on a small table by the window. She peeled back a glove and opened her notebook. Up close, the eye had no lid. Fine purple veins ran from the bloom down into the black roots. When she brought her pen near, the petals leaned toward the warmth of her hand. It wanted her. She pressed the trowel tip against a root. Black fluid welled out. Where it touched the wood, the grain darkened and began to soften, the way the soil had darkened under the dead horse. Jade wrote it down. The rot did not come from the flower. The flower carried the rot. It was a seed, and it spread the sickness wherever the black fluid touched. Then the fluid reached the edge of the table and dripped through a crack in the floor. It fell to the ground below and sank into the willow's roots. Jade watched the base of her own tree begin to turn wet and dark. The safe place was already infected. She had carried the source of the sickness up into her only shelter.