Lily Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 4 of 17

Marrow was gone between the pines. Ollie waited beside Lily at the lip of the slope. Below them, the smoke sat thin over the trees, gray and steady. It did not move like a cook fire. It leaned sideways, then straightened, as if someone kept feeding it. Lily held the cold flask against her palm and tried to want the clearing the way she had wanted it an hour ago. She could not. Something in the smoke had reached up and stopped her feet. "You smell that?" Ollie said. She did. It came up the slope in a slow pull. Under the burn there was something sweet and wrong. Orange peel. Cut lime. A softer thing behind those, like blossoms bruised in a pocket. She knew the mix. She almost knew it. Her hand tightened on the glass and the knowing slid back under. "I've smelled it," she said. "I can't say where." She looked at Ollie. "If I go down not knowing, I walk into whatever put me here." Ollie sat on his heels. "Then don't go yet. Stand here and pull on it. Ghosts remember by smell better than by eye. My gran said so." He did not look at her when he said it. He watched the smoke. Lily closed her eyes. She let the flask warm a hair against her skin and spent a little of the last squeeze. Not all. Just enough to hold her still while she reached. The orange came first, from a tree by a low white fence. Then the lime, small and hard, in a bowl on a kitchen sill. Then cherry blossoms in a jar her mother kept. Then plums, split, on a plate. Then pears, sliced thin. Then roses. Roses on a table. Roses her mother cut every Sunday from the bushes by the back step. Her mother's kitchen. That was the smell. Her mother's kitchen, all of it burning at once. Lily opened her eyes. The flask was almost quiet in her hand. "It's not a stranger down there," she said. "Someone's burning my mother's garden. Every tree. The roses too." Her voice stayed level because her body could not shake. "Whoever met me in the clearing that night knew our house. Knew what she grew." Ollie stood up slowly. "So you know who it is?" "No." She looked down the slope. The smoke leaned toward her now, like it had found her. "But I know they wanted me to smell it. They're calling me the second time." She stepped off the lip and started down. The flask went cold again against her palm, one squeeze left, and the trees below opened a narrow path toward the fire.