Jade Verdance came to Brackenmire to find out why the horses were rotting. Now one of them wanted to eat her. It burst from the tree line at a gallop, jaw hanging loose, black foam ropes swinging from its teeth. Its ribs showed through peeling gray hide. Where its eyes should be, two wet sockets leaked something dark. Jade froze on the open path. She had a notebook and a phone. She had no fence, no gate, no weapon. She knew horses. She wore their faces on every shirt she owned and had ridden since she was six. This one moved wrong. It slammed a hoof down and screamed, and the sound was not a horse sound. Jade backed away slow. Her green curls stuck to her sweat. The horse tracked her by the noise of her boots. Her dog moved first. The German shepherd planted himself between Jade and the horse, low and stiff, service vest bright against the mud. He barked once, sharp. The horse swung its ruined head toward the sound. That bought her a second. Jade grabbed the shepherd's harness handle. "With me," she said. She ran. A purple mansion rose ahead through the trees. Its walls shone violet, its roof scaled like a cat's eye, its front doors tall and arched. Jade did not care who owned it. She cared that it had walls. Her boots hit gravel. Behind her the hooves hit faster. She needed the horse to look away, just once. Near the doors stood a lawn figure of a man, dark and stiff, soot scattered black across the ground at his feet. Jade tore the figure loose and hurled it sideways. It crashed into a hedge. The horse whipped toward the crash and charged the noise instead of her. Jade hit the doors with her shoulder. They gave. She and the dog spilled into a bright hall. A purple pool glittered across the floor. She kicked the doors shut and dropped the latch. The horse struck the other side. Wood cracked but held. It struck again. Then it stopped. Jade slid down the door to the floor. The shepherd pressed against her, panting. Her hands would not stop shaking. She had known Brackenmire's horses were sick. She had not known the sickness could hunt. Through a tall window she watched the horse stagger in a circle on the lawn. Its head dropped. Its legs folded. It lay in the grass and did not move. Something dark spread out from under it into the soil. Jade pressed her face to the glass. Where the black seep touched the ground, a stalk pushed up fast. It opened into a purple flower with a single eye at its center. The eye turned. It looked straight at her. Jade stood. Whatever was rotting the horses had just watched her run. Now she knew where to start.

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.