A few months after they were married, Troy used a demonstration of the right pose and angle for a real suicide cut as a prelude to more pleasurable matters, standing behind her as he gently dragged a fork up the length of her wrist. “This is how you do it if you’re serious about something other than getting attention from the other kids,” he’d explained. And after she’d taken over, he’d whispered in her ear, “Good form, baby,” before he slid one hand around the back of her thigh and clamped the other over her chest so he could hold her in place when she started to writhe under the sudden, fierce ministrations of his fingers. At the time it had all seemed dangerous and sexy. How else would a cop do foreplay? But had there been more violence in the display than she’d been willing to see? Had he just been tutoring her for a moment like this one? Had he been imagining her eventual suicide with a murderer’s intent?
Caitlin presses the jagged lip of the shattered champagne flute against her wrist until she sees the flesh give from the pressure; then she drags it slowly up the length of her forearm. The wound flows, but isn’t the sloppy, arterial burst she was aiming for. Even so, a tremendous heat travels up the length of her arm, so intense she doesn’t realize she’s dropped her makeshift dagger until she hears it hit the floor. But the heat is more pressure than pure flame, and it is a relief compared to the Indian burn she felt inside her gut when Troy’s teeth fastened around that pretty young woman’s earlobe. It feels as if her left arm is turning to vapor, and she’s half convinced the crackling sound she hears is her own blood hitting the gazebo’s floor.
But the soft series of pops that come next has to be cracking wood. That can mean only one thing and it’s absurd: something is chewing the gazebo itself.
Impossible…
Caitlin clamps her hand over the flowing wound. Her suicidal conviction has evaporated at the first signs of either a monster or a miracle, she isn’t sure. The dark tendrils curling up through the fresh cracks in the gazebo’s floor have started a serpentine crawl toward the splatter of blood at her feet.
They are snakes gone boneless, she thinks. That’s how they’ve squeezed through the cracks in the gazebo’s floor. But when they continue to rise straight up into the air with strength and determination, when their fat, wrist-thick bodies don’t droop or bend, when she sees not one, not two, but four tendrils in all, rising on all sides of her in an almost perfect circle, she glances down at her hand, at the tiny rivers of blood spilling in between her fingers, to see if her blood loss is severe enough to cause hallucinations. But while the pain is still there, the flow is too slight, hitting the jostled floorboards in fat intermittent drops. She isn’t near death, that’s for sure. And the shock of almost walking in on her husband fucking another woman has pushed the champagne rapidly through her system, leaving her stone-cold sober and alert.
Caitlin can see clearly alternating patches of strange luminescence lining the slender bodies of these strange creatures. And while everything about their size and their behavior is utterly wrong, their composition is simple, common even.
“Flowers and leaves…”
She whispers these words to herself.
Not snakes, not the fingers of some subterranean beast. Vines. That’s all. But once she’s whispered these words aloud—flowers and leaves—the words only deepen her paralysis, because by then she can see that the blossoms, each one about the size of her hand, are opening in unison. They look like the flowers of a calla lily, but inside of their four, evenly sized white petals is an insect-like amalgam of stamens and filaments, and all of it glows with an interior radiance so powerful it looks like it might drift away, spirit-like, from the temporary prison of the petals.
And each blossom, each impossibly animated, pulsing blossom, is pointed directly at her.
They’re looking at me.
Then the smell hits her, a force as powerful and determined as the vines themselves, plugging her nostrils, making her eyes water. She hears her own quick, deep breaths as if from a distance, a ragged counterpoint to the sounds of the floorboards underfoot settling back into their new disturbed positions. The smell is blanketing her, consuming her. She blinks madly, trying to resist its call, because not only is it somehow drawing in darkness from the edges of her vision, but it is also nothing like the cloying perfumes she has always associated with Spring House.
It is the smell of fire.
…They are coming.
She can feel the horse hooves pounding the mud, can feel them through the channel she has opened in the palms of her callused hands, the ones that connect her to the clamor of angry souls within the soil. She can hear their shouts. They have discovered the decimated cane field, and they know what she has done. That after promising them a limitless bounty, she has punished them for their betrayal.
And because they have some sense of what she is capable of, they will come with their polished Colt revolvers, and they will attack with as much swiftness as they can muster. And so she has no time to wait. She must bring herself to the very raw edge of her power, the place where she can feel a writhing, feral chaos in the darkness on the other side.
The darkness below. The darkness underfoot.
She’s always pulled back from that place, not in fear that she wouldn’t be able to stop the result, but in fear that it would tear her apart from within. But now the choice is to either die by their lead, or summon forth a final justice from an earth that has always spoken to her in a magical language only she seems to hear.
Because they are angry. They are seeking their own twisted form of justice, and this fact leaves her with the despairing realization that all forms of justice are somehow twisted at their core. Will Felix Delachaise be among them, or will he leave the bloodiest work to his overseer as usual, the same overseer whose work she halted in mid-whip, beginning this whole mess?
But when the door to the slave quarters behind her blows open, she sees neither the overseer nor Spring House’s bastard owner. She sees a perfectly framed view of her husband, Troy Mangier, halfway out of his suit, bare ass flexing as he drives himself into the beautiful young woman. And Caitlin feels herself jostled inside of her dreaming point of view—who was it? A slave?
The past and present have met in a fever dream of rage, and now her husband is staring slack-jawed at her through a doorway—in time, in history, in sanity, she can’t know—while he continues to fuck some little slut atop the bathroom sink. But the rage is leaving her. Maybe because Troy is staring at her over one shoulder, mouth open, eyes vacant. His expression is devoid of lust; his thrusts seem compulsory now. The floor between them explodes, and with the exhalation of her crippling rage, Caitlin senses the arrival of a strange new power.
3
“Not here,” Troy whispers.
And that’s when Jane Percival realizes why he won’t take his hand out from his Hanes, even though she’s pushed back over the porcelain sink so far the copper faucet is digging into her spine, even though her dress is hiked so far up her legs he’s been able to work wonders on her with his mouth for a good five minutes now—his blood isn’t pumping to all the right places yet, and he doesn’t want to let on.
What does he want? A short walk, a little caffeine? Neither will be easy to come by with the wife hovering somewhere downstairs.