Over one shoulder, Nova says to Blake, “Back up! Now!”
Blake moves away as far as the doorway to the back porch. Nova pours a thin trail of lighter fluid several feet out from the blossom. The massive white petals glow unapologetically despite having been doused. She flicks off the child safety on the fireplace lighter in her left hand, brings the tiny, focused flame to the puddle of fluid at her feet.
The fluid ignites in a single, blink-fast whoosh. The flames are instantly sucked up and over the flower and into the air above.
Nova rocks back off of her knees, her butt hitting the floor with a hard thud. Willie jumps back a step.
The bugs explode from the crystals in a frenzied cloud.
The flames, which have become a single arc of blue and orange, race up the outline of some vague and previously invisible shape that fills the air above the unmarred blossoms. A hint of a face or a silhouette, Blake can’t tell. But it’s there for a second, and then all of it’s gone, like the fire has been consumed by the air itself, and save for a scorch mark in the spot where Nova first touched the lighter to the fluid, there’s no evidence of her attempt to destroy the flower at all.
All of it happens so fast Blake’s attention ends up on the bugs again. A swirl of blue fire just ignited below them like a giant Bunsen burner, and it still wasn’t enough to force them into full retreat. They had moved, agitated, but now they close over the chandelier again, a buzzing, swirling testimony to the draw of whatever dark power resides within the blossom’s undisturbed glow.
When Blake leaves the room, Nova and Willie don’t move, and he figures they’re still stricken by the pale suggestion of a ghost that was briefly illuminated by Nova’s unsuccessful attempt to destroy the flower.
In the ruins of the small study just off the foyer, beneath the ceiling destroyed by Kyle Austin’s speared body, Blake finds the second blossom, a mirror image of the first, just as vital, just as illuminated, a slender thread of fierce beauty amid the dangling Sheetrock and overturned leather-tufted desk chair. Lining the holes in the ceiling are more regiments of hypnotized insects. They’re gathering here around this blossom as well.
Blake stumbles into the house’s grand foyer, because here there is no wreckage or debris or veins of june bugs and flies dappling the walls or the great chandelier. Just a tilting portrait of Felix Delachaise on the wall overhead, with his high-domed forehead and lips so fat they appear to be peeling away from his mouth, and the fresh memory of Caitlin’s dismantling. As realization breaks over him, Blake reaches for the doorknob because the only thing he can think to do is run. But from behind him comes Nova’s voice, as clear and decisive as a whip crack.
“You said no.”
She’s standing in the door of the study. Behind her, Willie stares down at the second blossom with a vacant, glaze-eyed expression.
It feels like he’s breathing through a straw, but Blake manages his next words carefully, as if he were speaking to a mentally handicapped patient. “Those bugs are going to… I don’t know… react with those flowers, and then they’re going to turn into something like what—”
“You said no, Blake.”
“I know what I said, Nova.”
“Well, it has to mean something. It has to. She forced it on you. She manipulated you; she overwhelmed you. She dragged you out there, and even then, even then, Blake, you said no. You made a choice. That’s got to mean something.”
“I don’t think she gives a shit,” Blake whispers.
“Caitlin?”
“No. Not Caitlin.”
“Then who are you—”
“Virginie. Virginie Lacroix.”
They’re standing a few feet apart now. Willie watches them from the doorway of the study, the shotgun leaning against the door frame in a final gesture of surrender to the powers at work all around them. In another few minutes, Felix Delachaise’s portrait will probably slip from its hook and crash to the floor, and then his furrowed brow will make it seem as if he’s angry at being dropped and not struggling to process what happened to Caitlin Chaisson, which is how he looks right now.
“I’m talking about the ghost of a slave who can make plants grow and die with her bare hands. I’m talking about the woman I saw when I smelled that flower. All of this, it’s—it’s Virginie…” He turns to the gardener. “You’re right, Willie. She’s sideways and all through everything and waiting to be fed. And now she has been. She got Caitlin’s blood, and now she’s got mine and she’s going to do the same thing to me she did to her.”
“You don’t know that!” Nova screams, but her building hysteria tells him she believes every word that’s just tumbled from his mouth in a mad rush. “You don’t know what any of this means.”
“I know what I can see. And I see a process. I see a pattern. And it’s starting all over again. I don’t know how long I have. A few hours, maybe. A day. But they’re going to come for me, Nova. They’re going to come for me, and they’re going to… take me too.”
When Nova embraces him, Blake is so startled his next words leave him. She holds to him so tightly he feels as if his bones are going to crack, as if in a fit of childish anger she’s convinced she can literally armor him against the forces she knows will come for him soon. Willie has moved in a few steps closer, as if he too thinks that by closing the circle there’s something they can do. He holds back, though, as if knowing that the gesture would be just that: a gesture.
“You ain’t gonna run?” he asks Blake.
“Where would I go? She took one of those flowers all the way to New Orleans and those… things, they still came for her. Right here, they got her.”
“Maybe they can’t go much farther,” Willie offers, voice trembling. “Maybe you could outrun ’em if you tried.”
“I don’t think so,” Blake whispers.
“You don’t think so?” Nova cries, pulling away from him. “What the hell does that mean? You don’t wanna think so. Is that it?”
Willie and Nova stare at him the same way he’s seen a thousand distraught relatives stare at a doomed loved one in the ER, and it’s more than he can handle.
Blake hears Nova’s footsteps behind him as he races through the study and then the front parlor toward the open back door. Then she falls into step with him as he stalks toward the gazebo.
“The bugs, they were normal until they got Caitlin, right?”
“I don’t know, Nova. I don’t—”
“You do know! They were normal when they came down through the widow’s walk in a big cloud. They were still just bugs. They only changed after they tore her apart.”
The red gardening box is still upended a few yards from where the gazebo now sits atop a baby Indian burial mound. His eyes search the grass for the pruning shears Caitlin slashed him with. Because the gazebo’s light had shorted out, the lights from the main house throw Blake’s and Nova’s shadows across the gazebo’s frame, making it look even more ruined than it actually is.
“We can get them before they get you, is what I’m saying, Blake. We can put you somewhere safe and use you like bait. Then we can blow the fuckers up. We’re all from Louisiana here. We know how to kill a bunch of bugs, for Christ’s sake!”
“Blow them up? Just like we burned the flower in there?”
Blake picks up the shears and tests them in one hand.