Charon Of The Cold Room

Chapter Ten: The Bloom That Failed

Kian left the dead man in the ash and ran.

He caught a night taxi two streets away and pressed one hand to his ribs the whole way across the city, feeling the blood seep warm through his shirt. He didn't care. In his other hand he gripped the cedar box so tightly that its corners bit into his palm. One dose will wake the sleeper for a little while. If anyone alive knew what had really happened on that road, it was Lina.

St. Elowen was quiet at half past three. He took the stairs to the eighteenth floor two at a time and slipped into the neuro suite. The specialists had taken Lina off the ventilator that evening, once she began breathing on her own, and now only a clear oxygen mask covered her face. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, even breaths. She looked very young. Three nights ago he had found her zipped inside a body bag, and he still saw it every time he closed his eyes.

Kian drew the curtain, opened the vial and tipped a single pale seed into his palm. He crushed it between the backs of two spoons from her untouched meal tray, stirred the powder into a few drops of water, and lifted the mask. Then he let the mixture fall beneath her tongue, straight onto the black lotus.

For a full minute, nothing happened. Then the dark edges of the bruise began to fade, curling back on themselves like burning paper. Lina's eyelids trembled, her fingers twitched against the sheet, and then she opened her eyes.

They were glassy at first, drifting across the ceiling and the window and the monitors, until they found his face. Her lips moved. "Kian." It was the first time he had heard her voice in three days, and it nearly undid him.

"I'm here." His voice cracked. He took her hand, and she gripped it with a strength that startled him. "You're safe. You're in the hospital."

"No." She shook her head weakly, and a desperate urgency filled her eyes. "Listen to me before I go back under. I can feel it pulling." Her breath hitched. "It wasn't an accident."

Kian's hand froze around hers.

"The car hit me, and I was on the ground," she whispered, each word costing her. "It stopped. It didn't drive away. I could see inside. Torin Halvorsen was in the passenger seat, slumped against the window, and he wasn't moving. He wasn't driving, Kian." Her fingers dug into his hand. "The driver got out. He had a doctor's coat on. He knelt down next to me, and I thought he was going to help me. Then he put a needle in my neck." She swallowed hard. "He was on the phone. He said, 'If she lives through the night, we'll know Charon loves her.'"

Her grip loosened. Her eyes fought to stay open and lost. The grey shadow crept back beneath her tongue, and within seconds she was breathing slowly again, as far away from him as before.

Kian sat frozen with her limp hand in his, and the cold of the morgue came back to him all at once.

Gravebloom had never been meant only to kill. It was bait. Nobody on earth survived it without Charon's needles, and the people who murdered Mother Yarrow knew that better than anyone. They had poisoned his sister, laid her in a steel drawer, and simply waited to see whether she would live. On that first night, with eleven needles in her chest, he had announced himself to the very people he had spent three years hiding from.

And it was worse than that. Torin had never been the driver. The heir who woke up with no memory of the drive had been drugged and propped in his own passenger seat, a ready-made culprit. Kian had demanded a confession from the wrong man. Seraphine had turned on her own cousin and lost her family for a crime he hadn't committed. And the man in the doctor's coat had used all of that noise and outrage to walk away unseen.

Kian knew only one doctor who smelled of bitter almonds.

He laid Lina's hand gently on the sheet, fitted the mask back over her face, and stepped out into the corridor. Seraphine was waiting for him, leaning against the opposite wall in her scrubs and white coat, looking as though she hadn't slept either. She held a single printed page, and instead of handing it to him, she held it up so he could read it.

It was a corporate registry record for Obol Holdings, incorporated somewhere he had never heard of. The registered agent was Ignatius Barlow.

"Barlow," she said quietly. "Charon's go-between. The man who stood beside my grandfather's bed two nights ago." She lowered the page, and her grey eyes held his, steady and unrelenting. "Mortuary attendants don't buy hospitals, Kian. Who are you?"

He opened his mouth to answer, and from the far end of the corridor, Del screamed.

Seraphine's hand closed on Kian's arm. Before either of them could move, his phone vibrated in his pocket.

It was a photograph. His mother lay asleep in her own bed at home, one arm curled under the pillow, her face slack and peaceful. The picture had been taken from inside her bedroom, barely two steps from the bed, and the timestamp said it was four minutes old. On the pillow beside her face lay a black lotus.

Beneath the photo was a single line of text. One bloom failed. We planted another. Ada was on the other side of the city, alone, and someone had stood over her bed while she slept, close enough to touch her.

Kian stared at the number it had come from. He knew it better than his own. Three years ago, that number had sent him a single word on the morning he ran out of his final exam.

It was Mother Yarrow's.