This Wicked Fate (This Poison Heart #2)(73)

CHAPTER 20

A tug in the pit of my stomach led me forward. It was the same feeling I’d had just before I found the Poison Garden back home. A sense that something was calling out to me, beckoning me. I tripped along behind Viv. With each passing moment she looked sicker; her brown skin was almost gray as the flickering invisibility of her various parts began to subside. But the poison in the wolfsbane—that would not subside. That would usher her to her grave.

She cursed at me and threatened me every five minutes that she’d put me to sleep if a single blade of grass so much as moved in her direction. I had to explain to her that there were some things I could control and some things I couldn’t. I wasn’t calling the plants, but they reacted to me nonetheless. Thick tendrils of Devil’s Pet slithered along the ground on either side of us. The trees groaned as their boughs arched overhead. They were waiting for me to give a signal.

Behind me, Dre kept his arm around Calvin’s waist as they shuffled along, trying to keep pace. Calvin’s condition, like Viv’s, worsened as we moved toward the heart of the island. He struggled to keep his feet under him, and Dre kept yelling at him to get it together. I didn’t know how somebody was supposed to just get it together after being poisoned by some toxic plant. These people were irrational, and that made them dangerous to me and to one another.

My throat burned with every breath I took. My lips were starting to crack, and I realized it was probably because I hadn’t had anything to drink in hours.

I stopped. “I need water.”

“Shut up,” Viv said. She shoved me forward and I lost my balance, falling face-first into the dirt.

I was too exhausted to move, too wrecked to pay attention to the pain that bloomed in my cheek. As I lay there, a sprig of trumpet-shaped blooms stretched toward me. One of them tipped itself up and spilled a mouthful of dew across my lips. The water stung my chapped skin and brought with it an unexpected chill. Another bloom tipped over and gave me another little drink. My glasses were off again, but even then, I could make out the cream-colored blooms of the thornapple.

Viv grabbed me by the back of my T-shirt and yanked me up to my feet. “No cheating, sweetie.” She kicked at the flowers and some of them broke off under her shoe. A ripple of anger coursed through me as she laughed. “On second thought,” she said, “I am a little thirsty.”

She reached down and grabbed one of the other blooms that was still brimming with dew and put it to her lips. Dre leaped forward and smacked it out of her hand.

“It’s poisonous!” he shouted. “Angel’s trumpet—I think.”

I shook my head. “Wrong.”

“It’s not toxic, then?” Viv asked.

I could see the desperation in her wide eyes and pinched mouth. She was dying of thirst.

Drink it, I thought. Every last drop. I overdramatically wet my lips. The poison in the thornapple was enough to kill her. Paired with the wolfsbane in the invisibility mixture, I was hoping it would be enough to finish her off.

“It’s poison,” Dre said, glowering at me. “And you’ve had your fill of that already. Keep moving.”

Viv shoved me forward and we pressed on. I looked between the trees as we went, hoping to catch a glimpse of Marie or Persephone. I kept hoping Circe’s voice would ring out in the encroaching dark, but there was nothing. They might still be sleeping. Viv could have put them so far under they’d forgotten to breathe. Terrible thoughts invaded every corner of my mind until I found myself gasping for breath, sweating but not from the heat. I wrestled the panic into submission. A branch broke somewhere to my right. We all stopped midstep and Viv glared at me.

“I didn’t do it,” I said quickly.

She peered into the tree line, then turned back around. “Keep moving.”

We continued on, but somewhere in the shadows there was a flash of something between the trunks. A person. I kept my head down and my mouth shut.

The trees began to thin and a rush of panic washed over me. I thought we were approaching another shoreline, but all of that faded away as we pushed into a large clearing littered with Tacca chantieri. The black bat flower. Exactly the same species as the ones in the glade outside the garden back home. The difference here was the sheer volume of them. They were so tightly packed I couldn’t see the grass beneath them, and as I walked into the glade, they all turned their whiskered faces toward me.

Across the clearing stood a stone enclosure. Dre had said it was three stories high but I think he was off by a lot. The top of the wall was at least twice the height of the house in Rhinebeck, maybe a full five stories. It rose up from the surrounding land like it was born from it. A constellation of star moss bloomed at its base and swirled up the sides like thick green galaxies, catching each slick slate-gray stone in its orbit. Dre put his hand on my shoulder and I shrugged away from him.

“See the entrance?” he asked.

The gleaming metal gate was festooned with vine-like structures I didn’t recognize. They were a deep cobalt blue with thorns the color of rust and blooms a shade of peachy coral.

“What is that vine?” Dre asked.

“I—I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Dre tilted his head back. “One of those thorns barely nicked Calvin and now he’s dying.”

“Shut up!” Viv snapped at her brother. “You don’t know that.” She pushed past me and knelt next to Calvin, who had collapsed into a heap among the black bat flowers. “You’re gonna be fine. As soon as I’m stronger, I’ll bring you back.”