This Wicked Fate (This Poison Heart #2)(76)

“I’m so sorry, Bri,” Karter said again.

I held my hands up and willed a cage of vines, none of them poisonous, to bind him. Coiling tendrils and wide leaves encapsulated every part of him until I could only see his eyes through the tangle of foliage.

“He’s not going anywhere,” I said. “And we have something more important to do right now.”

Circe nodded in agreement and retrieved the two cages as Persephone gazed toward the walled enclosure. Something dark and unreadable passed over her face.

I went to Viv’s body and took the vial of Living Elixir from her pocket, grasped Marie’s hand, and approached the gate.





CHAPTER 21

If the gate guarding the entrance to the Poison Garden back home was a wicked grin, this one was an insidious smirk. The bars weren’t straight up and down anymore but instead, tilted to the left and right like jagged broken teeth. The gaps were big enough to walk through. Maybe that had been what Dre and the others attempted to do. But how they hadn’t managed to worry about the blue vines creeping their way across the bars didn’t make sense. The audacity of the coral blooms paired with the blue trunks of the vines screamed danger. As we approached, my suspicions were confirmed as the air spilling down my throat turned icy. It took my breath away. Circe and Persephone both began to cough. Marie sucked in a breath and held it.

I angled my body to slide through a gap in the gate, and as I passed through, a coil of the deadly vine encircled my ankle and climbed up my leg, turning around my calf and gripping my thigh. The thorns drug across my jeans, then laid themselves flat.

“What is this?” I asked.

Circe ran her hand over her forehead. “I think it’s called Beast of Burden. I’ve never actually seen it in person.”

I let out a breath and pushed forward, helping Circe transfer the two cages into the interior of the walled structure. Marie came in after her and then Persephone. We stayed close to one another as we navigated a narrow pathway that followed the right angles of the interior wall. When we emerged into the inner space, we all stopped. I was dumbstruck. This garden was like the Poison Garden on steroids.

There were no mundane herbs, no quiet plants. The inner sanctum of the giant walled garden was in full bloom. There were no partitions there, only a big open space where the most poisonous plants I knew of grew straight from the ground. The air was made of ice—of poison. Devil’s Pet with offshoots the size of tree trunks slithered among the bushes of crimson brush. More tangles of Beast of Burden crowded the overgrown pathways between the earthen plots. Black hellebore, bloodroot, clusters of euphorbia, hemlock bushes the size of boulders, mandrake whose roots rose from beneath the rich soil like the appendages of a corpse. Poison ivy clung to every brick, and all of them seemed to wake from their long slumber as we entered.

In the nearest corner of the garden a tangle of black hellebore as far across as I was tall bloomed, showing us their bright canary-yellow centers. The entire gathering of plants twisted back on itself, revealing a waist-high rectangular stone structure.

A box.

Persephone slowly examined it and a moment later called out to us. “You won’t believe what this is.”

As I approached the structure the hellebore pulled back to reveal a single word etched into the stone wall above the box.

Medea.

No one said a single word. The box was a sarcophagus, and in it were the remains of the woman whose story had defined the Colchis family.

“Who put her here?” Marie asked.

Circe shook her head. “I—I don’t know.” She pulled out the moon clock and held it in her trembling hand. Its ticking fell in time with the beating of the caged piece of the Heart. “We don’t have much time left.”

As we moved away from the grave, the hellebore fell over it like a shroud, hiding it from view. But as Medea’s final resting place was hidden, something else was revealed.

As if on command, the deadly foliage shifted in the moonlight, revealing a mound in the very center of the garden. At its peak stood what could only be the thing we had gone there to find—the Mother. The last piece of the Absyrtus Heart.

It stood like a petrified monument to Medea’s slain brother, Hecate’s only son—Absyrtus. It was triple the size of the pieces we’d seen that still retained their anatomical shape. It sat atop an onyx stalk as thick around as my leg. The roots laced through the earth, breaking the surface like the tentacles of a sea creature every few feet and extending all the way to the wall.

“Do you know where we are?” Circe whispered. “Gods …”

My breath caught in my throat. It wasn’t that we were in the presence of this rare and deadly plant, it was that we now stood in the spot where Medea had laid her brother to rest. Where she had, no doubt, wept over his grave, where she had spilled her own blood to keep these shattered pieces alive. We were again sharing space with Medea across the centuries.

“Any idea what we’re supposed to do now?” I asked. We’d done the impossible. We’d gathered the pieces of the Heart together in the same spot, but what now? I took the vial of the Living Elixir out of my pocket and rolled it between my fingers. “Maybe we pour it on top of the Mother?”

Persephone quickly moved to one of the cages and opened the metal door. She retrieved the intact piece of the Heart and set it in the dirt beside the Mother near the top of the mound. The roots immediately anchored themselves in the ground, and while the beating of the Heart had dwindled to once or twice a minute, it stood tall, like it knew it belonged there.