“We have these on the grounds of Highmoor,” I said, bending down to examine the spotted tubular blossoms. I looked up in alarm. “Should we get rid of them?”
Gerard chuckled. “Foxglove doesn’t often kill, but it can wreak havoc on your digestive system and heart if an antidote isn’t supplied.”
I glanced warily at the dainty blooms. Now that I knew the secrets they held, they suddenly seemed strange and suspicious.
“Would you like to see my prized jewel?”
“I…I suppose?” I swallowed back a growing lump of fear.
He helped me to my feet and brought us to the center of the poison garden. Gerard held out his hand to a shrub nearly as tall me, as if at court, presenting a grand dame. “I give youAtropa belladonna.”
Small, bruised-looking flowers nestled between its leaves, and scatterings of dark berries glistened seductively in the morning light.
“One of the most dangerous plants in all the known world,” he said, staring in rapt wonder. “She’s the only specimen I’ve ever been able to grow to maturity. The seeds are nearly impossible to germinate. But look at her. Isn’t she magnificent? So lovely, so deadly. Even ingesting a few berries will—”
“Stop,” I interrupted. “I don’t want to know.”
He tilted his head, as if unable to fathom my aversion. “I only thought—”
I turned away from the plant, itching to free myself from this garden of death. The greenery—which had seemed so benign, so lovely, only moments before—now leaned toward us with malicious intent, as if plotting our demise with eager glee.
I fled past plants with pale, starry-shaped leaves and spiky blossoms as red as blisters, trees dangling trails of flowers so yellow they looked like vomit, a thick hedge that smelled strangely of almonds, tickling my nose with terrible persistence. My vision swam before me, spinning too light, too bright, and I felt my knees give way. My head struck the lavender-chipped tiles and the world went black.
Everything came screaming back in a riot of colors that burned too bright, leaving trails of glowing comets dancing across my corneas.
“Verity? Verity!” Gerard said, leaning over to shake me. Points of light shot out from his face; his eyes burned like sizzling embers. He looked radiant. He looked like a god.
My head throbbed, every beat of my heart pulsing too strong, sending erratic reverberations echoing through my limbs.
A sudden swing of movement seemed to suggest I’d sat up, but when I stared ahead, all I saw were panes of the greenhouse windows. They twirled like a prismatic kaleidoscope, iridescently hued and bursting with wonder.
“Verity,” a voice called out, teasing and flippant.
I turned to see my sisters, my six dead sisters, there in the greenhouse.
Ava’s skin still erupted in plague pustules. Octavia’s limbs splayed out in angles so wrong I felt as though I might grow sick. Elizabeth’s wrists dripped bathwater and blood onto the ground below, wetting the dry earth like a warm summer rain.
“You’re not here,” I muttered, and my tongue felt too thick and sluggish, a sausage casing stuffed too full and on the verge of splitting. “You’re not here because you’re dead.”
“Verity,” the voice said again.
Gerard.
I think.
I blinked, struggling to keep my eyes on my sisters. They wanted to turn, wanted to roll back, back into my head, back into the welcoming embrace of oblivion, back into the bleak, black nothing.
“Verity…”
My eyes snapped open. Snapped toward the voice.
Only it wasn’t Gerard who’d been speaking.
Her skin was pale and ashen. Long streaks of black hair showered down her shoulders, wafting in a breeze that I absolutely knew wasn’t in the greenhouse. She smiled, revealing sharpened gray teeth, and her eyes…
I whimpered, pushing myself backward, trying to get away from them but they pinned me in place, a butterfly staked through its middle to a mounting board. Deep pools of black stared down at me, mesmerizing and hypnotic. There was no white, no iris. Just oily, writhing black.
“Verity…,” she said, drawing my name out like we were playing a game, caught in the middle of a dance. She blinked and the black—the awful, horrible black—came rolling down her cheeks, staining her face with streaks of malevolence.
