The mist hung back for her.
It streamed across the lawn in curves of white and clung to trees like on damp milkwhite cobwebs. Leaves formed faces in whorled surfaces, praying—and, almost, grieving.
Gabriel extended a palm up to the sky of night-dark not-light, darkness heaping itself in clumps over his form as happy puppies cling.
Margo never spoke a word. She walked only behind her, her footsteps crunching against the slick moss, her breathing suspended in the hush.
They walked into it together, the creaking gate that they left to hang sounding like an unspoken secret.
"Where are we?" she asked finally.
Gabriel kept moving forward, his voice far off. "The Garden of Rehearsals."
"Rehearsals?" she repeated.
"For what comes next," he said.
His eyes didn't look to hers. "For what you are when no one's there."
The garden was not like the one Lindsay had in her yard.
No orderly tulips. No painted-on ceramic gnomes' smiles. No butterflies of hope.
Here, flowers moved.
Petals curled in toward stems like fingers. They throbbed with color, not like color but like hunger. Ferns moved deliberately in the air, their breathing like lungs. A line of orchids whirled as they passed, their dark purple mouths opening just so, as if tasting her fear.
Margo's stomach churned.
"This spot." she breathed. "It is not dead. It is alive."
Gabriel did not respond. He stopped under a twisted willow whose branches curled above the ground like stretching fingers.
He knelt and stroked the earth.
"It was beautiful," he breathed. "Before the gardeners tired. Before the tourists came."
Margo whirled about, her eyes raking the darkness ahead.
The road branched five ways—each ringed by a varying hue of gray. The fog was thicker on the farthest road to the right.
She tripped.
"Which way?"
Gabriel didn't answer.
When she turned back, he was nowhere to be seen.
The silence that followed was sudden and stifling, pressing down on her eardrums until all she could hear was the soft slurp of mud underfoot.
Then she heard it.
Something moving.
Something dragging.
At the weeping bushes there was the whisper of slithering leaves—the screech of vines against dirt. And then she saw it.
A thing. Ivied and rot-covered and flowering. Its face—or what could have been its face—was a hole of moss. Its eyes were empty holes filled with twisting roots.
It hissed.
Not like a snake.
Like something that had howled for centuries and learned to begin but not end.
Margo gasped and spun. She ran.
The flowers beside her sprang to life in an instant.
Vines shuddered. Leaves uncurled to display thorned mouths. The flowers stretched. Stretched. Stretched.
They snapped shut their petals, biting the air.
Margo leapt over a bed of thorned roses. A blue lily swiped and scratched her leg.
She screamed—but never shattered.
Behind her, the creep of a plant made a howling sound.
Its branches shot above natural length. It flailed and crept along. Its every move rattled the garden floor.
Gabriel's shriek came from far away, "Margo, left! Go left!"
But she was too scared. She went the opposite way.
A miscalculation.
The aisle grew small. Trees crowded in. Their branches scratched across her arms, her cheeks, her hair.
Then the forest engulfed her.
The canopy above was a mesh of shadow veins. No sky. No stars.
Only eyes.
Everywhere.
Blinking from the bark. Glowing softly in the distance. Watching her.
She backed away and bumped into a tree.
It opened its mouth.
A jagged grin, bark peeling like old skin. Its branches writhed like arms and one stretched out.
Margo screamed.
The earth beneath her gave way.
She fell—head first, arms and legs kicking—into a dark hole.
She fell through roots and silence and dreams and lost things.
And then—water.
She splashed it with a bone-jarring crash. Cold as ice. Cold enough to bruise. She burst up, gasping, choking, her battered arms scrabbling towards the edge of a greasy black beach.
She pulled herself up, choking so hard she almost vomited.
When she got used to the pale blue darkness—she saw them.
Figures.
Scores of them.
Bark-skinned and moss-skinned. Their faces empty. But armed now. Thorns to spears. Wood to swords. They were human-form, not human.
They came forward.
Margo turned to flee—but in time.
One of them sprang forward, a stem-knife held in his hand. He clipped her hair off with one stroke. A great tress fell to the ground like fallen petals.
He stooped, retrieved it… and consumed it.
"No—stop!" she exclaimed, retreating.
They hacked again—this time across her arm. A deep, red cut unfolded like a new flower.
She stumbled and twirled, her feet scraping along the ground beneath her.
One vine snaked behind her and tripped her legs.
She fell with force. Her knees scraped against something hard.
The vine coiled around her ankle.
"No, no, no—PLEASE—" she screamed.
It pulled.
Hard.
She was pulled across the earth, across thorns, by grinning trees whose lips curled into laughter. Her skin ripped in little areas, blood running down her knee, her shoulder.
She kicked. Bitten her tongue. Screamed until her throat was sore.
Then—
It flung her.
Her body went soaring through the air like a tossed rag doll and crashed into a tree.
Crack.
The bark was torn behind her. Her eyes crossed over.
Pain. A mist of it.
Then—nothing.
She had no idea how long she was there, lying unconscious under the weight of the bodies.
Perhaps minutes. Perhaps hours.
But the garden whispered.
Whispered her name like a lullaby embroidered with needles.
"Margo… Margo… Maaaaar-go…"
When finally she opened her eyes, she saw a shadow kneeling over her.
Gabriel.
His eyes were wide open. His lips shook.
"I told you not to run off."
She coughed. Her chest hurt.
"I… I didn't… I didn't intend to…"
He pressed his fingers to her lips.
"Don't talk. Not here. They'll hear you."
"Who—?"
But the question faded from her lips when she looked up.
Above them, dozens of tree-branches writhed. Like hair caught in wind. But there was no wind.
Gabriel lifted her gently.
"We need to go."
"But I'm bleeding…"
"Exactly. You're scented now. They'll come."
He bore her, step by straining step, along a route she hadn't seen. One that opened wide between two ancient boulders. One that was. toothed.
As he walked through it, the door of the fog slammed shut over them like the lid of a coffin.
They stepped—finally—to the border of the first garden. The air was cleaner again. But her sores remained open.
Margo stumbled, hating to lean on Gabriel.
All of them there pulsed with agony. But not only bodily.
Something had brushed against her mind there. Something ravenous.
Gabriel said nothing. He simply looked at her as if she was already transforming.
And in the trees in the distance, the vines quivered.
Waiting.