dead leaves. She cracks her coin-sized knuckles and steels herself for the eventual drive home. Navigating dark streets in a storm can be difficult. She understands this more than most. It's been four years, and she still can't get images of the boy in the raincoat skipping across the highway out of her thick-sloped skull.
Within a vacant room inside the bowels of the building the woman with the copper eye has just entered, past the crying hooker in the stairwell and the junkie slumped against a mattress in the corridor, cowers a little girl in the dark. She brings her knees under her chin and wraps her arms around her legs, holding tight. She rocks back and forth, back and forth. The girl tries to forget the nightmares that brought her to this building. A bolt of lightning from outside paints the room silver for a split second, making the splintered floorboards and shredded wallpaper come alive around her. This is my life now, she thinks. Her tiny heart wilts behind her ribs. There's no going back. Never again. A crack in the wall grabs her attention. It runs up to the ceiling, where it deepens and webs out like the roots of a tree.
In the corridor outside, the woman with the copper eye places a gloved hand on the doorknob and twists it. The ten-year-old she's come to find is behind the door. The eye has led her here, and it's never wrong.
The girl does not anticipate the unexpected guest, not that anything would prepare her for what the woman has in mind anyway. All she does is stare, and stare... and stare.
Miles away, in a quiet brownstone in the more affluent side of town, another little girl watches in awe as green shoots sprout from the pores of her sleeping stepfather's skin. In a matter of seconds, the shoots become stems tipped with buds that bloom into flowers of brilliant reds, purples, and yellows. The girl crouches down and smiles, plucking a flower from her stepfather's blossoming corpse as he becomes her special garden. Just like Granny had. And the nanny with halitosis.
The flower in her hand is delicate, possibly the most precious treasure she's ever seen. It makes her heart swell, knowing that true beauty always blooms from within anyone. Even drunk stepfathers.
From these moments onward, the little girls' fates are linked forever and shall twist, coil and entwine around one another in time. Not like vines, nor deadly vipers. But like wild and poisonous flowers in full bloom.
Chapter One
Oshibana
Pop culture and Hollywood will have you believe that black cats, ravens, and broken mirrors are omens of bad luck. But it’s human botflies one should be wary of.
Dermatobia Hominis. Fat and hairy, and parasitic. They infest human skin by laying eggs just beneath the surface, only for their larvae to hatch, plop to the ground and pupate.
Human botflies are nasty. Once considered the godspawn of a grotesque deity, nowadays they’re seen as nothing more than harbingers of a filthy magic that leaves a rank taste on the tongue like spoiled milk.
So, when I see my landlady approach me in the corridor outside my apartment with an envelope in her hand — her face a mosaic of raw lesions and bumps — I know shits about to go south.
“Hi, Wendy.” My voice cracks, much to my embarrassment. I step backwards, even though the other woman is still a few meters away. I press against the door to my apartment, and the amber security charms that swirl in lazy figures of eights send vibrations down my spine. I’ve seen and experienced crazy things. Mad, eldritch terrors, blood curses and mystical vermin. But botflies? Nothing drags me back to thirteen years ago, when I was alone and frightened in that derelict building Copper-Eye found me, like those obscene insects and the havoc they carry with them.
“Delphi,” the older woman breathes. Her voice is phlegmy and hoarse, as though the insects have laid eggs in her mouth. “I have something for you. It was left in my mailbox by mistake. Funny how that happens sometimes, right?”
Hilarious. I look down at the envelope in her hand. An adult botfly lands on it, then rubs its legs together before buzzing toward Wendy’s mottled face and rests on her left eyelid. There’s no way I’m touching that envelope.
I force a smile, though I’m pretty sure it comes off as more of a grimace than anything else. Wendy doesn’t seem to notice. The vibrations at