my light in and caught my first glimpse of what it contained. The strange plant bore an unmistakable resemblance to a human heart. My phone slipped out of my trembling hand and hit the floor with a loud crack.
I scrambled to pick it up as the flashlight flickered on and off. A spider’s web of cracked glass stared back at me as I checked the extent of the damage. I sighed. I should have stayed my ass aboveground.
Turing back to the enclosure, my light glinted off something set in the stone near its base. I pushed up my glasses and crouched to read the words engraved on a rusting placard.
ABSYRTUS HEART
I slowly stood, my gaze locked on the glass housing. The plant from the big book was real, and for whatever reason, Circe had put me through an entire scavenger hunt to find it. It was behind a locked gate, a locked door, and a gathering of toxic plants that would put most people in the hospital—if they lived long enough to get to one.
The confines of the room pressed in on me. The Heart stood within the enclosure like something out of a nightmare. The plant was rooted in a small circle of dirt ringed by shining black stones, and directly next to it was a second circle of dirt where nothing grew.
I searched for a way to open the glass and found a small keyhole marked by the same crest as the door above. Using the bone-white key with the ruby heart, I unlocked the case. Without the foggy glass in the way, I studied the plant. It was even stranger up close. It looked like the drawing in the big book, but it wasn’t pink and plump. It was crumbling and ashen. The artery-like stalk snaked into the bone-dry dirt. Without thinking, I reached out to touch one of the broken leaves. Maybe it would perk up like the plants in the shop back home.
My fingers had barely brushed the nearest leaf when a bolt of cold entered my arm like an electric pulse. I stumbled back, clutching my hand. A numbing ache spread into my wrist. I cried out, my voice echoing all around me. Panting, my heart racing, I fell against the wall. My hand felt like it was frozen in a block of ice. The pain was so much worse than when I cut myself dissecting the water hemlock, worse than anything I’d ever felt. It was the most toxic thing I’d ever come in contact with.
I quickly locked the enclosure and left, making sure to lock the metal door, too. My hand ached, and the cold had spread to my arm like ice was flowing in my veins. I rubbed the back of my hand, trying to push warmth into the tips of my fingers, but the pain of touching my own skin was agonizing. I paced the Poison Garden, shaking out my hand.
I was immune to the hemlock, to the poison ivy, and the crimson brush, but this thing—the Absyrtus Heart—had wounded me in a way I didn’t think was possible. Did this immunity have limits?
The pain held fast, refusing to retreat. I watched the time through the fractured glass of my phone’s screen. Only after thirty minutes that felt more like hours did the pain start to dissipate.
A gathering of blush-pink oleander overtook the confines of its plot and spilled across the ground and was crowding the hellebore, suffocating it. I decided to thin it right at that moment and try to put my mind somewhere else. I grabbed a mesh bag from one of the hooks in the garden wall and pulled up the oleander, stuffing it inside. I glanced back at the place in the wall where the door was hidden. I didn’t know what an Absyrtus Heart was or why it was in its own secret room, protected by enough plants to kill everyone in Rhinebeck a few times over. Marie said it was dangerous. She’d asked me not to open the door. I should’ve listened.
I took the oleander I’d collected and left the garden. My hand still ached as I made my way home. I wanted to keep that room locked up. If that was what Circe had wanted me to find, she’d gotten her wish. I saw it, but I wasn’t going back in there. Why hold on to a plant like that? Something that poisonous was dangerous, not that anybody could even get to it—but