Page 27 of Tangled at the Root
The study is splattered in blood and gore.Myblood and gore. I extend a shaky hand and murmur an incantation to summon my glasses.
The lenses are intact, thank God. A short chant gives them a thorough clean. The cheap frame shifts willingly according to my command, straightening and fixing itself. I plop them on my face and everything in the distance sharpens.
“Where—?” My voice comes out thick. Raspy. Desperate. “Take me to her.”
The study door is wide open. I brace my feet when the floor moves, much gentler than the last time the house had relocated me according to its will.
It leads me to the sitting room, where Genevieve is standing in the far corner, like she’d heard me coming and had run as far as she could get.
I can’t remember the last time my death actually meant something. When last I worried about someone else witnessing it, if that had ever even been a worry in the first place.
Genevieve sees me and lets out a strangled sound. Her expression is twisted with horror and anguish.
And my soul is shattering. My heart is fucking disintegrating.
“No,” she keens.
“Genevieve,” I try, clearing my throat. The floor stops moving when I’m a few feet from her, my shaking hands outstretched in supplication.
“No, no, no—” She clenches her eyes shut, pressing harder against the wall even though there’s nowhere for her to go. I ignore that her hands are tipped with claws, gauging out paint and concrete behind her. The evidence of my latest, violent death is splattered all over her face and hair and tank top. OhGod.
“Genevieve, it’s me, I’m fine, I promise—”
“No, please, God, no—”
I’m crying; her pain is so visceral. “Genevieve—omemi.”
Her breath hitches at the endearment—we’d never allowed ourselves to refer to each other so intimately, soobviously—her chest heaving, but she doesn’t open her eyes. I don’t move any closer. I’m too afraid.
“Omemi,” I whisper again.Mine; my own.
Slowly, she opens her eyes. Stares at me like she’s simultaneously seeing a ghost and like it’s the last time she’ll ever see me.
“I’m fine.” I furiously wipe away my tears; this isn’t about me right now. “You’re okay.”
It doesn’t seem like she can speak, or even knows what to say, which I understand.
I sway on the spot, and it snaps Genevieve out of it. I’m in her arms before I can crumple to the floor.
“Rosemary,” she gasps, sinking down to her knees, cradling me gently to her chest. The panic and terror are back in her gaze. I’ve never seen her look so wild. Despite the situation, I find myself greedily cataloguing all these new expressions, permanently marking them in my memory like a historian discovering something new and unseen. “Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” I repeat weakly. God, but I hate this expression I’ve put on her face, like she’s waiting to watch me die again, except this time, I won’t miraculously come back to life. “I just … I need my trunk.”
Genevieve tries to extricate me from her embrace, but I don’t let her. I don’t want her out of my sight right now. I don’t want her to stop touching me.
The floor beside us rumbles, turning into fine sand, which abruptly sinks. My trunk leaps out of the hole, as if ejected by an invisible force, and the floor magically repairs itself afterward.
My lips twitch despite my exhaustion. It seems the house can alter itself and its foundations at will; I should be taking notes. My mother would be so excited to learn more.
Genevieve grabs the edge of the trunk, pulling it closer. I end up seated between her legs, my left shoulder to her chest, legs thrown over her left thigh, her arms dropping to my waist.
“Oh,” she says when I’ve brought out the Ziploc bag holding the familiar candy.
The first time we’d truly spoken to each other had been the day we’d shared my sticky toffee. For the days preceding that, we’d been two lonely, introverted girls sharing a study space in the library every Tuesday, drawn to a silence so comfortable it had seemed like an old thing.
Even back then, her deliberately muted emotion had been obvious, calling to the part of me that was just as purposefully repressed. She must’ve felt the same, because after that first Tuesday when she’d claimed all the other rooms were full, she’d kept coming back.
We’d talked a bit of course, but about things that didn’t matter.
