Page 64 of An Invocation of Monsters

Staring at the flowers, twisting them around as though to discern an answer in the petals, I remembered what I had told Kiraxis on our first meeting.

What happened to flowers and chocolates before getting the goods?

Oh my God. He’d taken me literally.

I couldn’t get out of bed without stepping on a few of the flowers, which made me wince after all the trouble he’d gone to. Then I looked back at the bed, which now resembled a strange island floating in the midst of greenery.

He had to have cleared out several entire meadows to make this happen. Somewhere out there, a lot of bees were very confused about where their lunch had gone.

Then, to my surprise, a massive grin spread across my face.

“How’s that for flowers on a first date?” I asked the room, receiving no reply.

It was so… sweet of him. Nobody, not even Brady the quarterback, had ever given me flowers.

I found several vases stored in the sideboard in the parlor, and crammed as many flowers into them as I possibly could, distributing them throughout my quarters. But even with every vase filled, there was still a massive quantity of flowers around my bed.

With the sweet-spicy scent filling the air, I took a shower and emerged in clean clothes, padding out into the parlor.

There were so many flowers left… I sat and stripped the leaves from some of them, poking them into my bun.

My mind was full. Completely and utterly packed to capacity.

I pulled a notebook from my duffel bag, clicked a pen, and started writing down everything I remembered from the meeting.

A lot of it was a complete jumble to me. I would likely get no answers on how the four of them had met in the first place, nor about where Tasha had disappeared to.

But some of this… I could definitely work on some of this myself. And now I felt I knew why the genealogy book had been included in the box.

I slid it out from under the Deepwater book and flipped it open. It had the rather dry title of The Research Guide to Genealogy, and there were many, many paragraphs of extremely small font.

I could feel myself trying to yawn already.

But I made myself flip through it, hoping for notations, a dog-eared page, literally anything to give me a hint—

And there it was, fluttering out as I began flipping towards the back. I picked up and unfolded what appeared to be a torn-out page from a spiral notebook.

My mother’s bubbly writing covered it, creating an odd tree of sorts… with my name at the very bottom.

I moved upwards, following the lines of the sketched-out tree and the other names listed there.

Gillian and Josephine Marsh

Felicity Marsh

Sophie Marsh (who was Sophie’s mother??? Check records in Innsmouth)

That was it. But it was clear that my mother had believed we were related to the same Sophie Marsh who had been photographed here so many years ago.

I checked the pages the notebook paper had been hidden between, but there was nothing but more dry, dusty paragraphs. Had she concluded all of this based solely on a rather common last name?

That was a hell of a reach. There were probably thousands of Marshes on the East Coast alone.

I looked at the family tree again, nibbling my lower lip.

Finally I picked up my phone, hesitating here and there as I debated how best to phrase this.

Elle: So it turns out mom was super interested in genealogy

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