In the distance, Charlie screams and there’s the clatter of rubble falling. Charlie isn’t a superhero either.
I sigh and close my eyes. “Okay, he can stay with me.”
Chapter
Two
“So how are you about the bathroom? Any weird things I should know about?”
“What weird thing would I be doing in the bathroom?” I ask in confusion.
Charlie shrugged. “I dunno, that’s why I asked, roomie.”
Charlie has got me there.
“There’s nothing weird going on in the bathroom but let me show you where the towels are.”
My house isn’t the one I grew up in, but it’s cozy with two bedrooms, a living room with a reading nook and an eat-in kitchen. There isn’t a front porch, just a brick stoop to sit if I want to drink my coffee and people watch while Sweet Tooth wakes up. I like to sit there in the mornings and in the evenings I go on back to my small back porch that leads right out to my favorite part of my new home.
A small greenhouse sits right off the back porch, the door opens right up to it and it’s nice when it rains. I can walk right out of the kitchen and keep dry on my way to visit my plants. The previous owners built it but they left town not long after Wrath and Buffy ended the whole virgin sacrifice scheme the town hadgoing on. I guess Sweet Tooth lost its charm for them when the blood of virgins wasn’t making it prosperous.
And while the house was neat and well-tended, the greenhouse looked like it hadn’t been cared for in years. It was nice having something to work on when I came back to an empty home in the evenings. Bit by bit I cleared the dead vines and plants from the space and cleaned the glass panels until they sparkled in the sunlight. Setting the greenhouse to rights gave me something to do. Direction when I felt like a top spinning too fast. Everything was happening all at once, and none of it to me. Everything and nothing. What did you really have when you held both in the palm of your hand?
I didn’t have a clue. I’d spent weeks thinking about it while I cleaned and repotted the plants in the greenhouse. It was good I had something to do with my hands while fighting off the sense of existential doom. Made the time pass faster.
I give Charlie a tour of the house and get asked approximately four more times about “weird stuff” happening in such tantalizing locations as the kitchen, the front stoop, his bedroom, and of course, the living room. After the tour, I leave him to settle in and it’s my greenhouse I go to. The warm humid air makes me pause and take in a deep breath. The scent of mint and lavender mingling in the air has me smiling. All my life I wanted to garden like the others that got to work out at the greenhouses but Blossoms weren’t allowed to do that kind of work. We were put in the taffy shop, the flower shop, or the hot springs.
“Blossoms are beautiful. They should be somewhere they’re admired. Front and center.”Was what Mister O’Hare had said. I almost manage to make a face thinking about him. Not really a frown, but kind of like an eye twitch. Progress on the frown front.
“Draven,” I say quietly. “Not mister O’Hare. It’s Draven and he’s dead.”
Buffy killed him with a sword through his gut. I saw it. He’s buried in the graveyard with the rest of his devotees in an unmarked grave. Not the head of the Founders and the cult, not the mouthpiece of our demon god like I’d been raised to believe, but a man. Just a dead man.
I start to work on repotting a lavender plant that Ms. Donna gave to me last week. I fill the new pot with soil and work the plant out of the plastic container she put it in. It’s snug, the roots pressed up against the sides into a ball. My mind starts to wander like it always does while I shake the roots free of soil and rinse them off.
“You’ll like your new home,” I tell the lavender. “Plenty of room to spread out. That container was too small. It wasn’t right for you.”
My mind skips from the plant to my reality of what’s wrong and right. What I know and what I don’t know. How I always knew something wasn’t right about the fate of the Blossoms. That there wasn’t any City or happily-ever-after. Maybe I knew. I had to have known.
Deep down I’d always known everything was wrong.
We all had.
My mother’s tearful face flashes in my mind and I shove it away but before I can, the lies she told me drag themselves out of the past.
“I’m just so very sad that you’ll leave us one day for a glamorous life in the city. That’s all, Meadow. You’ll have so much fun dancing and sightseeing you won’t want to come back to Sweet Tooth to visit. No one ever does because it’s just so much fun.”
So. Much. Fun.
There was no fucking fun unless you defined fun as getting your throat slit by your intended so you could be the perfect sacrifice to a demon god. My mother knew exactly what was going to happen to me on my wedding night, and there wouldn’t be any trips to the city or fun for me. She’d known what had been happening to the other girls for hundreds of years, she knew because it almost happened to her and she didn’t say a word to me. I feel sick just the way I always do when I think about my mom. I guess it’s not true that it hadn’t happened to her, she’d grown up in Sweet Tooth just like me.
It had happened to her. Even though she’d never been a Blossom, she’d been as much a prisoner as me.
I haven’t seen my mother in a couple of weeks. The last time was when I was clearing some of the forest near Wrath’s Embrace with Buffy one sunny afternoon about a week after everything went down. The houses out that way had been used for the remaining cult members still loyal to the Founding Families that had chosen to stay.
“We can’t just throw them out into the world, but they have to go somewhere if they want to stay.”
That somewhere was right in the shadow of Wrath’s Embrace so that Buffy and Wrath could keep an eye on them. My family was among those that had opted to stay.
