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 still, why chance it at all? Dread crept in and buried itself in my thoughts.

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 20

My phone chimed in my pocket. I was surprised it still worked. It was Karter.

“Hey, Briseis,” he said. “You busy?”