Page 57 of A Curse On Black Lake
“Me too. More than anything else, I know it would disappoint my Grams, and it’s not fair to her memory.” She looks out the window above the couch, and another tear escapes her eyes.
Grief is full of questions, and heartache, and answers to questions you never wanted to ask in the first place. A space remains empty in your chest, the loss. It’s like someone went in, cut out a piece of your heart and then closed you back up. Only the space, the loss, gets bigger. It’s widening for Eliana. I know what that’s like, and it’s probably not attainable, but I want to stop the crack from growing.
Chapter twenty
Eliana
Vineswiththornssosharp they drip with my grief stricken blood, consuming my pain as they grow from my chest, crawling over my breastbone, to my collar and gripping into my shoulders digging deeper and deeper. Part of me wishes Killian would go so I can cry and bleed in peace. Lean into the pain.
But I’m also glad he’s here. I take a ragged breath and another sip of my lavender tea, silently begging for respite.
No one has held me while I cried. I don’t feel so alone with him, so broken by loss. There’s another part of me, the one I don’t want to address, that begs me to crawl back into his lap and tell him to hold me and never let go.
He stood up for me.
He let me cry.
He gave me relief.
Killian lifts the mug to his lips, and his eyes widen. “Wow, that’s good.”
“Thanks, it’s my own blend,” I sigh.
“Hey, I have a question. Since you know so much about plants, do you know that weed-looking flower that pops up randomly?”
I nod, knowing the one. When I was little and it popped up overnight, I would pick it so I could study the flower. I always thought it was pretty.
“Do you know anything about it? Why does it come up randomly?” he asks.
A feeling in the back of my mind tickles, and the Spirits are strangely silent, and it dawned on me that when Killian was holding me they went really quiet. As if he told them to let me be.
“I know Grams did some research on them to see if there was some medicinal value. We can look,” I tell him, setting my tea down.
He follows me into Gram’s study, where generations of Greers have studied, collected information, and created different remedies, tonics, and poultices to help people in the community. I’ve ruined our legacy.
Nausea crawls up my throat, and I swallow it down, breathing in the small room that still smells like her. It’s filled with shelves that go almost to the ceiling. There’s a desk sitting on a rug in the center with a little table off to the side where testing is done.
The Greer journals are all stacked across a few shelves by date, going all the way back to 1850.
“Wow,” Killian mumbles, looking at the shelves filled with books.
I smile and drag my finger across a line of spines pressed together. Grams started her own collection, complete with drawings, explanations, warnings not to mix with specific materials, and warnings for women who need help, but could be pregnant. Some of these plants could severely hurt someone if used the wrong way.
“Grams was very good at what we do. She found a lot of ways to help people heal mentally and physically, get pregnant, and feel better.”
“Sounds like she had been teaching you for a long time,” Killian says.
I glance at my own growing stack of journals. A lot of it was research already done, but when I was younger, it was the practice of the thing. Soon those journals turned into full scale sketches. I tried to capture every detail I could with the naked eye. In the others, I created my own recipes, trying them on myself as much as I could. Similar to the tea that helps calm anxiety.
“She taught me everything I know. She saved me too…” I trail off. I don’t want to talk about my parents, but I opened the door.
Then again, death seems to surround both of us.
“What did she save you from?” he asks carefully.
I look over my shoulder, and his eyes find mine. The beat of my heart becomes strangely louder, and blood rushes in my ears.
“My parents died when I was seven. They drowned in Black Lake. That’s still all I know. Grams wouldn’t tell me the details, or she didn’t know. I eventually stopped asking.”
