Page 1 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)
THE MOJAVE DIDN’T welcome her. It tolerated her.
Heat shimmered off the highway as Nora Vale pulled up the long driveway and killed the engine.
Silence folded over the car like a closing fist. Cicadas buzzed in the brittle brush, their droning pulse almost drowning out the overheated ticking of her car.
A dust cloud hung in the air behind her, rising like smoke from a signal fire that nobody would bother to read.
She stepped out, her boots hitting the gravel with a decisive crunch. A hot breeze sent sweat down her spine as she shook out her long chocolate-brown hair, already sticking to the back of her neck. She took one look at the house and sighed.
“Still a fortress, huh, old man?”
It didn’t look much like a house anymore.
It looked more like something a doomsday prepper abandoned in a hurry.
The stucco walls had faded to a sad, peeling yellow-gray, the kind of color that made you wonder why anyone bothered painting it in the first place.
Corrugated tin clung to one wall, rattling with the wind, and a nest of mismatched wiring bristled from the roof.
A lizard skittered out of her path, vanishing under a rusted rain barrel that looked like it hadn’t seen water in decades. The Joshua trees around the place seemed to be leaning away, and the large yuccas had grown out of control.
Nora pulled her sunglasses down and squinted at the house, lips pressed into a thin line. “Hell of a retirement plan, Pops.”
The envelope from the county office felt sweaty and sticky in her hand. She tore it open, pulled out the key and the impersonal note: Estate awarded to Eleanora Vale, next of kin.
No funeral. No neighbors. No one to say they’d missed Orin, or even noticed he was gone. The old man had gone out like he lived, quiet and stubborn.
The padlock on the door was stiff and new.
She jiggled the key until the lock gave with a satisfying click.
The door creaked open. The heat slapped her across the face, dry and brutal, like walking into an oven.
Dust hung in the air, and the smell of scorched paper, old sweat, and sage hit her nose.
She took a step inside, stirring a thick layer of dust on the floor.
The place hadn’t seen a cleaning rag in years.
Overhead, wind chimes swayed from the ceiling fan.
Not the pretty kind from craft shops, but homemade ones made of bones, twine, raven feathers, and bits of obsidian.
One had a tiny mouse skull tied in the center.
Nora remembered making them with her grandfather, weaving in agate and old buttons and whatever else they’d scrounged up.
She was pretty sure at least one of hers was still up there.
Crooked, but holding on. She smiled and ran her hand beneath them, letting them clink softly together.
The house hadn’t changed. Not in the ways that mattered. Her family had been out here for generations. Scraping, sweating, going slowly mad. She’d left. But the desert had a long memory.
The furniture was sparse. The same old overstuffed couch, her grandfather’s burnt orange recliner, a rickety coffee table covered in random junk.
There was an old tube TV on a stand, complete with VCR.
The metal desk was cluttered with yellowed journals and notepads, a box of bullets, bundles of dried flowers wrapped in red string, and a shortwave radio under a makeshift shelf of survivalist junk.
Nora wrinkled her nose. “Still stockpiling. Still paranoid.”
Her eyes landed on the journal on the desk. The leather was cracked but the pages looked recently filled. Curiosity won out over hesitation, and she flipped it to the first page.
May 31 12:41am
He walks still. I’ve just seen him.
The desert doesn’t let go, and neither does he.
Nora shook her head, trying to clear it of the feelings flooding in.
Her stomach tightened. No way. She hadn’t thought about him — or it — in years.
The Yucca Man. Not since she’d decided it was just old desert nonsense, and her grandfather’s obsession with finding him had all but ruined their relationship.
But seeing the words in her grandfather’s deliberate handwriting felt like someone had scraped a nail down her spine.
She pulled her hair back, sweat trickling down her neck. “You were losing it, Pops. Talking to ghosts. Seeing things.”
But the problem was, she did remember. Nights when the sky stretched too wide and too empty, and she felt watched. She remembered her grandfather’s half-mad warnings, telling her to never speak the name through glass or whistle after dark.
But she was a kid back then, scared of her own shadow. Now she was a grown woman with a half-finished thesis and way too much caffeine in her system. She wasn’t about to start believing in cryptids just because the old man had still been obsessed.
She flipped another page, skimming the paranoid scrawls about curses and eyes in the night. A shiver ran through her anyway, and she cursed under her breath. Maybe this place was getting to her already.
A loud clatter from outside made her jerk. A metal bucket rolling across the gravel. She peered out the window, half expecting to see something tall and dark against the bright horizon. Nothing. Just wind and dust.
Get it together, Nora. She wasn’t about to let an old story and a creaky house make her lose her mind.
Nora drifted through the rest of the house in a semi-daze, her thoughts spinning.
She found her old bedroom, since converted into some sort of research center.
Filing cabinets lined the walls, and the shelves were crammed with cassette tapes, all labeled in her grandfather’s tight, measured handwriting.
Dusk - South Hollow - June 12
Whistling Voices - 3 a.m.
Breathing Tree
A wind chime made from teeth hung in the corner, swaying in the still air.
Nora made a face. “Yeah. Totally normal.”
There were more journals. So many more. Some were sealed in plastic bags, others tied with red string. A few had sticky notes on the covers, covered with dates, pressed flowers, weird symbols.
One sticky note caught her eye:
If she comes back, tell her not to look directly at the horizon after dark.
He will be waiting.
Her stomach twisted. She forced a laugh. “Paranoid much, Pops?”
She fished through a filing cabinet labeled FIELD NOTES — 1986–2003.
Maps, rubbings, faded Polaroids. One caught her eye.
It was a photo of her at about seven, next to a younger Orin, both standing at the Hollow Watcher, a rock formation not too far from the house.
She was in a red jacket, her hair in pigtails, looking wary.
Behind them, just out of focus, something massive loomed behind the rocks.
She squinted, running her thumb over the photo. She stuffed it into her pocket.
Nora tried to busy herself, pushing down the crawling unease.
She opened all the windows, letting fresh air into the house for the first time in who knows how long.
She went to her car and grabbed the cleaning supplies and the bag of groceries she had thrown together in a hurry.
She felt like she was always in a hurry lately.
She started her stick vac and did a pass on the floors, getting the worst of the dirt.
Her phone dinged as she was getting out the mop.
It was Lauren, Nora’s best friend from the university. There were also several missed texts from her ex, Eli. She rolled her eyes.
Lauren:
Just checking to make sure you made it safe! Excited to visit soon!
Nora smiled. She was looking forward to spending a girls’ weekend with Lauren in a couple of days. She had to admit, it wasn’t the worst place to stargaze. Quiet. Vast. A decent break from the city if you didn’t mind the creeping dread of ancestral dust and unreliable plumbing.
She leaned on the counter and dialed. Lauren picked up on the second ring.
“Hey. Yeah, I made it. It’s a complete disaster. No Wi-Fi. Barely any signal. The only entertainment is a VCR and some Blair Witch journals my grandfather left behind…”
They talked for a few minutes, half making plans, half complaining. Nora warned her just how far off the grid the cabin actually was, nowhere near the trendy areas that had sprung up over the last few years. But Lauren didn’t care. She was just excited to escape.
“Perfect. See you soon.”
They hung up. Nora didn’t check Eli’s texts. She wasn’t in the mood to be reasonable yet.
She slipped on her headphones and queued up a true crime podcast, the hosts’ voices familiar and oddly comforting, like friends narrating someone else’s disaster while she cleaned up her own. She mopped the floors, wiped down the counters.
Then she glanced at the sink and winced. Something canned and long forgotten had fossilized at the bottom.
She opened the fridge. A wave of stench hit her. Everything inside was rotten, but thankfully, there hadn’t been much to begin with. She tossed the contents into a trash bag, tied it tight, and hauled it out the back door like it might bite.
Throwing the trash in the bin, Nora spotted the old stock tank they used as a makeshift hot tub.
She pulled off the dusty cover, surprised to find it in good shape.
He must not have used it since she left.
The thought tugged at her. What had he done while she was gone?
Obsessed over aliens and cryptids in silence?
She sighed, grabbed the hose, and rinsed out the tub. A corroded bottle of chlorine turned up in the shed. She dumped some in and hoped for the best.
The rocky hills stretched around her, stark and silent. She breathed in the clean air. Then she froze. A flicker of glowing amber eyes glinted across the horizon and then disappeared. Probably just a coyote. Right?
A jackrabbit darted past, ears twitching, foraging through dust.
The wildness of it stirred something deep. It settled into her bones.