Page 18 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

THE HOUSE HAD that same eerie stillness it always did after he left her aching.

Nora lay on her back on the sofa, staring at the water stain on the ceiling, arms limp, shirt twisted under her ribs. She hadn’t moved in what felt like hours.

It didn’t help.

The hum inside her was growing louder.

She sat up abruptly and rubbed her hands over her face, like she could scrub off the night.

She tried to think like an academic. Or a scientist. Or a woman clinging to the edges of reason.

Symptoms:

-restlessness

-auditory hallucinations

-tactile sensitivity

-temperature dysregulation

-intrusive erotic flashbacks of a desert cryptid licking the sweat from her neck

Diagnosis: existential horniness with a side of demonic bonding.

Treatment: unknown.

Prognosis: deeply fucked.

She laughed, bitter and low.

She couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t lie back down.

She stood, stretched, and pulled on jeans, boots, a hoodie that didn’t belong in this climate. Threw her charger and toothbrush in a backpack. Slid her notebook and a half-empty bag of trail mix into the side pocket.

She didn’t even know where she was going. Just… out. Away.

A reset. She could go to a motel, get pancakes. Text Eli and pretend she’d just been out of range.

She could choose to come back. That was the point. The illusion of choice.

She grabbed her keys. Slid her phone into her pocket.

Her hand paused over the obsidian stone.

She took it.

She didn’t speak. Not to herself, not to the house, not to the thing she hadn’t admitted she was afraid of yet.

She just opened the door and walked outside.

The desert air wrapped around her.

She didn’t stop to look at the horizon.

She didn’t want to see anything out there.

The car groaned on the first try. Then again. On the third, it started.

“Good girl,” she muttered, patting the dash.

She backed out slowly. The headlights cut through the dark like dull knives.

The dirt path was barely visible, even with high beams. But she knew it by muscle memory.

Outside, the silence felt thicker. Like she was being watched.

Her grip tightened on the wheel.

“This isn’t permanent,” she said aloud. “I just need to get my head on straight. Somewhere with concrete and traffic and zero supernatural sexual tension.”

She nodded once, like she was convincing herself.

Ten yards down the path, the engine sputtered.

She frowned. Tapped the gas. The vehicle lurched forward.

Another thirty feet and she heard a screech under the hood. The lights flickered.

She hit the brakes and stared into the dark.

The road looked wrong.

Too long. Warped. Like someone had dragged the horizon backward with both hands.

The Joshua trees stood motionless. But their stillness felt aggressive.

She leaned forward, squinting.

Then she saw him.

Far down the ridge, barely visible in the twin cones of her headlights.

Asher.

Watching.

Not moving. Not coming toward her.

Just there.

A fixed point on the edge of her escape. As if he’d always been there, shadow-wrapped and rooted in the heat shimmer, watching her pack, watching her panic, watching her fall apart.

She stared at him, heart thudding. Every cell in her body pulled toward him like a tide.

“No,” she whispered.

She slammed the car into park, flung the door open, and stepped out into the night.

He didn’t move.

She stalked forward anyway, fists clenched, obsidian stone burning in her pocket.

When she was close enough to see the glow of his eyes, she stopped.

“What is this?” she shouted.

“I’m leaving, you know. I didn’t sign up for this haunted desert shit. I didn’t ask to be claimed like a prize in someone’s fever dream.”

He didn’t speak. But something in his posture shifted. Like he was bracing. Or breaking.

“Oh, now you’re just going to stand there again?” she snapped. “You show up, you touch me, leave me half-feral. And then you pull the mute forest creature act like nothing happened?”

He flinched.

“You don’t understand,” he said, voice low and rough.

But then… silence again.

Like he’d slammed some ancient door inside himself.

She stepped closer, fists shaking.

“You don’t get to burn yourself into my skin and then ghost me like a fuckboy with moss for a spine.”

Still nothing.

Just those eyes. Watching.

And that made something in her snap.

“Say something. Do something. Don’t just watch me like I’m the one who’s dangerous.”

He stood like the trees. Like the stone.

Too old to move.

Too wounded to speak.

And maybe that was worse.

She laughed once. Sharp. Bitter.

“God, do you even care what this is doing to me? Or is this just some eternal cryptid mating ritual? Midnight mindfuck, emotional chaos, vanish again until next time?”

His hands flexed at his sides. Like her words cut deep.

And that was worse, too. Because she wanted to hurt him.

He had made her feel too much.

And now she was unraveling in the middle of the road, screaming at a myth.

“You think I wanted this?” she said. “You think I came out here to get spiritually wrecked by a seven-foot bark cryptid?”

He took a step forward.

She froze.

He didn’t reach for her.

But his face looked shattered.

And that broke her all over again.

She took a step back. He didn’t follow.

“I don’t know what you are,” she whispered.

“Or what I am now. Or if I’m just losing my fucking mind.”

She hadn’t meant to sound broken. But she did.

And he looked at her like she’d dropped something between them. Something sacred.

“I’m not yours,” she said, softer now.

“You don’t get to just take me.”

And that seemed to do it.

He lowered his head.

Then he vanished.

Like he’d never been there.

Like she’d screamed into a dream.

She dropped to her knees in the dust.

Her chest felt like it was caving in. She pressed her hands to the earth, tried to breathe.

She wasn’t crying.

She wasn’t.

But the tears came anyway. Hot, fast, mean.

It wasn’t just the rejection.

It was the silence.

The unbearable, screaming silence that came after being so close to something that felt like meaning. Like connection. Like maybe she wasn’t completely lost in her own skull.

And then… just gone.

She bent forward, forehead to the dirt.

“Great job,” she muttered. “Definitely told off the magical desert entity in the most productive way possible.”

No echo came. No wind.

The obsidian stone in her pocket had gone cold.

Dead weight.

Whatever thread she’d been following was severed.

It should’ve felt like a win.

But it didn’t.

Because the worst part wasn’t that he’d come.

The worst part was that he didn’t stay.

She stood eventually and walked back toward the house without looking back. Each step felt wrong. Off-beat. Like she was walking away from the center of something.

Her boots were dust-caked. Her knuckles scraped. Her face windburned.

The obsidian stone felt like a joke now. A souvenir from something that had already chosen to leave her behind.

She unlocked the front door with stiff fingers.

The house was still warm, still scented faintly of sage and desert sun. But it didn’t feel like a sanctuary. It felt like a hollow body waiting for breath that wasn’t coming.

She dropped her bag and moved through the rooms slowly, like a stranger.

Everything looked the same. Nothing felt the same.

She stopped at the hallway mirror.

Looked. Really looked.

Her reflection blinked back, just a second too slow.

Her skin too clear.

Her eyes too bright.

Beautiful. But not in a way that comforted her.

In a way that made her stomach twist.

Like something had poured itself into her when she wasn’t looking.

She’d noticed the pattern.

The glow came when she was aroused. Or angry. Or afraid.

It responded. Like a tide.

But it didn’t feel like hers.

It felt like the land was listening, and marking her back.

She pressed her fingers to the mirror. They looked normal.

But when she pulled away, the glass shimmered faintly.

Like heat. Or light. Or something bleeding through.

She laughed. It wasn’t a kind sound.

When she finally got in bed that night, she didn’t expect to sleep.

She didn’t expect dreams.

But her body was exhausted.

And the desert is patient.

***

The next morning, she went back out to her car.

This time, she wasn’t running.

This time, she needed answers.

The road blurred past in waves of heat. The farther she drove, the more the world seemed to soften, like the desert was letting her pass. Like she belonged to it now.

The shop was quiet when she stepped inside.

The bell over the door gave a half-hearted jingle.

Opal stood behind the counter like she’d been waiting.

A gauzy black dress with the moon phases stitched into it hung beneath her denim vest, enamel pins glinting.

Her silver hair was caught in a messy half-knot.

A bone charm dangled from one earring, and her rings clicked as she moved.

Tarot cards were scattered across the counter, half-covered by a coffee mug.

She didn’t look up.

“You’re changing,” she said softly.

Nora stepped farther in, fingers grazing a shelf of smoky quartz and desert glass. “How do you always know?”

Opal snorted. “People think I see the future. I don’t. I just pay attention. And eavesdrop. A lot.”

Nora almost smiled. Almost.

She took a shaky breath. “The obsidian stone stopped reacting. I think it’s broken.”

She held it out. It had gone cold after she screamed at him.

Opal finally looked up, meeting her eyes. “Maybe it already did what it came to do.”

Nora sat on the stool near the front desk and dropped her bag at her feet. “I need you to tell me what the hell is happening to me.”

“You’re blooming,” Opal said. “That’s never a clean process.”

Nora gave her a look.

“No Hallmark version, I promise.”

Opal pushed away from the counter and disappeared into the back. The beaded curtain clattered. Nora sat in the dim silence, heart pounding. The wall of mismatched clocks ticked out of sync. One spun backward.

When Opal returned, she was holding a cloth-wrapped bundle. She placed it gently between them.

“Your grandmother left this with me. Told me to keep it safe.”

“For who?”

“She didn’t say. Just that someone would need it. When the desert started waking up again.”

Nora hesitated, then pulled the cloth back.

Inside was a blade.

Obsidian, sharp and jagged-edged, set in a worn wood handle wrapped with twine. It didn’t glow. It didn’t hum. But something in her responded, like the knife had always known her.

“What is this?” she whispered.

“Ritual. Protection. A piece of the land that remembers how to cut back.” Opal tilted her head. “Or maybe it’s just a knife. Either way, it’s yours now.”

“Was she…” Nora couldn’t finish the question.

Opal shook her head. “She wasn’t chosen. Not in the way you are. But she knew what it meant to love the land without trying to own it. She kept one foot here and one in the world. Taught me everything I know.”

Opal leaned against the counter, arms folded.

“I thought I was called once. Maybe I was. Maybe I didn’t answer the way it wanted. The desert doesn’t explain itself. And it doesn’t beg.”

“Do you regret it?”

Opal looked away. “Some days. Other days, I think it would’ve eaten me alive.”

Nora looked down at the blade. “Why me?”

“You’re not cursed, if that’s what you’re asking. And you’re not chosen, either.”

Opal’s voice gentled.

“You’re choosing.”

“There were always supposed to be two,” she continued. “A guardian, and a bloom. He protects the desert. Becomes part of it. Formed by the land to protect the bloom. To remember her. But without her, without someone to open and carry the life, it all turns to rot.”

“I’ve read this script before,” Nora said. “The brooding immortal monster who softens for the girl with a sacred womb. Do I get a cursed gemstone too?”

Opal snorted. “It’s not softness he turns to, honey. It’s hunger.”

Nora swallowed. “And what happens if I finish the bond?”

Opal’s gaze dropped to her folded hands. “You’ll belong to him. And he’ll belong to you.”

Nora pictured him in daylight. Not just a silhouette in her dreams. A person. A force. Hers.

Her thighs squeezed involuntarily. She cleared her throat.

“Okay,” she muttered. “That’s not terrifying at all.”

Outside, the sky had gone lavender. The shop felt warmer now, the air dense with things unspoken,

“What if I leave instead?”

Opal’s voice was quiet. “The desert doesn’t chase. But it remembers. And it never lets go completely.”

“What if I don’t want this?”

“You do,” Opal said. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

Nora opened her mouth to argue. But nothing came out.

Because Opal was right.

They sat for a while longer.

Opal made tea, black and bitter and laced with something floral Nora couldn’t name. The shop glowed amber as the sun slipped toward the ridge. They didn’t speak of fate. Only choice. What you carry. Who you love. Who you become.

When Nora finally stood, her body felt heavier, but steadier. Like something inside her had locked into place.

She clutched the cloth-wrapped blade and stepped toward the door.

Then she turned back.

“What happens next?”

Opal shrugged. “That’s up to you. But I hope you don’t run. Too much is lost when the ones who hear it walk away.”

Nora nodded once.

And when she stepped outside, the wind rose to meet her.