Page 24 of Sweet Silver Bells

“I’m still here,” Hunter said, and the words took substantial effort. Pushing past that haze that wanted him blank, in a state of walking sleep, felt like a superpower, something unnatural that he shouldn’t be able to do.

But he was there.

Here I am.

“You’re mine,” he stammered.

Olivia didn’t hear, or at least she didn’t react. Her song continued on a loop as she started singing it again from the top.

“All seem to say,

Throw cares away,

Christmas is here,

Bringing good cheer.”

There was a gasp of air as she threw her head back toward the sky. Her hair took the shape of a crescent moon while she threw her hands behind her and screamed at the darkness overhead. Hunter watched it all in slow motion.

Snow landed on her cheeks. Frost clung to her devastatingly beautiful eyelashes. Her mouth was open as she howled. Olivia’s pain wrecked its way through everyone’s ears in a supernaturally loud yet pulchritudinous caterwaul.

My tree siren.

Tree siren she was, as anything green or rooted reacted to her noise, to her grief, breaking open the gates of hell on the surface of the Earth.

Hunter couldn’t respond; that haze still had such a hold of him.

What he wanted to do was grab Olivia and shield her, so that he could take the brunt of what was coming. Instead, he stood there, his body dazed, nearly paralyzed, rooted down as if the earth had decayed the pavement and wrapped itself around his feet.

It might as well have done that, the terror already clawed through him, as Olivia’s cry threatened to cover downtown Stockbridge so that it may never see the sun again.

At least, that was Hunter’s initial reaction when the Christmas tree behind the carolers lashed out each branch, growing hundreds of feet and crashing down onto the large group of immobile spectators wearing their holiday best, stuck under Olivia’s spell.

There were no screams. The group nearly welcomed it.

It was grief made manifest. A heartbroken woman unleashed the storm she could no longer hold inside.

She couldn’t help it. It was who she was.

Hunter knew it was his choice, but it was certainly a choice to stay in her heart as violence broke out in the calmest manner, a true, cheerful holiday horror.

Thwap. Thwap.

The tree branches whipped at the crowd, catching their victims and wrapping them from head to toe in silken webs spun of pine and pressure. He could see red pooling, blood a dark crimson mixed with the green.

He could not tell if the pine was driving into his skin or if the branches were simply wrapped too tightly around him.

The haze pressed harder against his throat and swelled inside him like something alive and angry.

It wanted to choke out any words he might have left.

It felt like a punishment for daring to speak at all.

He thought her name as if she could hear it.

Olivia. Help. Please.

She was still crying. Her body shook so violently that her knees hit the ground. Something inside her had broken open. She was not ready for this. She was not ready for any of it. And now, the world cracked beneath the weight of her unraveling. He would carry it if he had to.

Is this how it all ends, Sarah?

He knew he had moved on too fast. He could see it now with painful clarity.

The blame belonged to him and him alone.

He had dragged Olivia out of the forest when he should have left her to its shadows and silence.

There had been a terrible comfort in the darkness back then, a quiet promise that wherever his wife had gone, he could follow and disappear alongside her.

But he had refused that surrender. He had insisted on pretending to be a hero because he needed to matter to someone living. He’d needed someone to save so he would not drown in the memory of saving no one at all.

Now, Sarah was not the only one whose soul had tangled with his. He had allowed it to happen again, and he could not decide which shamed him more—wanting it or lying to himself that he did not.

He would fight for his life now because of Olivia. She needed him in ways he did not fully understand. She was a monster, something wild and untamed, maybe even dangerous enough to kill him without meaning to. Yet she was real. She made him real, too.

The thought cut through him, sharp and cold, but it did not leave.

He was tired of being the broken man that people pitied and spoke around.

He wanted to be something steadier, something good, the way his father had always been for his mom.

But Olivia was not his mom. She was not soft laughter in a safe kitchen or quiet weekends spent folding laundry.

Olivia was a storm. She was a beast that no one could hold down.

The haze began to lift from his chest. Air filled his lungs again, rough and cold but precious. Around him, the low hum of panic rose into clearer voices. The crowd was waking up. He was still here to hear it.

Was she stopping? Was she pulling back?

“Olivia,” Hunter growled out, but he still couldn’t reach out his hand, the haze still gripping his body despite feeling like each stitch of an invisible binding fabric was individually breaking open, one at a time.

The garland that hung between the streetlamps slithered down to the pavement, taking over the ground and tugging on ankles so that people fell face-first into asphalt, wrapping them in vines like children’s paper chains, tightening but not yet tearing.

“You have to stop. Olivia, you’re killing them all.”

Her face was buried in her hands. Hunter wasn’t sure if she even knew what was happening.

A branch from the Christmas tree thwacked past him, and his stomach leapt.

Fear.

That was good; he could feel fear. His body had the instinct to survive through the haze.

Fog poured into the square without warning, as if someone had dumped dry ice into every storm drain at once.

It carried a strange, unnatural weight that pressed against Hunter’s chest and rooted him in place.

Whatever force crackled in the air around him made it impossible to feel the fog on his bare skin.

It moved in slow, greedy waves from every corner of the square, thick and wet, clinging to clothes and creeping into hair like the smell of rot.

Within the dense mist, the town’s lights burned with a sickly yellow-green glow, their shapes distorted by something that did not want to be seen.

Every strand of Christmas bulbs along the storefronts flickered in fits and starts, struggling to stay alive.

Their colors had turned dark and swollen, bruised like dead flesh left too long in the cold.

The garlands coiled tighter around a man’s legs as he screamed for help. They dragged him across the street, his body scraping over the rough pavement. His fingernails caught on the asphalt, tearing away and leaving jagged red smears behind him.

A few people lunged forward to help, but no one reached him in time.

But the vines paused, shivering in place as if confused. The garlands trembled with Olivia’s wavering will, squeezing, but not shredding. His screams turned to sobs. He was still breathing. The spell was shifting.

Hunter stumbled back and nearly fell as his boot caught on a rogue vine that had broken through a storm drain.

The air buzzed around him, not with insects but with a kind of electricity, a hum that resonated in his bones and teeth.

It felt static, like the anger and wrath his TV would express after its unfortunate burial.

Olivia knelt in the middle of the street, her shoulders trembling. Around her, the asphalt cracked and heaved. From those ruptures, green things were blooming. Not the soft green of spring, but a sickly, hungry color—glossy leaves slick with sap that dripped like saliva.

“Olivia,” Hunter said again, quieter this time, as if volume might shatter her more. “Look at me. Please.”

She didn’t, but her sobs were calming down, her shuddering less violent.

To his left, the Christmas tree at the center of the square stood tall and glittering, a beautiful icon wrapped in delicate silver tinsel.

It let out a deep, creaking groan that cut through the quiet night.

A second groan followed, louder and more strained.

The trunk began to bulge in uneven swells, as if something hidden inside was struggling to push its way out.

Without warning, the bark split open—not in a clean line down the center, but in a jagged, pulsing wound that seemed to breathe in the cold air.

From that wound, thick red vines spilled out. They were wet, veiny tendrils tipped with spines and dripping with a crimson secretion that steamed as it touched the ground.

Hunter gagged.

The vines lashed out, striking faster than he could track. One pierced the undercarriage of a car, lifting it off its wheels and flinging it like a toy. Another impaled a man in a Santa suit, pinning him to a light post where his body twitched and bled into the snow-dusted ground.

People scattered in every direction. Some ran screaming down narrow alleyways, their footsteps lost beneath the rising roar of the shifting trees. Others stood rooted to the spot, eyes wide, trapped in a terror they couldn’t look away from.

A woman grabbed her toddler’s arm and pulled, but the vines had already begun to creep up the child’s boots. They coiled, but hesitated, then slowly unwrapped and recoiled into the earth. The child sobbed but was thankfully unharmed.

The entire town square was transforming.

The quaint buildings lining the streets, brick cafés and boutiques with wreaths in the windows, were being overtaken.

Ivy broke through walls. Thorned vines crawled through shattered glass and pulled mannequins from displays like corpses from coffins.

One of them dangled, spinning slowly, a red scarf now coiled like a noose.

The law enforcement vehicle crash seemed so innocent, a dream, compared to this. How the town would ever recover, he didn’t know.

Hunter crouched low and ducked behind a ruined bench, heart pounding. Something brushed his neck. He swatted it away and saw a sprig of holly on his shoulder, its leaves gleaming like metal. Blood oozed from three fresh puncture wounds in his skin.

He bit back a scream and pressed forward. He had to get to Olivia.

She stood now, with her arms resting loosely at her sides and her head tilted back toward the dark sky.

Each breath escaped her mouth in soft clouds of steam.

There was something different about her expression, something calmer yet distant.

Her lips moved in a steady rhythm, forming words meant for something or someone no one else could see.

The lights that surrounded her no longer flickered unpredictably.

Instead, they pulsed in and out, steady as a heartbeat, perfectly in time with her own.

The garlands and vines moved around her like dancers. Or worshippers.

"Olivia!" he yelled again.

Her head turned slowly, and some recognition finally appeared in those dark eyes. Hunter felt like he was looking into a black hole that he had fallen into and would never be able to come back out of, even if he wanted to.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she said, voice dreamy, distant.

“These are people, Olivia. They're dying!”

“No killing during Christmas,” she whispered and nodded, like a child who remembered something that had been forgotten.

A new sound slithered through the cold air, a low and steady creaking that rose and fell like the grinding of ancient wooden gears.

Behind Olivia, the Christmas tree shuddered once, then began to move again.

This time it did not crawl. It rose. The roots at its base tore free from the frozen soil, unfurling like dozens of crooked legs searching for balance.

The trunk swelled and twisted, growing thicker with each groan of wood and snapping branch.

One by one, the delicate ornaments burst apart, falling away to reveal what they had hidden: pale bones tangled in dried flowers, shards of brittle hair, and rows of human teeth embedded deep within the bark.

It had a face.

Not a real face, but something that mimicked one—branches bent into eye sockets, strands of tinsel clumped together into a grinning, jagged maw. And it was watching.

Hunter took a step back. “What the hell is that?”

Olivia didn’t answer.

The tree screamed.

It was not a sound meant for ears. It was deep and shrill at once, like every dying animal on Earth screaming from one throat.

Windows exploded.

Light bulbs burst in their sockets.

People clutched their heads, blood running from their noses and ears.

Hunter dropped to the ground. The air was too loud to breathe.

Shhhhhhhh.

There was a hush.

He opened his eyes, and the square, once a cheerful holiday celebration, was now a garden of blood. The fog cleared, and Olivia smiled, radiant, a goddess.

“No killing during Christmas,” she repeated. “If I’d had that rule before, maybe things could have been different.”