The pearl's afterimage burned in Eleanor's vision as the crow's flesh rippled, its molted feathers revealing something far worse beneath not pink skin, but faces, tiny and screaming, pressed against the creature's subcutaneous layer like prisoners behind glass. The voice that slithered from its split beak wasn't just hers it was theirs, a chorus of every child who'd ever been fed to the house.
Mira convulsed on the chapel floor, her body rejecting the last of the vines in wet, rope-like strands. They squirmed as they hit the ground, burrowing into the cracks between bone tiles toward the altar. Eleanor lunged, shears flashing, but the crow intercepted and bit down.
The sound of the shears snapping between those needle-teeth echoed like a gunshot. The broken blades clattered to the ground, their metal blackening instantly as the chapel's roots surged upward to claim them.
"You can't prune the truth," the crow crooned, its many voices layering over each other. It hopped toward the altar, where the teeth-windows had begun to bleed, rivulets of dark liquid etching new names into the stone. "The garden always remembers."
Outside, the earth heaved. The butcher's oak tore free of the soil, its roots snapping like tendons as it lurched toward the chapel. The swarm-bees that had been the midwife coalesced into a screaming mouth that hovered in the air, repeating a single phrase:
"Where did you bury us?"
Eleanor grabbed Mira's wrist, hauling her backward as the first skeletal fingers breached the chapel's threshold. The children weren't climbing from the ground they were unfolding from the walls, their bones knitting together from scattered fragments in the tiles. Their eye sockets glowed with the same eerie light as Mira's.
The crow spread its wings, the subcutaneous faces pressing harder against its skin. "Time to water the garden," it whispered
And the first child's hand closed around Eleanor's ankle. Its touch wasn't cold. It was hungry, leaching warmth from her flesh with terrifying speed. The bark-like patches on her skin spread upward, hardening over her knee as she kicked wildly.
Mira gasped, clutching at her own throat. "They're in my" Her words cut off as her mouth stretched, her jaw dislocating with a wet pop. Something moved inside her not a vine, but fingers, tiny and bone-white, pressing against the inside of her cheeks.
The crow laughed, a sound like breaking china. "Too late for pruning. Now we harvest."
And the chapel's doors slammed shut.