Thorn to Die

I threw my hands out, finding a pull string. “Here it is.”

Before I could pull it, Blythe let out an ear-piercing scream. I panicked and yanked the string nearly off the ceiling, a light popping on above my head and blinding me.

“Get them off, get them off!” Blythe screamed. She was dancing around the concrete floor, swiping at her head. “Spiders! They’re in my hair.”

Another light string hung from the ceiling above her head. It caught in her hair as she flailed about, clearly the source of her imaginary spiders. Raven and I both cracked up, doubling over for breath, until Blythe finally stopped moving and noticed the pull switch. She put her tiny hands on her hips and glared at us. “Not funny guys.”

A tear ran down my cheek. “I’m sorry. So not funny. You’re right.”

Back to business. I looked around. Stacks of boxes leaned against every wall, almost all the way up to the ceiling. We were never going to find the letter in all of this. There must’ve been about a hundred boxes in that place.

“Blythe, look for the box,” I told her, running toward the closest pile. “You’re the only one who knows what to look for. Start looking.”

We searched high and low, dumping out boxes and throwing the contents haphazardly back into their spaces. Most of the stuff belonged to the floral shop. Foam arrangement cones, floral wire, fertilizer to keep the arrangements fresh. Nothing that looked like the precious

letter.

“Guys, look.” Raven held her hand up. Something brown wriggled on her palm. I realized as soon as Blythe screeched that it was a rat.

“What are you doing with that thing?” I spat. Vegan or not, I still didn’t like rats.

“This little guy’s got a lot of things to spill about Angie Pine,” Raven said, stroking the rat’s head. She leaned in closer as I shuddered. “He says she likes to kill his friends. Leaves poison out for them to eat.”

Poison? If Angie liked to kill rats with poison, she could’ve used that same poison to kill Allen White. Ian Larson might find that fact interesting.

“Poor little guy.” Raven put the rat back on the ground and watched him scamper away. “Why would anyone want to hurt him?”

I could think of a few reasons, but I held my tongue. Now was not the time to get into a debate about the innocence of rodents. We had to find that piece of paper.

Panic began to take hold in my chest. What if Angie had the letter with her at home? What if Blythe’s vision had been wrong? I didn’t know how this magical medium stuff really worked. Could our witchy powers ever be wrong? Doubt clouded my mind.

“Guys, over here.” Blythe waved at us from near the large metal furnace. She had a flat white box in her hand. “I think this is it. I know it is.”

She slid open the box, dumping out a pile of papers. We spread it on the wooden table like a deck of cards. There was writing on all of them. It looked like Angie had saved every letter she’d ever received. There were some dating back to the eighties, yellow and deteriorating from age. I scanned through about a dozen, coming up with zilch.

“Aha!” Raven held up a single sheet of paper with narrow scrawl across the page. “This is from Allen White. This has to be it.”

I crumbled the piece of paper I had in my hand and dropped it, my heart beating faster.

Blythe looked over her shoulder at the letter. “Yeah, that’s the one from my vision. Read it! What does it say?”

Raven squinted at the page. “It’s hard to make out. Something about flowers and…”

A noise from above made us all freeze. My muscles tensed, ready to spring into action. Another noise, and then the creak of a door being pushed open. The wooden floorboards groaned with the weight of footsteps. One, two, three. It was then that we heard Angie’s voice.

“Yeah, this is Angie Pine. I’ve got a break-in at my shop on Main. Probably some hooligans looking for my cash register. They broke the back door this time.”

All three of us shot toward the light switch and Raven managed to get her hand on it first. With a quick tug, the basement went dark. We huddled there, listening to the sound of our own breaths.

This was it, we were done for. No amount of excuses would work. I could already feel the cold hard prison bunkbed under my back. I would never survive in jail. My back was too fragile to sleep on metal.

“The window,” Blythe whispered, pointing to the nearest little basement window.

It’d already been cracked open the tiniest bit. We ran toward it and Raven grabbed a wooden chair to set underneath. Blythe was the first one up. She had no trouble forcing the window open and shimmying through the tiny rectangle, with us boosting her from below.

Next, was me. The fit was tight, but Blythe pulled on my hands from the outside while Raven pushed from behind. I scraped my knee on the asphalt, but it was worth it once I felt the warm summer air on my skin. Freedom.

“Who’s down there?” Angie’s voice came from the top of the basement stairs. “You better not be messing with my fertilizer. Stupid druggies.”