Chapter 5: An Unwilling Alliance

Chapter 5: An Unwilling Alliance

Alistair Finch was a ghost with a credit card.

For two days, Izzy had been chasing his digital shadow, a phantom who lived entirely online, leaving no physical trace. But ghosts get careless. Overconfident. Just after dawn on the third day, Izzy got the ping she’d been waiting for. Finch had used his card an hour ago. Not for a plane ticket or a burner phone, but for something so mundane it was almost insulting: fifty bags of peat moss and a hundred pounds of bone meal from a rundown hardware depot out on the county line.

The location was a flashing red dot on the map on her monitor, a beacon in the middle of nowhere. It was swamp-adjacent, miles from any real town. A place to be forgotten. Izzy zoomed in on the satellite view. Next to the depot, separated by a tract of overgrown cypress and palmetto, was a sprawling, derelict property. A single, faded sign was just legible on the satellite image: Blackwood Botanicals. An abandoned plant nursery.

It was the perfect lair. A place where a man obsessed with corrupting nature could practice his dark horticulture in peace.

Izzy stared at the screen, a cold, hard knot of certainty tightening in her gut. This was it. Standard procedure was to call for backup, set up a perimeter, and go in hard and fast. Breach, clear, secure the victim. But the memory of rain falling from a cloudless sky stopped her cold. The memory of a ghost’s whisper on the air. A full-scale SWAT raid—guns, flashbangs, shouting—what would that look like to an ancient, territorial entity that was already on a hair-trigger? It would be like trying to remove a tick with a flamethrower. They’d be seen as part of the blight.

Her hand hovered over the button for dispatch, her training and instincts screaming at her to call it in. The obstacle wasn’t just Finch anymore; it was her own procedure, the very rules that had defined her entire career. To save this girl, she had to break them.

She pulled out her cell phone and scrolled to a number she never thought she’d call willingly again.

“Vance,” she said when he answered, her voice all business. “I have a location. Blackwood Botanicals, off Route 7. I’ll text you the address. Meet me at the turn-off in thirty minutes. Come alone. And Kael, don’t be late.” She used his first name without thinking, the slip feeling both strangely intimate and jarringly unprofessional. She hung up before he could respond.

The turn-off was a gravel road swallowed by weeds. Izzy killed her engine and the headlights, plunging them into the humid darkness of the Florida night. Rain began to patter against the windshield, a real, natural rain this time, but it did nothing to wash away the tension. She sat in the driver’s seat of her unmarked sedan, the silence broken only by the rhythmic slap-slap-slap of the wipers.

Kaelen’s headlights appeared a few minutes later. He pulled his beat-up car behind hers and slipped into her passenger seat, bringing with him the faint, electric scent of ozone and the damp chill of the night. He looked tired, his eyes shadowed with a familiar weariness, but there was a new intensity in them. A focus.

“Blackwood Botanicals,” he said, his voice low. He didn’t need to ask why she’d picked him up. He already knew. “I can feel it from here. It’s like a wound in the world. The Sower’s rage… it’s building. It’s focused on that place. It feels… coiled. Like a snake in the grass.”

“Finch bought gardening supplies an hour ago,” Izzy said, her gaze fixed on the rain-streaked windshield. “He’s there. And if he’s there, Sarah Jenkins is probably there, too.”

This was the forced proximity, the shared confinement of the car, that stripped away their professional roles and left them as two people staring into the same abyss. For a while, they just sat, a detective and a psychic, watching the rain trace paths down the glass, each lost in their own version of the impending horror.

“Lena and I found a name for your… entity,” Kaelen said, breaking the silence. “In some old local folklore. They called it the Sower of Sorrows.”

“Fitting,” Izzy murmured. She felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. The name gave the formless dread a shape, a weight. It made it real in a way even the impossible rain hadn't.

“It’s not evil, Izzy,” Kaelen said softly, and the way he said her name made her look at him. His tired eyes were fixed on her, and for the first time, she didn’t see a charlatan or an eccentric. She saw a man carrying a burden she couldn't possibly imagine. “It’s just… absolute. Like a flood. It doesn’t hate the village, it just needs to get to the sea. Finch is the dam. And we’re the village.”

A sharp, stabbing pain lanced through Kaelen’s temple. He winced, his hand instinctively going to his head as he squeezed his eyes shut. A wave of psychic feedback washed over him from the nursery—the raw terror of the children, Finch’s sick, obsessive focus, and beneath it all, the Sower’s growing, monumental fury.

“You okay?” Izzy asked, her voice softer than she intended. The question was automatic, a flicker of genuine concern that surprised them both.

He opened his eyes, which seemed unfocused for a moment. He gave her a weak, wry smile. “Just listening to the local radio. The broadcast is a little intense.” He looked at her, really looked at her, and saw past the badge and the severe ponytail. He saw the tension in her jaw, the way her fingers were gripped so tightly around the steering wheel her knuckles were white. He saw the fear she was trying so desperately to contain beneath layers of professionalism.

“You’re scared too,” he stated. It wasn't an accusation. It was an acknowledgment. A bridge built between them in the cramped, dark car.

Izzy didn't deny it. She couldn’t. The lie would have felt hollow. She just stared out at the rain, her silence a confession. In that shared moment of vulnerability, something shifted between them. A spark of understanding, of mutual respect for the different, terrifying ways they were both looking at the same monster. It was a fragile connection, forged in darkness and dread, but it was there. An unwilling alliance solidifying into something more.

“The official report for this is going to be a nightmare,” she said, her voice a low murmur.

“Let’s worry about surviving the night first,” Kaelen replied. “Then we can get creative with the paperwork.”

As he spoke, a light flickered to life deep within the overgrown grounds of the nursery. It was a weak, yellow bulb, probably from a generator, casting long, skeletal shadows through the tangled trees and collapsing greenhouses.

It was a sign of life. A proof of presence.

The time for waiting was over.

Izzy’s hand moved from the steering wheel to the Glock holstered at her hip. She gave it a reassuring, familiar touch. “Okay, Vance. You’re my eyes and ears for the things I can’t see. I’m your muscle for the things you can’t shoot. We go in quiet. We find the girl. We get out.”

Kaelen nodded, his gaze locked on the distant, ominous light. “And try not to step on the flowers.”