Chapter 2: A House of Whispers and Blood

Getting Samantha home proved to be a task that would forever change how Elias viewed his sister. She came willingly enough, releasing Mrs. McGovern's severed head with the same casual indifference one might show when setting down a teacup. But as they walked the short distance between the two houses, she moved with an otherworldly grace that made his skin crawl.

"The thorns are singing today," she murmured as they crossed the threshold into the Shearer cottage. "Can you hear them, Elias? They're so very pleased."

Her voice carried that same sweet clarity it always had, but the words themselves seemed to come from somewhere else entirely. Elias guided her to the sitting room, his scholar's mind struggling to process what he had witnessed. Blood still stained her blue dress in dark patches that caught the dying afternoon light like abstract art painted in crimson.

"Father," he called, his voice hoarse. "Father, I need—"

The words died in his throat as Gideon Shearer emerged from the back hallway, his weathered face pale as morning frost. But it wasn't his expression that stopped Elias cold—it was the dark stain spreading across the front of his father's shirt, and the way his left hand pressed against his abdomen as if trying to hold something inside.

"Gideon," Samantha said, her vacant gaze focusing on their father with sudden, startling clarity. "You're hurt."

It wasn't concern in her voice. It was something else entirely. Something that made both men take an involuntary step backward.

"Samantha," Gideon said carefully, as one might address a wild animal. "You need to sit down. You need to rest."

"I've been resting," she replied, tilting her head in a gesture that would have been endearing from any other sixteen-year-old girl. "I've been listening to the Rose. It has so much to tell us, Father. So many beautiful secrets."

Elias felt the walls of their small cottage pressing in around him. The familiar space—the wooden table where he conducted his studies, the worn armchair where his mother had spent her final months, the family Bible resting on its place of honor—all of it seemed suddenly foreign and threatening.

"What happened to you?" Elias asked his father, gesturing toward the spreading bloodstain.

Gideon's eyes flicked toward Samantha, then back to his son. A silent conversation passed between them, one that excluded the girl sitting so peacefully in the center of the room.

"An accident," Gideon said finally. "While you were... while you were next door."

But Elias could read the truth in his father's haunted expression. This had been no accident. Whatever had befallen Mrs. McGovern had claimed another victim—and that victim had been lucky to escape with his life.

"I should tend to your wound," Elias said, moving toward his father. But Gideon held up a hand, stopping him.

"First, we need to discuss what you saw," his father said. "What she... what happened at the McGoverns'."

Samantha laughed—a sound like silver bells that made both men's blood run cold. "Poor Mrs. McGovern. She didn't understand about the pruning. She fought so hard against the shears."

"Shears?" Elias echoed, though something deep in his mind recognized the word with a familiarity that terrified him.

Instead of answering, Gideon moved slowly toward the old wooden chest that sat beneath the front window. Elias had seen that chest his entire life, had been told it contained family documents and heirlooms too precious to risk damage. His father had never opened it in his presence.

With trembling hands, Gideon lifted the heavy lid. The hinges creaked in protest, releasing a musty smell of age and something else—something metallic and organic that reminded Elias uncomfortably of the McGovern kitchen.

From within the chest, his father withdrew an object that made Elias's scholarly mind reel. It was a tool of some kind, but unlike anything he had ever seen in his theological texts or studies of ancient implements. The handle was carved from what looked like bone, yellowed with age and worn smooth by countless hands. From this handle extended a curved blade, but not of metal—this cutting edge appeared to be made from some kind of natural material that gleamed with an oily, iridescent sheen.

"The Shear," Gideon said quietly, holding the implement with the reverence one might show a sacred relic. "It has been in our family for... longer than our records show."

"Father, what is that thing?" Elias demanded, though part of him already knew he didn't want the answer.

"A tool," Samantha said before Gideon could respond. Her voice had taken on that strange, sing-song quality again. "For gardening. For tending the Rose's needs. Mrs. McGovern made such lovely fertilizer."

The casual horror of her words hit Elias like a physical blow. He stumbled backward, his legs giving out until he collapsed into his father's chair. The family Bible slid from the armrest where he had left it, falling to the floor with a sound like breaking glass.

"This isn't real," he whispered. "This is some kind of fever dream. Some kind of..."

"Look at me, boy." Gideon's voice cut through his denial like a blade. "Look at your sister. Look at what she carries in her blood—what we all carry."

Elias forced himself to meet Samantha's gaze. Those dark eyes that should have been familiar, should have been warm with sisterly affection, now held depths that seemed to spiral down into cosmic infinity. As he watched, her lips curved into that same serene smile she had worn while cradling Mrs. McGovern's severed head.

"The Rose showed me such wonderful things, Elias," she said. "Would you like to see? Would you like to taste the water that makes everything so clear?"

"What water?" Elias asked, though his voice came out as barely a whisper.

Gideon set the Shear carefully on the table, his movements precise despite his obvious pain. "There are things about our family that I had hoped... that I had prayed you would never need to know. Things I thought I could keep buried with scripture and prayer and the strength of our faith."

"What things?"

"Look under my bed," Samantha said conversationally, as if discussing the weather. "Mr. McGovern is waiting there. He wanted to help Father understand about the pruning, but Father still fights against his nature."

The words hit the room like stones thrown into still water, sending ripples of horror through the oppressive silence. Elias stared at his sister, then at his father, seeing the truth written in Gideon's resigned expression.

"No," Elias breathed.

But even as he spoke the word, he was rising from the chair, moving toward the back hallway with the inexorable pull of a man walking to his own execution. His father's bedroom door stood open, the space beyond dark and still.

Elias knelt beside his father's narrow bed, his hands shaking as he lifted the edge of the heavy quilt his mother had sewn years before her death. The smell that wafted up from the darkness beneath made his stomach clench with recognition.

Mr. McGovern lay there in the shadows, his eyes wide and staring, his throat opened in a precise line that spoke of surgical skill rather than frenzied violence. His body had been arranged with careful attention to detail, hands folded across his chest as if he were merely sleeping.

"Dear God," Elias whispered, scrambling backward from the horror.

"God?" Samantha's voice drifted from the sitting room, followed by that silver-bell laugh. "Oh, Elias. You still don't understand, do you? We serve something so much older than God. So much hungrier."

Elias stumbled back to the main room, his world dissolving around the edges like a watercolor painting left in the rain. His father stood exactly where he had left him, the ancient Shear gleaming in his weathered hands.

"Why?" Elias demanded. "In the name of all that's holy, why?"

Gideon Shearer looked at his son with eyes that held three decades of carefully buried pain. "Because, my boy," he said quietly, "we are not what I have taught you to believe we are. We never were."

The silence that followed was broken only by the sound of Samantha humming that familiar lullaby, her voice weaving through the air like smoke from an unholy incense. Outside, the afternoon was fading into evening, and somewhere in the growing darkness, Elias could swear he heard the sound of something growing, something blooming, something that whispered of hungers vast and patient and utterly alien to the human heart.

The family Bible lay forgotten on the floor, its pages spread like broken wings, while the Shear gleamed with promises of truths too terrible to comprehend.