This Poison Heart: Chapters 23–31

A tall, gangly man stood in the doorway.

“That troglodyte is giving out my personal information now, is she?”

“It’s Lou’s Funeral Parlor. My grandfather was a Lou, so was his father before him—Lewis, Louis, Lucian. In keeping with that tradition, I now carry the moniker.”

“Marie feels like she’s entitled to know things that don’t pertain to her.”

“In any given set of people, particularly people who are related by blood, you’ll find patterns, genetic anomalies that cause any number of diseases and afflictions.”

“In any given set of people, particularly people who are related by blood, you’ll find patterns, genetic anomalies that cause any number of diseases and afflictions.”

I had more questions, but I couldn’t let Karter beat up this wraith of a man in the basement of his funeral parlor.

Medea is said to have killed her own brother in an attempt to avoid being married off by her tyrannical father, who happened to be the son of the god Helios.

There is a folio in the Vatican Archives that a colleague of mine had access to about twenty years ago. It’s an assortment of documents that he believed were saved from the Library of Alexandria.

But the photo is proof this narrative existed, and that is a tantalizing fact in and of itself.

He pulled something up on his computer and clicked on a folder labeled Reconstructed Proto-Greek Phonemes.

Jason, commander of the Argo, sought Medea out and devised a plan to deceive her.

Medea poisoned the dragon, procured the fleece, and then, understanding that she would never be free from him, decided to kill Jason.

She concocted the deadliest poison she could, distilled it into a goblet of wine, and had it served to him.

She concocted the deadliest poison she could, distilled it into a goblet of wine, and had it served to him.

I descended the stairs into the dank little room.

For my AP Biology class, we’d taken a field trip to the museum and seen a human heart suspended in a jar of formaldehyde. We’d had to label the parts on a worksheet, and all those parts were there on the strange plant. The flat waxy plain of the right and left ventricles was pointed upward. The tangle of what might have been arteries snaked off the bottom and fed into long, thick stalks.

He shook himself from his panic-induced stupor.

Karter’s entire demeanor changed.

“Mom, can you get me the mortar and pestle?”

She begrudgingly slid the stone mortar and pestle set over to me, and Karter handed me the jar of dried arnica.

Down the hall, I heard the familiar notes of Sam Cooke’s crooning, and I smiled.

A thick layer of dust sat in the grooves of the open window, tinged green from all the pollen wafting through the air.

An original goddess, or an entity that the goddess label was slapped onto because they didn’t have a name for what she was.

The issue was that Lou had a job to do in Rhinebeck and it was inextricably linked with trying to keep the Colchis family secrets intact.

Apparently Circe and Selene owed several years of back taxes, and there is now a lien on the property.

Turns out she was a liar and wasn’t being honest when it came to being free and clear on the property. Do you know how much time I’ve wasted trying to facilitate this handover to you?

When you vacate the property, make sure you leave the keys, or I’ll have a warrant issued for your arrest. The police have already been apprised of the situation.

There are con artists that exploit families of the recently deceased, but this doesn’t seem like she was trying to get money or even the property itself.

She tilted her face to the sky in silent reverence.

She held up her mangled arm.

“My family has always sought the Heart, and their reasons were petty and selfish. I want it for something bigger and more profound than they could have imagined.”

Her contempt for her own son was clear, but I struggled to comprehend the rest of what she was saying.

The steady pulse was audible and reverberated in my bones.

A devious smile crept onto her lips.

The contents shimmered and a thick ash-gray mist billowed out. Mrs. Redmond stood transfixed, but I took several steps back.

She cried out weakly, then sobbed, her body convulsing with each heave.

A guttural growl erupted from the shadows, and a dog the size of a bear lumbered into the room, its wet lips pulled back over its gleaming yellow teeth.

The dog retreated and Karter grabbed his leg to stanch the bleeding.

“Jason’s line remains,” Katrina gasped. “We’ve been hunting them since the Heart’s inception. We should be the ones to reap the benefits of its magic.”