It was early spring when the first anonymous bouquet arrived at Sera's doorstep.
Wrapped in soft parchment and tied with crimson twine, the flowers were foreign—not from her inventory. They were dried, intricate, almost ceremonial. A strange, smoky scent clung to them, unfamiliar yet oddly nostalgic. At the bottom of the bouquet was a note, folded three times and tucked beneath a sprig of unfamiliar fern:
"For what you've awakened. You are not the only one who listens to petals."
There was no signature. No return address. Just that sentence. That warning, if it even was one.
Sera stared at it for several minutes, then carefully unwound the twine. She laid the flowers on the counter beneath the skylight, where the morning sun filtered in with pale curiosity.
The scent triggered something deep in her chest. Not pain—exactly—but tension, like the beginning of a sob. She closed her eyes and inhaled.
Memory.
But not hers.
She saw a boy kneeling in a greenhouse, hands dirt-caked and trembling. A girl screaming in a language she didn't recognize. A fire. A single bloom surviving the burn.
Sera stumbled back, nearly knocking over a vase.
When her vision cleared, the flowers were still there.
Quiet.
Watching.
Listening.
Later that afternoon, Sera buried the bouquet in the compost pile behind the greenhouse. She told herself it was just a prank, maybe even a poetic admirer—but she didn't believe it. Not really. Someone out there knew. Someone with the same gift—or something adjacent. And they were watching.
That night, she double-locked the doors.
The next morning, she found Lina already waiting outside the shop, sitting cross-legged on the bench in her ridiculous polka-dot raincoat. She looked up when Sera arrived, blinking sleep from her eyes.
"You look like you haven't slept," Lina said softly.
"I didn't," Sera replied.
Lina followed her inside without question, flipping the lights on and going straight for the coffee Sera had stashed behind the counter. It had become their quiet routine: coffee, flowers, silence broken only by the occasional joke or accidental spill.
But today, Sera hesitated.
She opened the compost bin and stared at the dirt, now unnaturally dark where the bouquet had decomposed. The soil gave off heat. Not warmth—heat. And something was growing. Too quickly.
"Sera," Lina's voice came from behind her. "What is that?"
"I don't know," Sera whispered.
A tiny green shoot had sprouted in the middle of the pile. Only a few inches high, but already thick. Wrong. Its stem was veined like human skin, and its leaves shimmered faintly with a metallic sheen.
Sera felt her stomach twist.
This wasn't a flower.
It was a message.
Inside the shop, Sera finally told Lina everything.
About the feelings she could absorb. About how each flower amplified a different kind of emotion. About how she never knew why she could do it—only that it had started after the accident that killed her parents. And how her aunt Mira helped her shape the gift into something beautiful.
Lina didn't interrupt once.
When Sera finally finished, Lina only said, "You're not alone anymore."
It took Sera a moment to realize she meant it—not just figuratively. Literally.
Someone out there had the same ability. Or worse.
"They're testing me," Sera muttered. "Seeing if I'll respond."
"Will you?"
Sera didn't answer. But her fingers were already reaching for the dried lavender.
By nightfall, the strange seedling had grown another two inches.
Sera placed it under a glass dome, on the edge of her workbench. She didn't touch it directly again—she knew better. But she listened.
Every few hours, she sat beside it, letting it whisper.
What it said wasn't in words.
It spoke in tremors, in emotional aftershocks. It wanted to be felt. It wanted to connect.
But what scared her most was this: it wasn't asking.
It was pulling.
The next morning brought more customers than usual. Word had spread again, and now even the mayor's wife returned, asking for a bouquet that might help with her "headaches." Sera handed her a bundle of chamomile, bluebell, and pale calendula—rest, trust, protection.
The mayor's wife smiled faintly, then lingered longer than necessary.
"Your shop smells different lately," she said quietly. "Like something old."
Sera kept her face neutral. "I rotated some new stock."
But as she watched the woman walk out, flowers in hand, she wondered just how many people would be sensitive to the change in air. Sensitive to the pull of that strange little sprout under the glass dome.
Lina appeared beside her, almost ghostlike. "This town's going to start asking questions."
"They already are."
"You ready for the answers?"
Sera didn't know.
That night, she dreamt of petals in her mouth—blooms unfolding on her tongue, choking her with their perfume. She woke up gasping, heart pounding, and knew without checking: the seedling had bloomed.
She rushed to the workbench, turned on the light—and stared.
It was unlike anything she'd ever seen.
The flower stood seven inches tall, delicate and lethal. Its petals were a deep violet-black, veined with gold. The center pulsed faintly, like it had a heartbeat. Around the base, the soil had cracked. And written in the cracks, in thin tendrils of root, were three words:
We See You.
Sera backed away.
Not just a message.
A threat.
But for what? Her gift had never harmed anyone. She helped people. Healed them. Offered solace.
So why now?
Why her?
She turned to her journal, flipping through pages of old notes Mira had kept about the family's strange history. There were whispers of a woman in the 1800s—Celeste Wynn—who could "draw emotion from the earth." No one believed it then. She was labeled a witch and vanished one night without explanation.
Was this connected?
Before she could dig deeper, the shop bell rang.
Sera turned, startled.
Lina stood in the doorway, holding a large envelope.
"It came to the newspaper office," she said, breathless. "Addressed to you. No return label."
Sera took it with trembling fingers.
Inside was a single photograph.
An old greenhouse, overrun with vines.
In the corner stood a girl with eyes exactly like Sera's.
On the back of the photo was a name: Celeste Wynn. 1874.
Beneath it, scrawled in red ink:
"The blood remembers. The soil keeps secrets. Dig deeper, little bloom."