This chapter comes from the DannyMay 2020 Day 2 theme: flowers.

There is nothing so insidious as the way something can kill you from the inside out.

Blood blossoms are beautiful; Danny can't deny that. Their petals like roses and stems a dark, enticing black make for a gothic, lovely visage, and Sam has talked more than once about how nice they would look in her garden, if only Danny weren't "allergic." He doesn't blame her—they are pretty. There has never been a more beautiful death.

It sticks to the inside of his throat, that sick-sweet scent. It coats his mouth like a film, and it clogs his lungs like mud from a dust storm. It eats at him, acidic, until his tongue is burning, his skin, his breath. It is a slow death, and one might think that for someone dead already, a second undoing is nothing—

but Danny is a child yet, and he may know what lies beyond mortality, but no ghost has ever been able to send back tales of what comes after they go for good.

So he chokes, afraid, on the scent of a killing thing, growing so innocently in the brush and yet untouchable to him. He collapses into them, and the thorns pierce his suit, his skin, and it is like puncturing a balloon, for how easily they go through. And he hurts.

And the poison seeps in.