(Source: Cococozy)

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Lavender was burning.

Anthemone turned toward the Perfume Emporium she'd frequented since grade school to find it in its death throes.  Florid smoke billowed from the glassy mouth where the display window should have stood.  The door that broke her nose in three other lives she hadn't lived dangled from mangled, melting molten hinges.  The danger of what it could do had passed; all that remained was what it could have unleashed.

The street that most often boasted a hundred shop-goers per minute of rush hour commerce was deserted.  Where's Fire Prevention Intervention?  She spun in a dizzied circle, seeking their neon spotlight in the sky.  But the sky was a deep purple haze that clung to rooftops like heaving storm clouds, so unlike the innocuous clouds of yesterday.  There wasn't a sun to be found.  And not another soul for hundreds of feet in either direction.  Not another soul for three seconds or two seconds more that I can see. There's only me.

She stared at the battered storefront, the only one like it on the boulevard. Every other store was intact, perfect in its recreation from her memories, pristine as they were when she passed them on her journeys to and from school each day.  This is wrong.  This is a dream. Why am I having this dream?  She had to find out.  I need to wake up.

Anthemone edged into the entrance and called out.  "Efram?"

Efram had been the perfumery attendant since she was old enough to visit unsupervised.  Taller than her yet shorter than most, he had the appearance of boy who never aged and the attitude to match.  She'd long thought he wouldn't have been out of place in one of her classes.  He'd cackled when she told him.  Efram didn't age nor did he leave. This shop of wonders wasn't right without him.

The walls of the showroom were furnished with a latticework of shelved glass jars and stoppered bottles filled with glimmering vibrant elixirs.  Tabletop displays show scented toiletries populated the main floor.  Vanities peppered the shop's perimeter, mirrors reflecting angels Anthemone couldn't easily see.  The front desk stood tallest of all in front of an ivory altar of decorative flasks.  This was the shop as she saw it daily.

The view transformed in a blink, darkness subsuming light, smoke filling the air, the temperature gone hot all over where it had been cool.  Tables were overturned, trails of glass crumbs and bath salts littered the floor in shapes Anthemone swore she had seen someplace out of dreams.

But no Efram.

Anthemone dropped to the floor to avoid a super-heated plume of citrusy smog that came screaming from the backroom to shatter each and every perfume bottle on the altar.  She knew all the scents, having tried them all.  Spearmint, honeysuckle, sea salt, rosemary.

The lab!

Carrying herself in a clumsy crouch, she charged into the scent lab to find her friend.  He has to be here.  He always had been.  Anthemone had a funny relationship with change.

The vaulted ceiling of the backroom lab were obscured by the selfsame purple smoke as muddied the air outside.  Every beaker, flash, and tubing chemistry rumbled in ominous discontent.  Efram wouldn't allow this.  He'd told her once how he had been a lab assistant in another life.  'Safety first!' he'd said, a lesson Anthemone carried with her.

On stepping around a bend in the wall, she glimpsed a figure she didn't recognize standing at the chemistry station.  Tall, tall, tall and broad at the waist. Flaxen-haired where Efram was brawny.  Translucent-skinned where Efram was brown.

"Who are you?"

When the figure—he? she questioned, unsure—picked up a beaker labeled lavender and another labeled verbena, she blanched.  She recognized bleach and ammonia on sight whatever they were labelled.  Don't you understand?

"Don't!"

But whoever they were, they didn't listen. They didn't say anything.  They smiled.

Anthemone backed away.

"Don't!"

They poured the two chemicals into funnel that led to a Bunsen burnt beaker filled with hydrochloric acid.  You don't do that accidentally, she realized, and slipped on bits of fragile bottle glass. This is no accident.

When 'lavender' oil met 'verbena', what should have been splendid became explosive.

A fire cloud erupted from the burner, up the tubing, along the liquid streams into the stranger's hands.

They were still smiling when flames claimed the skin on their hands, on their arms; consumed their clothes, and finally their entire body.  Their teeth were the last thing she saw...smiling.

As the inferno raged toward her, Anthemone screamed.  Unable to outrun the heat, she threw her arms over her head to let the scorching wall of fire sweep over in one great wave, as one vast mouth swallowing her whole where the flames were tongue and teeth and stomach.

Flesh curdled back from muscle, popped free from bone.  Bone cooked, marrow disintegrated, the air in her lungs evaporated mid-breath before the tissue sizzled, hissed, charred, and burned to ash, and bone to dust.

Anthemone wasn't screaming now.  She wasn't anything.

...

...

Her lungs stuttering to life on either side of her wildly beating heart, Anthemone peeled her eyelids apart to hear...and woke to these words banging around inside her skull:

"Do not enter Eau du Pur Perfume Emporium. Do not enter Eau du Pur Perfume Emporium. There will be no survivors."

Anthemone gagged, catapulting over the side of her bed to vomit the taste of blood and flowers onto her cluttered bedroom floor.

 She wouldn't need telling twice.