At six o'clock sharp, the alarm went off blaring like a mad siren. Rose tossed and turned in bed, flailing her arms in panic until she realised she was neither being attacked by lethal elves nor creepy shadows. The obnoxious wailing was coming from a device invented by humans to torture other humans.

"Oh, bugger off," she muttered from under her tangled sheets.

Squeezing her eyes shut and hovering her hand over the nightstand, she located the racket-inducing contraption. When she found it, she silenced it with a well-aimed slap.

"There, much better now," she mumbled.

The silence that followed was blissful, but unfortunately short-lived, as she remembered the mountain of uncomfortable tasks lying ahead. Rose buried herself under her covers, hoping to hide from her inevitable duties just a few more moments. Not that her night's sleep had been particularly refreshing. It had been mercifully dreamless but had left her with a lingering feeling of detachment. She was lying in her own bed, under her own fluffy covers, but she didn't quite feel like herself. The sensation of being a stranger in her own body sadly hadn't disappeared overnight. Maybe she needed more time until her body and her mind had reconciled with the fact that she wasn't a flower any more.

Running her hands down the length of her body, she tentatively felt her skin. Squeezing softly, she assured herself of the muscle beneath. Even her kneecap's knobbly hardness felt oddly reassuring under her finger's touch. Yes, everything appeared perfectly fine and completely human, no roots, no petals, no leaves. Rose let out a sigh of relief, relishing the unobstructed flow of air filling her lungs.

And yet...and yet...something was amiss and it disturbed her that she couldn't tell what it was.

A drawn-out and demanding meow pulled her from her musings. Before she could throw off her covers, Antares had jumped onto her bed and was now stalking from her feet towards her face. He sat on her chest, his perfectly rounded black paws barely an inch from her chin, and stared down at her through his sapphire eyes. She could have sworn he was giving her a reproachful glare because she had deserted him, even though it was only for a few days and surely Melinda had looked after him. But he was a stubborn cat and strangely attached to her, a fact she usually enjoyed, even though it meant that she rarely could be away for more than one day, or else the entire building would be aware of his extraordinarily potent voice.

"Don't be mad at me. I wasn't planning on staying away so long," she said, scratching him under his chin, the way he liked it. He immediately leaned into her touch and began to purr like a tiny engine.

"You don't need to make such a drama out of it, Antares. It's not like you didn't have anything to eat while I was away. You just have to stop being so picky about who serves you your food." She sighed, enjoying the fluffy warmth of his fur beneath her fingers. How nice it was to be back in this normal life, a warm bed to sleep in, a slightly cranky but now very cuddly cat to snuggle with. And the best of it—far and wide no elves in sight. It even almost rhymed, she thought to herself with a chuckle.

Antares stretched out across her chest, as if it were a giant cat pillow. "You know that I'll have to get up eventually. You're not the only one who's hungry and then I have to call my mom and I need to get ready for work."

When she thought about all the things that awaited her, she had half a mind to stay another day in hiding, but of course that wasn't the reasonable adult thing to do.

With one hand she reached for her now fully charged phone on the nightstand. Hopefully her mom already knew she was back thanks to Melinda, but she would definitely want to hear it from her daughter's mouth that she was alive and well. Better get this over with first, she told herself and dialled her mother's number, ignoring all the unanswered calls and unread texts on her phone.

Her mother answered on the first ring. "Rose!" she practically yelled into the phone. "Is this really you? Are you all right?"

"Yes, this is really me and yes, I'm all right." Well, maybe the last part was a lie, but her mother didn't need to know that.

"Oh, thank god, I finally hear your voice! You can't imagine how worried I was. I thought I'd never see you again!"

"I'm fine, Mom, really." Her fingers drew lazy circles on Antares's back. "Didn't Melinda call you last night?"

"Yes, she did, but she wasn't clear about what had happened to you. She sounded confused and evasive. It was as if she was trying to hide something. Why didn't you call me when you got back from wherever you've been? I've tried calling you more than a dozen times and left you messages too. What's the point of having a phone when you're not going to answer it?" The obvious reproachfulness in her mother's voice sent her guilt skyrocketing.

"I—I'm sorry Mom. My phone died and I was really tired and exhausted. The only thing I could think of was going to bed and sleep and...," she paused while she stroked Antares between his ears. "I'm really sorry I had you worried."

"Of course I was worried! What were you thinking? You're my little girl, my only daughter, and I've had no news from you since Sunday. I've spent every minute replaying one dreadful scenario after the other." She sniffled, her voice beginning to waver. "Michael kept asking for you nonstop and refused to go to school until you'd be back safely again. I ended up driving him there."

If Rose still had any doubts about the gravity of this situation, they were just erased. Her mother absolutely loathed having to play taxi for her children.

"Does Dad know?" Rose asked while Antares stretched lazily under her expert hands.

"Yes, Frank knows. I called him last night after I spoke to Melinda. Even he was concerned and you know that means something."

Yes, she knew that, but now was not the moment to dwell on that.

"Aren't you going to put me out of my misery and finally explain what on earth happened to you? People don't just fall off the grid all by themselves."

"You're right, they don't," she pushed out, her voice suddenly hoarse.

There it was. The moment of truth Rose wasn't ready to face. It had been different with Melinda, who constantly joked about Rose's obsession with 'those pointy-eared weirdoes', but her mother tended to give her the impression that any minute spent in research of the elves was a minute wasted. Therefore Rose had mostly avoided this topic in her mother's presence altogether.

"Rose..." her mother started.

"I'm not hurt, if that's what you are thinking," she quickly cut her off. Not physically at least, she added silently to herself. Bending the truth to relieve her mother's worst fears was a venial sin, wasn't it?

"I just...I ran into..." She searched for the right words that eluded her while she stroked Antares's back, his purring reverberating through her chest.

In the silence between them she heard her mother draw in a laboured breath. "Did the elves have anything to do with your disappearance?" Her mother's voice had turned into a hushed whisper and for a moment Rose thought she hadn't quite heard right.

"What? Why would you think that?" Her mother was the last person on earth to believe in the existence of anything supernatural. "What did Melinda tell you?"

"Not the truth, obviously." Her mother sounded somehow defeated. "Rosie, I know you better than what you think, so there's no need to try and deny the true nature of your trip."

"Mom, I wasn't..." she stuttered, fishing for words that wouldn't come. Evading the truth wouldn't be possible anymore. She owed her mother an explanation, even if she didn't know where to start.

"I—I needed clarification," she began, unsure of how to proceed. "I had to see once and for all if there was any truth to what the book claimed to be a reality."

"And did you find what you were looking for?"

"I did, but it wasn't the truth I had been hoping for. The elves may be devastatingly beautiful but they are also lethally dangerous." Rose swallowed. "And they have no love for us humans. I know that now." A cold shiver ran down her spine. The memory of her entire body burning and convulsing in pain was still too fresh to go anywhere near it.

"So they are real then? You saw them with your own eyes?" Her mother's voice sounded suddenly brittle.

"Yes," Rose breathed.

"I should have known I was right, that it wasn't just my childish mind imagining things," her mother said and it sounded like she was talking to herself rather than to Rose.

"What do you mean, you were right? What are you talking about?" Her mother's words were completely unexpected.

Her mother took what sounded like a steadying breath. "Rose, there's something I need to tell you about your grandmother."

"Gran?"

"Yes, my mother. You know that I've always told you she died when I was just a little girl."

"Yes, I do." Rose remembered clearly her mother's stories about her grandmother's unfortunate early passing.

"Well, I don't think that's what really happened."

"I—I'm not sure I understand. What else should have happened to her?" She wasn't sure she wanted to hear the answer.

"When I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me bedtime stories about the elves and show me pages from the book, which was her most priced possession. She always spoke about them as if she believed they truly existed and there was a longing in her voice as if she wished nothing more than to find them." There was a moment of silence and then her mother said, "I think she went in search of the elves and she found them and never came back."

"But...that can't be. We have visited Gran's grave. I know where she's buried. We...we've all been there." A dreadful feeling coiled in Rose's stomach. Those flowers in the glade...what if one of them was—no, that was impossible. Her mother must be mistaken. It simply couldn't be.

"That grave is empty," her mother said and Rose's chest hollowed out at the words. "They...they never found her body. For practical reasons she just disappeared and no one knew where she had gone. It could have been an abduction, an accident, or she could have eloped with a secret lover. The possibilities were endless, but of course no one would believe me, a little girl of barely five years of age, who would only babble about her mother having gone in search of the elves."

She let out a bitter laugh. "Which is why I eventually stopped talking about it. I hid the book she had left behind and after a while I had convinced myself that I must have probably just imagined all of it; stupid fairytales but nothing that had a foothold in reality. When years went by and she didn't return, she was pronounced dead and that's the story that eventually became the truth."

Rose was glad she was lying down because her world had just tilted and she was about to slide off the surface of the earth. "But...but you've never told me anything about this!" Her chest constricted painfully and it was not because of Antares whose claws were digging like needles through her nightshirt.

"I know, and I'm really sorry, but I thought that if I clung to the lie it would eventually turn into reality. It was too painful to keep waiting for the return of someone who I knew would never come back." Her mother drew in a laboured breath. "At the same time I was trying to protect you. I thought that if I kept you away from all this, never mentioned any of it, you'd be safe. I should have known that when you started to develop a similar obsession with the book, that I had probably failed. When I heard that you had gone away for the weekend and two days went by without any news from you, I saw history repeat itself. I was blaming myself for not having thrown the book into the fire when I had the chance, for having allowed you to keep it after you found it when I already knew what harm its pages could do."

"You don't have to worry about that anymore. The book is gone."

"Gone? What do you mean?"

"I don't have it anymore. The elves took it. I only realised it when I was on the train back home."

"You think that is what they were after?"

"I don't know. They never mentioned it in my presence. It looked like they didn't even know about its existence."

"Well, be that as it may, I'm sure it's for the best that it's gone and can do no more damage, luring young women into the claws of those evil creatures."

"You're probably right." These had been her exact thoughts, but somehow the loss of her book—yes, she still called it her book—still hurt.

"Mom, listen, I have to go now. I need to get ready for work." Even though Rose had about a thousand more questions, now was not the time for that. She needed a clear head, not one that was packed with unsettling revelations.

"Of course. I'm sorry I've kept you so long."

"I'm glad you've finally told me. We should get together sometime, so you can tell me all there is about Gran."

"We should. How about you stop by for some coffee and cake tomorrow afternoon?"

Rose scrambled into a sitting position, finally dislocating Antares from his temporary sleeping place on her chest. He gracefully landed on the floor with a meow and stalked, tail straight up in the air, towards the kitchen; his unmistakable way of demanding food.

"I don't know yet. I'll probably be working extra hours this week."

"Well, then just call me whenever you have time."

"I will." Rose stretched one of her arms over her head to get her body into motion.

"I'll let you go, so you can have breakfast and do all you need to do before work," her mother said. "And Rosie?"

"Yes?" Rose squeezed her phone between her cheek and her shoulder while she searched under her bed for her fluffy slippers.

"I'm glad you are back. After losing my mom, it would have killed me to lose my daughter too."

"That won't ever happen," Rose said, her voice choked while one fluffy slipper dangled between her fingers. "I'm never ever going near them again."

Rose spent her morning shower trying to cleanse her mind from the swirling thoughts, but no matter how vigorously she attacked her scalp, she couldn't get the image of her grandmother  fading into a flower out of her head. It couldn't be. She wouldn't think about this now. There was probably a completely reasonable explanation for her grandmother's disappearance. Not everything  always had to do with the elves.

Lathering her body, she forced herself to focus on her day ahead. She would have breakfast and then she would call her boss and go to work. She wouldn't give the elves still power over herself by allowing them into her head. She was done with them, once and for all. Her mother's sudden revelations would not change that. She needed to live her life and that life would not include anyone with pointed ears.

After getting dressed and serving Antares food, there was no more point in trying to delay the conversation with Ms. Odinsen. Rose quickly finished her bowl of cereal and waited for the microwave to ping with her mug of hot chocolate, while she dialled up the number of her boss. It rang twice and the she heard the familiar voice, grumpy as always.

"Municipal library, director Velma Odinsen speaking. How can I help you?" The way her boss barked into the phone made it overly clear that being helpful was not something high up on her agenda.

"Ms. Odinsen, it's me, Rose," she said, pulling out the mug from the microwave and almost dropping it because the handle was hot as hell.

There was a pause at the other end of the line, but Ms. Odinsen quickly regained her momentum. "Well, if it isn't the elusive Miss Pernelle gracing us mortals with her presence. I do hope you have enjoyed your extended weekend while we have been drowning in work with poor Alan having to take on double shifts to cover for your absence." Ms. Odinsen's penetrating voice was dripping with sarcasm.

Rose held back a sigh. She would have quite a lot of explaining to do. Hopefully she would still have a job after she was finished. If not, she was screwed. Looking for a new position wouldn't be easy, especially if she was let go without a letter of recommendation.

"I'm really sorry," she began, serving her boss a fabrication of truth and lies, twisting it into something that hopefully sounded credible enough. She spoke about thunderstorms and about  having gotten trapped beneath a fallen branch and then having had to wait for help and not having been able to walk. Adding a broken down phone and delayed trains to the mix, the concoction, which was completely elven-free, elicited only silence from the other end of the line.

"Ms. Odinsen, are you still there?" It would have been a real pain to have to repeat every single thing she had just said, especially since she couldn't be sure to get every detail right again.

"Yes, I am. I did read about those thunderstorms in the paper. Even killed some people, didn't it?" Did she detect concern in her boss's voice?

"Ah yes, I believe so. It was a nasty storm, almost unnatural in its force." Using the word 'unnatural' to describe her experience was as close as she would dare venture to the truth.

"Well, be that as it may, I do hope that your injured leg isn't going to keep you from coming to work on time today."

"No, of course it won't." Rose sighed in relief. Her boss had not questioned the not-quite-so-truthful retelling of her weekend. This meant she still had a job. She only needed to remember to put on a limp for a few days, just for show.

"Good. I'll see you at ten sharp and come right to my office, please. We're going to have to work out something for you to make up for the time you've lost."

"I'll be there," was all she said.

"Good-bye, Miss Pernelle." There was a click and Ms. Odinsen had hung up on her.

Rose sunk onto her kitchen chair, the mug of hot chocolate no longer hot. Her fingers were trembling around the handle and she quickly placed the mug on the table before it would slip from her hand. Taking a few deep breaths, she buried her head in her hands and raked her fingers through her hair when a familiar furry softness brushed against her legs. She didn't need to look down to know that Antares was snaking between her legs, his deep purrs rolling off of him like waves.

"I'm fine. I'll be fine," she repeated, if to herself or to Antares she didn't know. The words had never felt more wrong in her mouth. She might never be fine again, but she had to try. If not, the elves would have won and she was not willing to admit defeat. Not today.