Rose

by Ripley Proserpina

  Rose

  Daylight’s Crown, Book One

  Ripley Proserpina

  Copyright © 2019 by Ripley Proserpina

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design by Storywrappers

  Copy Editing by Jennifer Jones at Bookends Editing

  Content Editing by Heather Long

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. Rose

  2. Rose

  3. Horus

  4. Rose

  5. Rose

  6. Seti

  7. Rose

  8. Seti

  9. Rose

  10. Ra

  11. Rose

  12. Horus

  13. Rose

  14. Seti

  15. Rose

  16. Rose

  17. Horus

  18. Rose

  19. Seti

  20. Rose

  21. Ra

  22. Rose

  23. Horus

  24. Rose

  25. Ra

  26. Rose

  27. Horus

  28. Rose

  29. Seti

  30. Rose

  31. Ra

  32. Rose

  33. Horus

  34. Rose

  35. Rose

  36. Seti

  37. Ra

  38. Rose

  39. Rose

  40. Ra

  41. Seti

  42. Horus

  43. Rose

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by Ripley Proserpina

  Foreword

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for picking up Rose. This book is a spin-off from the Midnight’s Crown series which includes Briar, Shadow of Thorns, and Diadem of Blood and Bones.

  Rose’s story takes place in the same universe as those books, so you’ll see some familiar characters!

  If you haven’t read those books yet and would like to, you can find them here: https://amzn.to/2TKNfJM

  I hope you love Rose as much as I loved writing her!

  Love,

  Ripley

  1

  Rose

  Ten Years Ago

  Rose Carrado should have listened to her mother. “Stay inside, lock the doors.”

  Dying, she stared up at the bare branches against a winter sky and thought about how beautiful the night was.

  But the ground was cold and hard. The creature bit through her skin, holding her in his arms like she was a baby. “Such a pretty girl.”

  “Stay inside, lock the doors.”

  The wind picked up, rattling the branches and whipping the leaves across her face. He dropped her and what little breath she had huffed out like a tiny puff of smoke. Poof.

  Boston was in chaos. Creatures—demons—had crawled out of hell to devour all of them. That’s what the priest at church said. And from what Rose saw on the news, he was right.

  Angel of God, my guardian dear…

  Mom had to work. She was a nurse and the hospitals were busy, but she hadn’t wanted to go. “Stay inside, lock the doors.”

  From the window, she’d watched Mom run to her car and speed away. At twelve, Rose could follow directions.

  The creature, who smelled like mud and rotted leaves and something else, something sour, stared into the darkness for a moment before hunching over her. He bit her neck and licked the blood that flowed from her wounds.

  She was a delicacy, and he took his time with her. Bite. Pain. Bite. Pain. Rose didn’t want to die, but it hurt so much. So while he appeared in no hurry to kill her, she had no illusions. She was going to die soon.

  “Stay inside, lock the doors.”

  Tonight was the first snow. She’d thought, stupidly, it would be safe in the backyard.

  I just want to catch a snowflake.

  And she had—for a second. Until the creature had touched her ankle, dragging her down to the ground.

  It had burned, the first bite, like she’d chopped peppers and rubbed her eyes. The heat spread from each wound he made on her body.

  He was hungry. The creature—crawling, sliding, sipping—nipped at her body like she was a fancy cake. One bite here. Another there.

  It didn’t hurt as much anymore. She didn’t even feel the cold, and she’d long given up struggling.

  His hands were on her shoulders as he slithered up to her face and stared down at her. “Pretty girl,” he said again.

  Until he spoke, she hadn’t known whether he was male or female. He’d just been an amorphous nightmare. Genderless. Made of squishy white skin, a wide, sharp-toothed mouth, and eyes that glowed like an animal’s.

  Pressing his nose flat against her cheek, he breathed in deeply. Like she was a flower. “Pretty girl. A pretty smell. One more bite.”

  This was it. The moment she died.

  Only she didn’t. Someone picked up the creature, and he screamed. There was a snap, like a branch breaking off a tree, and the night was silent again.

  The lights of Boston kept the sky from getting too dark, and she was glad of that. She wouldn’t want to die in blackness. A face appeared, hovering at the edge of her vision, and she rolled her head toward it.

  If the creature was a demon, then this was an angel. A man stared down at her, a pucker between his dark brows. His eyes were dark, darker than dark, nearly black, and he looked angry. Why was he angry with her?

  “You’re not going to die,” he whispered, except his lips didn’t move. Maybe he hadn’t spoken. Angels didn’t need to speak.

  She would have argued, she was twelve after all, she argued about everything, but she couldn’t find her voice. She could have told him what was happening. She was dying. The demon had killed her.

  “You’re not going to die,” he said again. “Hang on. Help will be here soon.”

  “Ra!” A rough voice called the angel, and he snapped his head up.

  Don’t leave.

  He touched her forehead, trailing fingers down to her neck and frowned. “You’re not going to die.”

  And then he was gone.

  Something had happened with his words. The thread Rose was about to cut pulled tight but didn’t break. Each time her eyes wanted to close, his voice sounded in her mind, and she knew—she couldn’t go to sleep. She had to keep breathing.

  With each breath came pain. It was heat, like she was stepping closer and closer to an open flame. She should stop before she burned, but her feet kept moving toward the fire. Closer and closer.

  Rose opened her mouth and screamed.

  2

  Rose

  “Haven’t seen you for a while, Rosie girl.”

  Shrugging off her coat, Rose sat in the phlebotomist’s chair. Another day, another blood draw. “Twenty minutes,” she told Reg, who was tasked with hurting her today. “That’s all I’m giving you. Can you do it?” She lifted her eyebrow in challenge.

  “I’ll have you out in a jiffy. You didn’t eat anything did you?”

  For ten years, she’d been getting her blood drawn. She knew the drill. Reg deserved an eye roll, so she gave him one.

  “Don’t kill the messenger!” Laughing, he held up his gloved hands. In one hand, he held the needle that would slide beneath her skin and into her veins.

  Ignoring him, she let out a breath and waited for the pinch and burn. Of all the phlebotomists, Reg was the best. He was efficient, quick, but today wasn’t his day. Or maybe it wasn’t hers.

  She knew the moment he touched the needle to her skin what would happen. The metal acc
ordioned, folding into itself instead of pushing into a vein.

  “Crap.” Reg’s voice was resigned as he tossed the needle away and withdrew another from his cart. This one was sturdier, thicker. “Why today?”

  Dread welled in her stomach as Rose pressed her head against the cushioned headrest and waited. It was better if she didn’t look, so she studied the room. There was a poster on the wall, the same one that had been there for the last six months. Pregnant smokers! Earn up to $400!

  The needle jabbed her. A constant river of pain ran beneath her skin, but this made it surge like white water rapids. Rose sucked in a breath and instinctively shut her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Rosie.”

  Reg pressed down on her arm, holding the needle in place while he reached for something with his other hand. Without looking, she knew what had happened. This needle hadn’t done the job, but it had gone through a layer of dermis. Reg would keep it in place, so she didn’t heal up, and slide another, stronger one, in its place.

  “Just do it,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Call the doctor, would you?” he said to someone before the metal stabbed into her. Locking her muscles in place, Rose bit her lip and tasted blood on her tongue.

  “We got it,” he told her a little breathlessly.

  Rose opened her eyes and glanced at the man. Sweat glistened on his forehead and his cheeks were red, like he’d overexerted himself.

  “Miss Carrado, what happened?” Dr. Eben Stone walked into the office. Glancing pointedly at Reg, who taped the needle in place and left, he settled into a seat next to her.

  “One of those days,” she replied, resigned.

  Dr. Stone nodded as he lifted her arm to his face. “Did you feel differently this morning?”

  “No,” she replied. There was always the undercurrent of pain.

  “No meds? No drugs?”

  “No,” she said, answering the question with the same answer as always. “Never.”

  He glanced at her, his blue eyes bright. “I have to ask.”

  She wished she hadn’t come here today, but hope was a strange thing. For ten years, Rose had hoped someone would heal her and make her normal again.

  But this was her normal.

  Dr. Stone touched the needle with a gloved finger and then pressed on her skin. Just like that, the day went from a blood draw, to an examination. “Epidermis feels normal to the touch. No discrepancy in skin tone.” With a quick yank, he pulled the needle out of her arm, and she hissed. Her skin had begun to heal around the metal, and it tore as he withdrew it. Before he could wipe away the blood, her skin knitted together. She could feel the healing. It was like the bites the creature had given her, an open flame held to a nerve ending.

  She hated this, but from Dr. Stone’s fascinated expression, she was the only one who did. He cleaned off her blood and lowered his face to her arm. Nothing was there. There was no wound. No bruise.

  “One more prick,” he said. He peered at the needle he’d removed, sliding it into a bag Rose knew would go to a lab for further investigation, and took a similar one from the drawer. Dr. Stone had drawn her blood on many days like today, when she was like titanium and impenetrable. Before she could prepare herself, he drew his hand back and stabbed the needle into her arm.

  The river churned and boiled, but Rose sat like stone.

  She was a science experiment—a strange human phenomenon whose worth was tied up in her uniqueness as the sole survivor of the Boston Nightmare.

  In the ten years since Rose had been attacked, the world had moved on. No one wanted to believe the unbelievable. The month Boston had spent under attack had to have had a logical explanation.

  Gangs.

  Weird cults led by some Charles Manson wannabe.

  A collective psychotic episode.

  Drugs in the water.

  Even with evidence taken from the thousands of cameras around the city, leaders and locals made excuses. Rationalized the irrational.

  It was easy enough to do when the only person who’d lived through an attack and could say exactly what happened to her was a twelve-year-old girl.

  Demons? Angels? Impossible.

  Her poor mind had created those things because her brain wasn’t equipped to process that trauma.

  And as for her symptoms, well, the trauma had activated a dormant recessive gene. That’s what Dr. Eben Stone believed anyway. He had come to them—Rose and her mother—after her first flare-up of pain. She’d screamed and cried, writhed on the paper-covered hospital bed like she was on fire, but no matter what they tried, the doctors couldn’t explain what was happening to her.

  And they couldn’t draw her blood.

  She could be x-rayed and scanned, but her skin was hard as stone.

  For a time, anyway.

  Dr. Stone, an expert from the Centers for Disease Control, was called in to examine her. He’d had no answers ten years ago, and he had no answers now.

  Breathing through the pain, Rose watched the glass vial fill with her blood. “I told Reg twenty minutes.” Her voice was wooden. Robotic.

  “Where are you on the pain scale?” he asked, removing one vial and replacing it with another.

  “A million,” she answered sarcastically.

  He lifted dark eyebrows and looked up at her through his lashes. “Rose.”

  “Three,” she answered, because no one wanted to hear that every day was a ten. Every day was flaying, stabbing, burning, drowning.

  “Last month was fine,” he said, almost to himself. “We drew blood no problem. The month before that. The same. Something has to be different.” He finished with the second vial and picked up his computer. Rose would bet her whole life was on that computer. It would be a record of her temperature, menstrual cycles… ear infections. Her genome was probably on there, too. Dr. Stone had done so much genetic testing. There would be CT scans and MRIs, and EEGs from sleep studies.

  All of it would look normal.

  But Rose wasn’t normal. She was poison personified, and to Dr. Stone, who watched her with a gleam in his eye, she was a mystery to be solved.

  “You should call in, if someone is expecting you,” he told her. “It’s been so long since this has happened, nearly six months, that I want to run the battery.”

  Rose shook her head. “I have a deadline,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Dr. Stone muttered, typing into his computer. “We’ll do the EEG first, because you haven’t eaten or had anything to drink. You can eat, then we’ll do the CT scan and MRI after. Maybe I’ll just have you drink water and draw blood again. See if that makes a difference.”

  “It didn’t last time,” Rose reminded him. Six months ago, he’d done the same tests, had the same hypotheses. There was no rhyme or reason to her symptoms, they came and went with no discernible pattern.

  “It might be different,” he replied. Dr. Stone looked over at her. He’d been a young doctor when she’d first met him. At the time, she’d thought he was old, like all grown-ups. But now, he was probably only in his forties. His hair was a little thinner, and his face more lined, but he hadn’t changed all that much. He was tall, fit, with dark blond hair and blue eyes. Despite living in New England for the last decade, he still had a southern accent. Rose noticed the way the nurses noticed him. They stared at him as he walked by or blushed when he spoke to them, like he was something special.

  They didn’t know him like she did.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that it might be time to call it a day.”

  His brows furrowed and his lips thinned into a line. He turned glittering, angry eyes on her. “I’m doing the best I can, Rose.”

  “You’re not the one being studied,” she replied.

  Shutting his computer with a snap, he stared at her. “You’re awfully talkative today. Months go by and you don’t say a word to me, but today I get full-length sentences.”

  His vehemence took her aback.r />
  “You’ve done your best. So have I.” This was going to hurt. She tugged the needle out of her arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  She wiped away the blood with a tissue and grabbed her coat. “Everyone has forgotten about what happened. Don’t you think it’s time we do, too?”

  He approached her, palms out. “Rose. Think about what we can learn from you. You think you’re the only child who’s lived through something horrific? You’re not. What if you’re the key? The way your genes turned on—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pushing her arms through her coat. “I’m done.” Her camera bag sat next to her chair, and she picked it up.

  “Wait!” he called as she walked by him. He grabbed her arm and stared down at her with wild eyes. “Don’t do this. This is our life’s work.”

  Rose shook her head. It was time for this to be over and for her to accept that this was the way things would always be.

  He must have seen it on her face because he dropped his hand. “No one believes you. They’re happy to believe this whole thing—the videos, the deaths, the pictures—it was mass hysteria. They think you’re cashing in on it, and no matter what I do, they think I’m just as crazy.”

  Cashing in? “I can’t get insurance,” she said, “and thank God my student loans will die with me, because they are huge. Do you know how lucky I am each time someone hires me? All someone has to do is Google me, and they find a dozen articles about how I’m the modern-day equivalent of a Puritan screaming, ‘Witch!’” She zipped her coat. “How am I cashing in?”