Rose

by Ripley Proserpina

  “I think Rose is right,” Seti said. “I think we should just… see what they have to say.”

  Horus sighed and crossed his arms. He gazed around the room as if taking stock. “Fine.” He sat on the edge of her bed and crossed one leg over the other. If he was going for casual, he was failing.

  There was a knock on the door as the thought occurred to her that she should make her bed, but it was too late for that. “Just—try to be relaxed, okay?” she said to them.

  That might have been asking a lot. The big men, despite their best attempts, looked ready to jump up and throw down.

  Hoping for the best, she walked to the door and opened it. Two plainclothes police officers stood there, but behind them… Holy shit. There were a half-dozen uniformed officers.

  Seemed like overkill.

  “Rose Carrado. I’m Detective Michael Bibbins with the Transit PD. We have some questions about what occurred on the Orange Line tonight.”

  All her bravado disappeared. She’d been so cocky a moment ago, but she was transported back in time when she’d had to meet with similar detectives and tell them a story that none of them believed.

  “Can we come in?” his partner asked.

  She nodded and opened the door wider to allow them to pass by her. The two men came inside along with their back up. The uniformed officers spread around the room, hands on their guns.

  “These are my friends,” she said. “Ra—”

  “Rodney Seddik.” Ra held his hand out to Detective Bibbins and then his partner. “You are?”

  “Detective Bill Shaw,” the other man said. “And you?” He stared at Horus and then Seti.

  “My brothers,” Ra said. “Horatio and Seth Seddik.”

  “This makes our job easier,” Detective Shaw said. “We were hoping to speak with you as well.”

  “What do you want to know?” Ra asked.

  Rose waited for it. Denial was inevitable. What would the police call it this time? An LSD trip? A hijacked surveillance system? “A man in another car pulled the emergency brake before pushing open the doors. He later appeared in your car. A bystander recorded a fight in which you, Mr. Seddik, pull the man’s head from his shoulders. More than one of the passengers in the train attest to this.”

  Son of a bitch. The one time it’d be helpful for the police to second guess what they saw! Rose did some quick calculations, drawing on her former experiences with the police. If they had a video, then they had all parts of the video. And they wouldn’t like what they saw. If she was going to get them out of this, she was going to have to take a risk. “Do they also say that the man disintegrated into ash?” Rose asked.

  Detective Bibbins grimaced. “There are conflicting reports about what people saw happen to the man after his head was removed from his body.”

  “But that must have appeared on camera as well,” she said.

  “The video was inclusive.”

  “So, it is conclusive that Raaaodney,” she stumbled over his name, “pulled someone’s head from his body, but inclusive that afterward the man turned to dust?” She crossed her arms. “That sounds crazy.”

  “No one turned to dust,” Detective Shaw scoffed. “That’s impossible.” He glared at Rose. “Miss Carrado, we’re asking you to come with us to the station. But Mr. Seddik, you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…” He Mirandized Ra, stepping forward as he withdrew handcuffs from his pockets.

  “You don’t have a body,” Rose cried, “because the guy was pranking everyone! The whole thing must have been set up. And computer graphics. People will do insane things for attention.”

  Ra let the detective put him in cuffs but dragged his feet as she spoke. “That makes sense,” he said. “A lot more sense than someone pulling off a guy’s head.”

  The detectives glanced at each other, less sure of themselves now.

  “You don’t have a body,” Rose added. “All you have is a video that shows one thing you think is possible, and another you think is impossible.”

  “I’ve seen the video,” Seti said. “It looks like he breaks Rose’s arm, but look—” Rose held her arm out when he nodded at her, pushing up her sleeve quickly. “She’s clearly fine.”

  “Probably CGI,” Horus said, shocking the crap out of her. “Like I read about being used during the Nightmare.”

  Detective Bibbins rubbed his eyes. “Take the cuffs off, Shaw.”

  The man did, but he scowled and glared at them as he did it. “Who was the man in the video?”

  “I’ve never seen him before,” Seti said. Rose almost spoke up to agree, but she had actually seen him before. And somewhere in the city, there was bound to be a witness to that. “He got aggressive with Rose. We just left before anything could happen.”

  “Yeah,” Bibbins said. “We saw you at the Jackson Square platform. You know you’re not supposed to get out of the train. We could charge you with trespassing.”

  The relief that filled her from being downgraded to trespassing from murder made her stupid. “Okay.”

  Seti turned to face her, eyes wide with a what-the-fuck expression. She returned it with an I-don’t-know-what’s-wrong-with-me-face of her own.

  “It seems like we may have acted too quickly. I’m sure you can understand, Miss Carrado, why we’d be concerned to see you involved in a situation like this.” Detective Bibbins frowned at her. With a simple statement, he reminded her that she was a well-known liar. She was the crazy girl who made up stories about vampires. Ironic that the one time she actually was lying, it was to say vampires didn’t exist. “You and your friends should expect another visit from us. Got it?”

  The smart-ass side of her wanted to say something like, “So don’t leave town?” But provoking cops wouldn’t be good for anyone.

  Bibbins nodded at Ra. “Mr. Seddik.”

  Shaw was a whole lot less thrilled with the turn of events but didn’t say a word. Instead, he stormed out of the apartment while gesturing at the other officers to leave.

  The door closed behind them and Rose’s knees wobbled. Holy crap.

  She was officially done with this long-ass week. She was tired, hungry, cranky, and confused. Facing Ra, she lifted her eyebrows. “Rodney?”

  “My name makes people uncomfortable,” he said. “It’s too different.”

  She pictured an unflattering passport photo along with the name Rodney. Nah. Ra couldn’t take a bad photo if he tried. “What happens when they try to look you up in the system?” she asked.

  Horus answered. “Our passports have the names we gave the detectives.”

  Which reminded her… “Horatio is the best name I’ve ever heard.”

  Horus smiled, glancing down at the floor. “Thanks. I chose it because it is close to my name, but also one of my favorite characters from a book.”

  She racked her brain but came up empty. “What book?”

  “Horatio Hornblower,” he said. “It’s about a British naval officer.”

  “I like that.” She smiled. He’d given her an insight into himself, and she filed it away so she could look it up later. Maybe she’d even read the books and see if they revealed anything else about Horus.

  All of them, even Seti, felt like mysteries to her. She couldn’t get a bead on them except that they’d appeared when she needed them. If she wasn’t careful, she’d start to rely on them. They’d start to mean something to her.

  If she was honest, they already did.

  23

  Horus

  “Now is the time to leave.” Ra spoke in all their minds, but neither Horus nor Seti responded.

  He kept eyeing the door, but for the life of him, he couldn’t make himself walk out. Not when Rose was smiling at him, asking him questions, and making him feel.

  What was he supposed to do? When they first left, he thought it was the right thing to do. Rose was dangerous to them: she represented the unknown. Horus couldn’t make sense of his feelings, both his body’s response to her, and the way
he kept thinking about her. Leaving, isolating themselves, that was their default.

  Ra’s warnings about attachments rang in his brain constantly. Human lives were short, and the pain of losing them was inevitable.

  That hurt sat at the forefront of his mind. He couldn’t look at Rose without seeing her mortality. The entire reason they were in Boston at all was to see a human on his deathbed. If he had forgotten how much it hurt to watch his friends die, he was reminded the moment he and Seti walked into Henry LeGuin’s hospital room and saw what time had done to the boy they’d known since he was a toddler.

  It was hard—beyond hard—to be faced with the inevitable death of their friends. Little Henry had been different. He’d followed them around their patch of land in Quebec, making a nuisance of himself until Horus started to take his presence for granted.

  Seti had said they were like big brothers, but to Horus, Henry had been more like a son. Sure, Ra had shown him how to fish. But Horus had been there for Henry’s first fist fight, first sweetheart, first broken heart, and then he’d stood in the street while Henry volunteered for the army at the start of World War II.

  And despite everything that happened after, Horus had no regrets. He wouldn’t trade those special moments—his shot at pseudo-fatherhood—for anything.

  So if Ra had thought that by bringing up Henry, he’d made a strong case for going north and living in isolation, he was wrong. If anything, he’d only reminded Horus about how special—no matter how fleeting—attachments to humans could be.

  It’s different with Rose, though. None of his burgeoning feelings for her were paternal. And they didn’t seem fleeting. They stayed in his head. They came with a physical sensation inside him like his heart was reminding him it was there.

  “Do you want to stay here?” Rose asked, shaking him out of his thoughts. “There’s not a lot of space, but two of you could share the bed. I can make a nest on the floor, and someone can have the couch.”

  Horus eyed the double bed, then the couch.

  “It’s going to be so much harder to leave if we don’t do it now,” Ra said.

  “I’m not ready.” He sent the message to his brother, and from the lack of response, he got it.

  The place would be cramped, but he could do it. Of course, he didn’t really need to sleep, not yet. He could go weeks without it before his body fatigued.

  “Okay,” Seti answered right away and Horus barely contained a glare.

  Seti was absolutely interested in Rose. If leaving them on a mountain in New Hampshire hadn’t been proof, then the sad-eyed puppy-dog look he watched her with was.

  She smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Good. Are you guys hungry?” In response, her own stomach growled. She slapped her hands over her stomach. “Sorry. I didn’t eat today. Did I?”

  Horus loved the way she would start a sentence and then stare off into space. He’d caught her doing it a couple of times—it gave him the sense that there was no one else around to answer her questions, so she’d gotten used to doing it herself.

  “I did.” She nodded. “At the cafe. God, that was today, wasn’t it? What do you like? I have spaghetti.”

  Horus wasn’t hungry. Besides, he’d had four or five sandwiches. “Sure,” he said. “Can I help?”

  Eyes wide, she nodded. “Okay.”

  Inordinately proud, he followed her into the kitchen. Seti and Ra both glared at him, though for very different reasons.

  Seti liked her. “Be nice.” Horus lifted an eyebrow. Of course he would be. After all, he liked Rose, too.

  Horus had stepped away when they’d left the first time. He’d done the honorable thing. But all bets were off now. They were back in Boston, and he was going to make a play for Rose. Ra would have to get used to his warnings falling on deaf ears.

  He smiled his challenge at Seti, and the last thing he saw before the kitchen door swung shut was his brother’s middle finger.

  24

  Rose

  “Do you have vegetables?” Horus asked as she filled a pot with water.

  “I have a jar of spaghetti sauce in the pantry,” she said, hoping he wasn’t disappointed that she wasn’t cooking from scratch. Am I really worrying about what a vampire-ish person is going to eat? What a strange life she had.

  Horus seemed unfazed. “Great.” He grinned, moving around her kitchen like he was completely comfortable.

  Where was the brooding man? The quiet sentinel? This Horus was… different. He opened her fridge and dug around. When he stood, he held an onion and package of mushrooms. “I’ll chop these and we can put them in the sauce.”

  “Okay,” she answered. She found him a cutting board and knife and then moved out of his way. Even then though, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder. She watched him chop for a while, taking in the way his strong hands held the knife. He was a natural. “Are you a chef?”

  “No,” he answered. “But I like to cook. It takes my mind off of things.”

  “What things?” she asked, wondering how many questions she’d be able to ask without being intrusive.

  He was quiet, and for a while the only sound was him chopping and the water boiling on the stove. “My brothers.”

  Ra and Seti were in the other room, and she hadn’t heard a peep out of them. “Why?”

  “We came back to Boston to say goodbye to an old friend of ours, and then I met you. And now we don’t know what to do.”

  His answer was so forthright and honest, it scared her. “I don’t know what to do either.”

  He glanced at her before lifting the cutting board and pushing the vegetables into the pan. They sizzled, and he stirred them. “I feel good around you,” he said, and then shrugged. “Confused,” he admitted, “but good.”

  Wasn’t that the truth? “Me too. I’d like to get to know you…” She’d like to get to know all of them. Even Ra. Their quick mood changes gave her whiplash, but she definitely got how off-kilter they felt.

  Horus took a breath and side-eyed her. “What do you want to know?”

  Rose froze. He was giving her an open invitation to ask whatever she wanted, so where did she start? With the supernatural? Or the things she’d ask any boy she was interested in?

  Or did she just go balls to the wall, lay it all out on the line?

  “I feel safe with you, but also with Seti, and even Ra, when he’s not being a butt. And that’s one of a dozen things that confuses me,” she muttered. “Does that bother you?”

  He turned the heat down on the stove. Bracing his arms on the counter, he stared at the door between the kitchen and living areas. “No.”

  “Is that because it’s a vampire thing?”

  He swung his head toward her. “What? No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Because Briar has four husbands,” she said. “And she’s the only vampire I know.”

  “First off, I don’t remember proposing—” He smiled at her, and she wanted to die. Mortification spread through her and if she could have fit in one of the cabinets, she’d have hidden there.

  Undeterred and unaware of her sudden affinity for tiny, dark places, Horus went on, “Secondly, Briar’s not actually a vampire. She’s different for a whole bunch of reasons I can’t really explain—” Disappointment filled her, but he went on quickly. “Not because I won’t, but because I don’t really understand it. Rose—I don’t even understand why I am the way I am. I wish I did. I wish I understood the science of it all the way Marcus, Hudson and Briar do. Ra seems to get it. Seti pretends to.” He smiled wickedly at the last statement. “But this is how I’ve always been. From the moment I had awareness, I knew there was no one like me. And the ones that came later—they were very different. They were blood-drinking monsters who cared only about killing and feeding. We weren’t like that. And—I could do things they couldn’t. Walk in daylight. Eat.”

  “What about your parents?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember much about my parents.” He stared at t
he door now, jaw ticking. “I don’t remember their faces. Or the way my mother’s voice sounded. I remember impressions of them. A—I don’t know what it was—poem, maybe, my father would say to my mother. I don’t know, Rose.”

  He seemed so sad and lost. She wanted to fix it. This was what happened when she asked questions she shouldn’t have. She should have dated him first and asked about his work or where he lived—what he liked to do on the weekend. Instead, she went straight for the jugular. Tell me the most painful things about yourself.

  But… she knew just what he meant. “My mother died three years ago,” she said. “And if I concentrate really hard, I can remember her face, but her voice is getting fainter. And the pictures I have of her in my mind, they’ve become more like photographs—still frames of her. I can’t remember the actions or moments or expressions anymore. Like—she loved going to the Arnold Arboretum with me, and this one time, a butterfly landed on her. I remember her being excited, but for the life of me I can’t remember how her expression changed or if she moved or froze.” Her throat hurt as she tried not to cry so she swallowed. “That was only three years. So I can’t imagine how hard it is if a hundred years passed by.”

  “Three thousand,” Horus said. He turned a black-eyed gaze on her. His shoulders heaved like he was out of breath because it had taken a physical toll on him to admit that.

  “Three thousand years…”

  “And in three thousand years, there’s been no one like you,” he said. The way he said that—she thought he was talking about how she healed, but as she met his stare, she realized he meant more. He meant she was different somehow, maybe even special.

  The oil in the pan popped, and she hissed in a breath as a bead of it landed on the back of her hand. The spot turned bright red, but a second later, it darkened, deepening to a shade a little darker than her hand before it faded away altogether.

  “That was fast,” he said.

  “Do you heal like this?” she asked, holding the back of her hand toward him.