RoseBlood

by Howard, A. G.

  She’d need to venture out soon. If she didn’t on her own, he would lure her out. When he’d looked in on her earlier, she was seated on the first-tier steps inside the foyer, penning a note on a piece of stationery as translucent as the dress she wore. Had it not been for her sweater and leggings, he could’ve admired that expanse of skin, the way it glowed milky soft and radiant with energy. He wanted to do more than watch from afar. He wanted to stir the music inside her, to drink the pure, white light pulsing through her veins.

  He fought the craving, thinking instead on the beauty of the frilly, sculpted paper beneath her feather quill—an illusion of lace and ribbon. An illusion like Rune. She might resemble an angel, but there was a ravenous demon waiting to be roused within. If he were to cinch that dark, silken cord of rhapsody hanging loose between them, he could help her wake it . . . and together, they could tame it.

  But that delectable task did not belong to him. Although it should. It was written in the stars. He squeezed his gloved hands and stood.

  Damn the stars and their ill-wrought timing.

  His boots shuffled through a carpet of mushrooms and decaying plants as he dropped articles of damaged clothing across nasturtiums, dahlias, roses, mums, and asters—each bloom flashing their last jeweled bursts of color before the chill of winter came to tarnish them. Even with all the beauty at his feet, his gaze kept straying to the distance, past the ornate wrought-iron gates and fence separating the cemetery from the forest’s thick canopy of leaves—in greens, oranges, and golds. He suspected that must be how Rune’s eyes looked when they brimmed with freshly absorbed energy. He’d see for himself, soon enough.

  Yesterday he’d visited the cafeteria. He watched from behind the mirror while the senior students had lunch. A clandestine drama erupted between Rune and her new circle of friends. He knew who had planted the dead crow. Just as when she stole and vandalized Rune’s uniforms, her aura had glowed a stubborn, dogmatic brown. Her motivation was transparent. But things were already in motion, and there was no changing them. She would have to accept that fate had chosen Rune for this role, just as Thorn himself had to.

  After the atrium cleared, and all the aromatic foods had been wheeled away on carts into the service elevators, Thorn had slipped through the hidden door and searched for Rune’s name on the chalkboard.

  When he saw that she’d chosen gardening duty and hadn’t completed it for the week, it was as if heaven itself had opened up and delivered her. It gave him the chance to lay out the crumbs and coax her into the garden, across the footbridge, and to the edge of the cemetery while everyone was gone for the day. Of course she would be frightened, but her curiosity would make her brave. He knew that much about her, from their shared visions.

  Personally, Thorn never felt afraid amongst the graves and statues. They had been his playground as a child. Ironic that he was most at home on a field of death. After watching the teens at the academy over the last year and a half, how their lives paralleled the plays they enacted on stage—rich with relationships and morals and romance—he understood how strange and different that made him.

  In some ways, he craved their simplistic interactions and carefree lives. But he wasn’t like them. He didn’t belong outside this place, in a world filled with travels, and activities, and families and love.

  He’d turned his back on any chance of that years ago. He’d been raised by a phantom who slept underground in a coffin, and he would no doubt do the same himself one day—to keep his past at bay.

  Father Erik wasn’t insane. His past had molded him . . . warped him. Before he came to understand the power his deformity could wield, he’d feared it. At age six, after being on the run for weeks—trying to escape his mother’s hatred and abuse—Erik had snuck into a gypsy camp and was caught stealing food. They allowed him to live, but he had to earn his keep, taking off his mask and shirt, and posing behind bars as a child’s living corpse to terrorize onlookers for money. It took little imagination to convince customers he was a skeleton wrapped in a sheath of decomposing flesh.

  His fame grew quickly, and crowds would come, prepped with rotten eggs and spoiled fruits and vegetables to cast at his feet as offerings of food—as if a beast such as himself deserved nothing more than pig slop for sustenance.

  It was the first time he’d been unmasked and vulnerable to anyone. His own mother had made him wear his mask both awake and asleep. The shame and revulsion he faced when bared pecked away at any semblance of self-worth he had left. The horrified screams of other children, of their parents, bled into his nightmares and replayed mirror images of his own horrific face in vivid colors to haunt him.

  At last, one night, after having insomnia for months, Erik took refuge inside his cage, slipping into the prop coffin used as part of his act. He closed the lid and slept soundly until morning, shutting out the terrified wails, depraved cries, and images of the monstrous deformity that always followed him in his waking hours.

  The one way he could feel completely safe while at his most vulnerable—to assure no one would see him and scream in horror—was to be locked within a casket. So that came to be his eternal refuge.

  Thorn understood his father’s need to shut out the past, as others never would. He’d lived in a cage himself, three harrowing months before Erik found and rescued him.

  Father Erik’s eccentricities were by-products of his past, as were Thorn’s. As were anyone’s. Even the mundane staff that populated the academy had their own peculiarities and secrets. Thorn knew them all. He’d been observing from the shadows and taking notes. Such knowledge could prove useful, should he ever need to capitalize on it.

  A chilled gust blew across him, tugging at his cape. He let the hood fall away as he positioned the last piece of clothing from the pink bag. His ceramic mask covered one side of his face, the shimmery white of bleached bones, and there was no chance of being seen by anyone anyway. Other than Madame Bouchard and Rune, the occupants of the academy were out all day.

  Bouchard would be oblivious, preoccupied with her gruesome hobby—making amends to animals even in their death, via stitches, stuffing, and glassy eyes. An eccentricity the old woman shared on some level with Father Erik, to Thorn’s grim dismay.

  He tensed, following the path across the footbridge and to the graves. Dirt clods crunched under his boots and his shoulders drooped, heavy beneath the vile obligation he’d been waiting a lifetime to fulfill.

  Standing by a window, I position my third attempt at a letter to Trig and Janine where the dreary gray light filters in, so I can read the closing one last time:

  Well, I should go. I had to stay behind while everyone else went to Paris for a day trip. Not happy about being stuck here, but I’m going to make good use of the time. I want to get out to the garden before it rains.

  Oh . . . and one more thing, could you tell me if there’s any news on Ben? Is he better? Is he talking? The last I heard, he’d been showing signs of waking. Do the doctors still think it was a seizure from a head injury? Four weeks is a long time to be in a coma, right? I should’ve never come on to him after his poor cranium stopped my fall off that ledge. I should’ve insisted he get checked by a doctor right then.

  Please, write back. You’re my only link to all things Americana. Even the food here makes me miss home.

  Viva la hot dogs and hamburgers!

  Rune

  P.S. I miss your faces.

  P.P.S. I took some pics of the academy with my phone. I’ll text them once I get to Paris where there’s service. No kidding, it’s like living in a primeval forest here.

  Satisfied that this note won’t have to join the others in the trash, I fold the paper, slide it into the matching stamped envelope already addressed to Trig, and drop it into the outgoing mail slot in the box next to the main entry door.

  I’m so tired of acting oblivious about Ben, but as much as I trust Janine and Trig—who’ve always accepted my operatic outbursts without judging me—I can’t tell them what r
eally happened at that frat party.

  When I met my two pals in theater during my sophomore year at school, they were both seniors. In spite of our age differences, I was drawn to them because they were outcasts like me. We live in an ultraconservative town. You can’t be a boy who likes boys and designs ladies’ fashions, or a bulimic ballerina whose mom raised money for her college tuition by being an exotic dancer, without the majority of people looking at you through lenses tinged with discomfort and judgment.

  Still, the truth of that night is something even my two best friends wouldn’t understand. Yes, they know why I was drinking at the party . . . that while some of the guests wandered about the deck or splashed in the pool (I’d dressed the part—bikini and swimsuit cover—but hadn’t been brave enough to venture into anything deeper than a wading pool since the age of seven), the college junior who was hosting led others of us to his basement to show off his vintage record player.

  I was fine, listening to big bands from the forties and rock ’n’ roll from the fifties. It was when he dragged out a vinyl of Rigoletto that my world came crashing down. I sprinted for the stairs just as the heroine’s aria erupted, and my fate was sealed.

  Janine was my ride, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. So I drank. A lot. I figured if I drowned the notes in alcohol, I’d be able to prevent them from breathing . . . from surfacing. Unfortunately, I had even less control with three beers in my system. Seated precariously on the second-story balcony’s railing, I slapped my hands to my mouth to keep the song subdued and lost my balance. A hot college guy on the pool deck below broke my fall when I landed on his head.

  He helped me stand. He’d been swimming, and his upper torso sparkled in the twinkling white lights strung around the deck. His auburn hair was wet and mussed, and his blue eyes—slightly glazed as if having trouble focusing—trailed along my bared legs where they stuck out from my cover-up. I recognized the expression. Like I was a piece of meat and he was starving. He staggered a little, but it wasn’t from my crash landing. He was even more wasted than me.

  I’d noticed him once or twice while visiting Janine on campus during her summer session. I knew his name was Ben, and that he didn’t have a girlfriend. I also knew he was a player. But the aria pressed against my sternum and crept into my throat, climbing like bile toward my mouth. So instead of listening to the voice of caution, I threw myself at him to silence my itching vocal cords, to suppress the music burning behind my eyelids in myriad colors.

  I poured all of the emotions boiling in me—all the fear, mortification, passion, and longing—into a hard, demanding kiss that tasted of bitter hops, sweet malt, and musky pheromones.

  It wasn’t my first kiss. I’d gone to junior prom with a sweet, nerdy guy named Tate. We shared a benign closed-mouth peck at my door, when he dropped me home. But it never amounted to anything else.

  My kiss with Ben was different—mouths opening, tongues seeking. I was the instigator, lifting my arms around his neck to push the aria down. Ben groaned—deep, masculine gratification—and his lips felt as if they caught fire. His tongue scalded as it wrestled mine. He dragged me hard against him. The film of chlorinated water between our skin seemed to sizzle, and his chest burned my collarbone.

  We ignored the rap song blaring from the speakers on the balcony, ignored the snickering guests who opened a path so Ben could back us into the empty pool house and slam the door shut. He lowered me onto a pile of damp and musty beach towels on the cement floor—his heavy body straddling me.

  His hands were everywhere. There was nothing sweet or tender driving either of us. It was spontaneous, harsh, lusty, and degrading. I hated how fast we were moving, how out of control we were, and for an instant, I hesitated, until the notes resurfaced. In that muddled, hysterical state, I convinced myself that the humiliation of an impromptu vocal solo would somehow be worse than letting things go too far with a boy I didn’t even know.

  Those are the facts I shared with Janine and Trig.

  What I didn’t share was that just as my cover-up came off, as the kisses grew intense and gasping, Ben’s flavor changed to something singed, sweet, and unnatural—like roasted autumn leaves, sulfur, and copper wrapped in toffee. I devoured the taste, starving for more.

  A fiery sensation soldered Ben’s chest to mine, like someone had poured a pint of gasoline on us and followed it with a lit match. A bright grayish-yellow glow buzzed and ignited at the point of contact, where my bikini-wrapped breasts were flush to his pecs.

  I was so wasted—I can’t be sure I retained every detail. All I do remember—vividly—is that the glow jumped from Ben’s sternum to mine, catching flame to my blood while turning his cold and paling his face to a deathly white. I remember how he gasped for air as he rolled onto his back atop the heap of towels . . . how he clawed at this throat, trying to breathe. I remember screaming when his lips started to turn blue, when the veins in his temples and wrists seemed to sink into his skin, as if being hollowed out from within.

  Forgetting the odd glow within my chest, I stumbled from the pool house and shouted for help. By the time the EMTs arrived, Ben was convulsing, and the heat behind my sternum had snuffed out. But even before it stopped burning, no one had seemed to notice the strange light at my sternum. A few kids did, however, comment on my glowing contacts. I didn’t dare tell them I wasn’t wearing any.

  Instead, I stared at the ground until the warm tingling behind my irises subsided, scared and worried for Ben, yet horrified for myself. Of myself. When the paramedics arrived, no one mentioned anything about my eyes being abnormal. A kind EMT assured me what happened wasn’t my fault, that Ben was having a seizure and I’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I let them believe it, but I knew it was my fault. Because when we were kissing, when he began to thrash for life, I felt stronger and more alive than I ever had. I fed off his lust, and then his terror. And I wanted to keep feeding . . . but somehow, I came back to myself when I saw those blue lips. It was me who broke our connection in that instant.

  If I hadn’t, he’d be dead today.

  Over the past few weeks I’ve tried to convince myself I imagined everything. But I can’t explain away glowing eyes any more than I can the sprained wrist I suffered from the fall—something I was too drunk to notice at the time. If not for me being rushed to the ER alongside Ben in the ambulance, Mom wouldn’t have found out about the party, or my drinking, or my indiscretions with some guy I barely knew.

  And it wasn’t even worth it. In the end, the alcohol didn’t make a dent in my musical compulsions—because it didn’t change who I was. It didn’t fix me. Before Mom arrived to pick me up from the hospital, I’d already serenaded the staff with the aria. After they’d recovered from their awe-struck shock, they applauded then hooked me up to an IV, mistaking my post-performance malaise for dehydration.

  How could they have known I wasn’t thirsty anymore? That I felt satiated and full of life. All because I’d almost drained Ben of his.

  Even worse, how could I not wonder if I was cursed like Grandma had said all along, and that I’d done the same thing to my father years earlier with my demonic gift of song?

  Refusing to wallow in pity—for Ben, Dad, or myself—I go seeking redemption instead. If I can find a tangle of weeds overtaking some flowers and revive their beauty and purity, I can restore my self-worth on some level, and maybe investigate the location of that first gardener sighting almost a week ago.

  I slip into a pair of parchment-thin leather gloves from my winter clothes’ supply, and make my way outside, armed with a stainless- steel food tub, a large spoon and fork, and a serrated pie server from the cafeteria—temporary substitutes for a bucket, shovel, rake, and trowel.

  This morning at breakfast, Aunt Charlotte convinced me to wait until tomorrow, since that’s when Mister Jippetto promised to bring the gardening tools I’d requested last time we spoke. Although her real goal was to convince me to go with her to Versailles. Fortunately, Bouchard ended u
p staying, which seemed to make Aunt Charlotte feel better about leaving me behind. But I’ve changed my mind about waiting to explore the garden. I have to do this today.

  My tank top, leggings, and a flowing chiffon floral rust-print dress, followed with a navy raglan-sleeved cardigan that I knitted a few months ago for autumns in Texas, are more suited for the day trip my classmates took. Still, with the way the sky looks, I can’t waste any time changing, other than my shoes.

  I trudge through the parking lot, careful not to slip on the gravel rolling under my cowboy boots—their soles so worn they’ve lost all traction. When I was small, Dad and I weeded barefoot to keep from crushing the tender plants underneath. As I got older, and had to do things without him, these became my gardening shoes, because the smooth soles protected the leaves and stems.

  Several birds flutter overhead, and I’m relieved to hear them trilling and chirping. I take it as a good omen. Once I reach the yellowed, grassy outskirts of the garden, I’m in awe. At home, my plot of perennials and vegetables is manicured and tamed. There, I’m the conductor.

  Here, I’m the audience.

  Nature provides the performers—spicing every inhalation with floral perfumes, rotted wood, moldy leaves, and soil. Everything from shrubs and brambles to vines and weeds encompasses the sprawling landscape, as high as my knees on either side of the cobblestone path. In the distance, crimson rose bushes that rise to my chest bow to the rhythm of rain-scented gusts, like actors answering an encore. Fall flowers burst up from the graves of dead summer blooms, reluctant to shed their costumes of purples, oranges, golds, and blues, in spite of how garish they are against the withering landscape.

  Clouds swirl in a grayish mass, dimming the light. A thin film of fog clings to the plants and to my face like ethereal cobwebs. The sun has always restored me when I’m tired, sad, or unsettled. I could’ve used some of that positivity today.