RoseBlood

by Howard, A. G.

  With a touch that potent, I wonder what his kiss will be like?

  Diable and I pass room after room on the other side of the mirrored walls, but I don’t bother looking in this time. I’m too preoccupied, too confused, too . . . resonant.

  There’s no other way to describe how my body feels—pulsing, glowing, an ember of flame wrapped in song. The moment Etalon joined our hands with that ribbon, we became harmony personified—musical notes that could not only be heard, but seen, smelled, felt, and tasted. At first, I’d been drunk on it. With so many sensations to absorb at once, my nervous system dulled to cushion me.

  But now, wide-awake and sober, everything is radiant and vivid and thunderous. Our shared life-force rocks like a lightning storm of melody: reverberating inside my chest, vibrating through the tributaries of my veins, echoing in depths I never knew were silent . . . flooding hollows I never knew existed.

  We’re destined to be lovers, Rune.

  The power of that truth levels me, unbalances me. That he’s been trying to find me, just like I have him, although I never knew what I was looking for, or how much I missed him until this moment. Yet he’s missed me for so long. And now, for us to finally be here together, he has to be just as leveled and unbalanced as I am. It’s that knowledge that quiets my racing heart and calms my trembling hands, in spite of the monumental weight his words carry.

  Everything he said is a fact. I believe it. Not just because of the red, winding imprint scintillating and secure on my wrist and arm, or the green electrical sparks that bridge our hearts when we touch. I believe it because looking at Etalon and seeing into his soul is like looking into my own. And I’m positive it’s the same for him.

  I don’t have experience with romantic love, but this stretches beyond that. What I feel for him penetrates deeper than emotions or desire, deeper than tissue, bone, or marrow—an astounding, wondrous, and terrifying consumption of my entire being that is also somehow the summation of who I am.

  Twin flames.

  I settle the key atop my sweater as Diable and I reach the stairs’ end, ready to leave behind the hidden passage, along with my self-pity. I need to brainstorm how to get myself to Versailles in the morning. It’s time to end this curse that has darkened every corridor of my existence up till now, so I can make peace with who and what I truly am, and walk the halls of something new and bright—hand-in-hand with Etalon.

  Cautious, I ease open the secret door. Diable and I creep into the grand foyer. In the deafening silence, the squeak of the mirror’s hinges seems to reach all the way to the spiraling ceiling, sending nervous shudders down my spine. I hold my breath. Hearing nothing in response, I shut the mirrored panel and tiptoe toward my dorm room with Diable jingling at my heels.

  Moonlight traces the floor and bounces off the reflective walls—silvery-blue luminaries that paint my skin as I reach the Red Death phantom cutout standing beside the stairs. I stop there, remembering Etalon’s warning: You’re not safe up here. And his reaction at the rave club in the elevator . . . when he told me the Phantom couldn’t know I was gone, that his wrath would follow.

  A chill drizzles down my spine. It’s the Phantom who’s a threat to us both. That’s what Etalon is afraid to say aloud. But why is he in danger, too, if they’re family? Maybe the same reason I’ve been in danger from mine. And somehow, it’s all tied to Dad’s violin.

  The reminder of my trip to Versailles sets my nerves on edge even more.

  In the recesses of my mind, the Phantom’s mesmerizing operatic performance at the club reawakens and unfurls, elemental and sylphlike. With Etalon’s guidance, I’d suppressed that bewitching song, but I didn’t kill it. Now, the heavenly notes compel me to reach toward the cutout’s deathly white, skeletal mask. At the instant of contact, an icy splash of dread begins at my fingertips and frosts my body, threatening to freeze the symphonic flames Etalon so masterfully stoked in my blood.

  I jerk back. The Phantom’s voice fades, but I still feel it lingering at the back of my skull . . . cold, coiled, and waiting to strike again.

  A sudden rustle alerts me to someone hidden in the shadows on the stairway behind the cutout. My heart pounds when Diable hisses at my feet. I’m afraid to budge, the hair on my neck stiffening.

  An icy grip on my shoulder from behind makes me drop my tote and sends me twirling around to face a snake’s gaping mouth only inches from my nose. I yelp as Diable leaps up, claws digging into the olive scales. He knocks the serpent to the floor and a delicate clatter of metal pins follows.

  “Fichu cat!” Madame Bouchard’s pinched and made-up face leans into the moonlight, ghastly as a specter. “What are you standing there for?” She snarls my direction. “Help me salvage Franco!”

  I expel a relieved breath to find Diable’s victim is Bouchard’s latest dead-pet project. Serves her right for waving Franco in front of me. My guardian kitty will be getting an extra bowl of cream tomorrow.

  I kneel beside the music teacher, hands shaking as I concentrate on gathering the pins she dropped.

  “Oiseau chanteur,” she snips. “Imagine my surprise, to find you wandering the foyer an hour after lights-out. This should be enough to disqualify you from the role you won today.” There’s no missing the glee in her voice.

  Dropping the pins into a plastic container, I debate saying something snarky to ensure I’m booted out now that Audrey has the part of understudy. But it’s possible the lead role would buoy back to Kat since auditions were less than twelve hours ago. I have to tough it out until dress rehearsals in the late spring, so Kat has no chance of reprisal.

  “I—I was feeling nauseous. I just came back from the bathroom.” I drag my tote back into place on my shoulder, keeping my eyes averted, concerned they might still be aglow like Etalon’s were when I left the roof.

  Bouchard folds her limp, partially stuffed snake over her arm. “Hmmm. There is something decidedly flushed about your complexion tonight. Come here, into the moonlight.” She yanks me toward the windows. Diable follows, spitting at the snake’s dragging tail. “Faire taire, rancid feline,” she scolds.

  Diable claws at her ankles until she drops the snake. It glides to the floor—a bone-curdling whisper of scales on marble. The cat attacks the dead reptile, leaving me to my face-off with the music teacher who no longer seems to care about her precious Franco.

  Her clammy hand cups my chin and forces my gaze up. Already powder-sheen pale, she drains to almost transparent. “Non, non, non. I’ve seen these eyes before.” Her aura shifts from a stubborn brown to the grayish yellow of trepidation. “She’s going to want to know about this.” Her last statement carries a sour whiff of the coffee she must’ve been drinking while in her workshop.

  I try to break free. Bouchard struggles against me, fingernails digging into my skin through the weave of my sweater’s collar. Her thumb catches on the roof key’s chain, breaking it. It drops to my feet. Before I can retrieve it, there’s a rustle again on the stairs, close to the second flight.

  Bouchard trains a glare toward the noise. Panic lines her forehead. Shooing Diable aside with her pointy shoes, she snarls. “Come, wretched child. You should’ve listened to me from the beginning. You’re endangering others as much as yourself by being here.”

  We head toward the teachers’ dorms and understanding slams into me. Aunt Charlotte’s the one whose glimmering eyes Bouchard has seen. Somehow, she’s been hiding them. She’s the one who’ll want to know about my awakening because I’m like her now.

  The Bride of Frankenstein has been working with my aunt all along, to chase me away. They both want me gone, maybe as much as Grandma did.

  Other than dropping my tote like a lonely, pitiful bread crumb for someone to find should I go missing, I don’t even attempt to escape as Bouchard jerks me behind her. Where would I go?

  Diable falls into step close at my heels—my knight in woolen armor.

  In a matter of minutes, I’ll have those answers Etalon needed. But there’s
a brand-new question scratching at my psyche that I would’ve never thought to ask when I first arrived at RoseBlood six weeks ago:

  Will I live to relay everything I’m about to find out?

  21

  BOOK OF BLOOD

  “Everybody is a book of blood . . .”

  Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes One to Three

  I’m strangely calm by the time we reach Aunt Charlotte’s room and Bouchard knocks almost reluctantly on her door. I’ve remembered what Etalon said about my aunt not being “all bad.” He wouldn’t have sent me her way unless he knew I’d be safe.

  He knows her secrets, and that she’s one of us. I suspected it for an instant once I realized the deviation originated on Dad’s side of the family, but it seemed so far-fetched. The door cracks open and Aunt Charlotte peers out with one arm behind her back, white braids piled high on her head and a terrycloth robe wrapped around her dancer’s frame. Taking one look at my eyes, she ushers me and Bouchard across the threshold before shutting us all in.

  I cast a quick glance around the room. It’s designed just like mine—spiraling mini-stairway and loft, antechamber bed with a vent in the wall, zero windows. Instead of violet light, the soft amber glow of a floor lamp casts long shadows across her décor: black-and-white posters of stage productions and hooks holding ballerina shoes of various sizes from different times in her life—details that seem carefully staged, knowing what I know now.

  After that glimpse, I stare directly at my aunt, on the chance Etalon’s wrong. If so, she’s going to have to hurt me with my mom’s and her brother’s likenesses staring back—damning her.

  Sighing, she draws out her hidden arm and gestures with an e-cig toward the chaise lounge. I relax my shoulders a fraction as I plop down and Diable leaps up into my lap.

  “Françoise.” Aunt Charlotte aims a grimace at Bouchard. Her voice is tinny, as if she’s speaking through a metal pipe. “How did this come about? Did you catch her feeding?”

  Bouchard snatches the cigarette and leans against an armoire to sip the vapor. The scent of cloves drifts over to me. “She was meandering around the foyer, already looking like that. Most likely she siphoned off one of the boys as they slept.”

  “I would never,” I say, surprised by my security in that knowledge. Not just because I’m no longer hungry after being with Etalon, but because I’m aware of what I’m capable of now, and that I control it, which has nothing to do with our twin flame connection. It’s because I make my own conscious choices. I can live with this and learn to blend in. My aunt is proof of that.

  “Whatever the case,” Bouchard responds to my denial but keeps her gaze trained on Aunt Charlotte. “She’s a danger to the other students now, and to our secrets. She’s cured, yes? So we should put her on the next plane back to the States.”

  My aunt tightens the belt at her waist. “There are things she needs to understand first. Now that—”

  “Now that what?” I screech, causing Diable to growl my direction; it’s mostly for show, because his weight continues to warm my thighs. “Now that I know I’m a vampire like you?”

  Bouchard slants her gaze to the vent over my aunt’s bed then shushes me, releasing a pouf of scented white fog.

  I calm myself by plaiting my hair to a side braid. I’m not sure how the rage bubbled up so fast. But it’s long overdue. “Why did you go to such lengths to scare me away?” I ask, careful to keep my voice low.

  Aunt Charlotte and Bouchard exchange glances.

  “I didn’t agree with your grand-mère’s decision to bring you to RoseBlood,” my aunt answers. “But I’d made a promise to at least try. Still . . . I wasn’t convinced her strategy would have the desired results. I was worried it was a trap.”

  Bouchard clears her throat.

  My aunt rolls her eyes. “We were both worried of that.”

  I crinkle my forehead. “So . . . you tore my clothes and killed that poor bird to save me from another of Grandma’s psycho vendettas?” My stomach turns, remembering the crow’s greasy, clumped feathers.

  “Not exactly.” Aunt Charlotte moves closer to the lamp. Her eyes come to vivid clarity in the light, glimmering like Etalon’s when energy is brewing beneath the surface. Does she absorb it from the cigarettes somehow? Her irises are brown but fringed in gold. They’ve always been normal behind her glasses . . . hazel like Dad’s.

  Sunny mentioned my aunt having boxes of contacts stashed with her cigarettes. I glance over where Bouchard studies her e-cig from end to end, far too comfortable propped next to the armoire.

  The armoire where my aunt stores everything.

  I jump up and Diable grumbles as he’s spilled onto the floor. I rush to the other end of the room. Bouchard tries to block me, but I slap the cigarette from her hand, throwing her off balance.

  I force open the doors, and there they are. Disposable colored contacts: hazel brown. Aunt Charlotte’s camouflage.

  It appears we each have to wear some form of mask to fit into this world. Just like Etalon and the Phantom.

  “It’s good that you know at last. You won’t feel so alone now.” Aunt Charlotte’s warm hand clasps my shoulder gently. “I’ve wanted to tell you for years. But your grand-mère wouldn’t allow it. She feared it would endanger your mother, and she’d made a promise to your father to protect both of you at all costs. I didn’t realize you’d had your awakening, or I would’ve told you, regardless.” I start to shake her off, but her gentle touch reminds me of Mom’s, and I surrender to the sensation. “Sweet child, please be assured: Where your grand-mère is concerned, there’s never been a vendetta. It’s always been a rescue attempt. However warped.”

  I turn to her then. “What . . . drowning . . . catching fire to—how’s . . . rescue? Bird killer!” I bark the accusation to mock her like her patronizing explanation has mocked me.

  Aunt Charlotte shakes her head sadly. “I didn’t kill that bird. I simply used its corpse. Françoise . . . she’s Death’s handyman.”

  Bouchard huffs as she picks up the e-cig glowing at her feet. “A crow that has the voice of a kitten is an abomination. As is a viperine snake with a growl like a wolf. I was trying to save those creatures.”

  My chin drops.

  “Pssshhh.” Aunt Charlotte waves a hand. “I’ve heard it all before. Each fresh animal hanging in your museum of atrocities. All of them an abomination that needed redemption at your scalpel’s blade. Perhaps, had you not dropped out of vet school, you would’ve learned how to operate successfully.”

  “So . . . the rumors are true?” I ask with a stiff tongue. “About the animals in the forest?” But I don’t get an answer. Bouchard and my aunt are too engrossed in their bickering. The more I listen, the more it’s apparent how long they’ve known each other, and how Bouchard seems to be accountable to my aunt. Or at the very least, an ally.

  “No way,” I say. “She’s your familiar. People can be familiars, right?”

  They both stop talking at once.

  “Oh, look, our newly awakened ingénue thinks she’s figured it all out.” Bouchard narrows her beady blue eyes, deepening the web of wrinkles around them. “You’re only halfway there, tripe.” She points the e-cig my direction. “I’m not a familiar. I’m family. A second cousin twice removed, one generation older than you.”

  An unexpected snort bursts from my mouth. “Make that three or four generations, Lady Methuselah.” I’m not intimidated anymore. After everything she’s put me through while I’ve been here, I’m ready for a fight. And now that we’re on familial ground, I have nothing holding me back.

  Bouchard curses in French and starts toward me. I step up to meet her halfway. Diable hisses from the chaise across the room as Aunt Charlotte steps between us.

  “C’est assez!” She grabs her cigarette from Bouchard and pokes a finger into her chest. “I’m over being patient with you. Yes, yours is a recessive gene; yes, the power passed you by. Stop taking your jealousy out on Rune. Remember what I can do
to you, should I decide I no longer care to tolerate your negative energy.” She opens the door to show our bony second cousin out.

  Bouchard twists around and shoves her pointed toe over the threshold, preventing Aunt Charlotte from closing it.

  “Oh, you don’t believe I’ll do it?” my aunt asks her on a sinister murmur. She looks to the left of the door, where a clock hangs on the wall. “Hmmm. A quarter to eleven. I suppose I could have my midnight snack early. Cynicism tastes like flat ginger ale and cold peppermint tea, two of my favorite flavors. Rune, you’ll join me, won’t you? Bon appétit.” She licks her lips and her eyes flash.

  Bouchard shrinks back and her foot slips free.

  “Off to bed then. And sweet dreams, dear cousin.” Aunt Charlotte closes the door.

  I stand there in awe of the energy-sucking aunt I’m only starting to know, too tense and confused to move.

  “Sit.” She commands.

  An ember of rebellion flashes to life, but she inferred she wants to give me answers. I’m not about to jinx that.

  I take my seat. Diable has forgiven me for dropping him, and curls into my lap again. In all these weeks he’s been my companion, he hasn’t let me pet him, but he’s been more attentive tonight than ever. I’m guessing Etalon gave him very strict instructions. Testing my theory, I stroke his back. He arches his spine toward my palm, a request for more. Despite looking like an abrasive steel-wool cleaning pad, he’s plush, thick, and so warm.

  As I continue to caress his fur, he purrs and squeezes his eyes to blissful slits, his peaceful energy soothing me enough that I find my voice again. “Dad’s violin,” I say to my aunt, massaging the downy skin between the cat’s bat-like ears. His front claws knead my thighs. “Everything is tied to it.”

  “Who told you that?” Aunt Charlotte asks, frowning. She sets her e-cig aside, waiting.