The Rose Master

by Valentina Cano

  Lord Grey turned back to the creature I still couldn’t see, facing it even as its growls sent chills down my spine. He lifted his arms high above his head and held them there.

  I began to hear gasps and the screams of splitting wood. Warmth spread out around me, rising to a boil, morphing the air before my eyes into a shimmering curtain.

  Lord Grey’s voice sliced through the sudden noise, power coiled in his every syllable.

  “Get thee gone!” he screamed and slammed his arms down to his side.

  All air left the room as the explosion ripped through it. I was thrown backward against the wall, screams rising from all around me to an unbearable level. I covered my head as objects crashed on top of me, burying me under their painful weight, and waited for the end, whatever that might mean.

  Seconds, minutes, or even hours later, I became aware that the screams had stopped, and that nothing was collapsing on me anymore. Shifting my arms, I allowed the rubble that covered me to slide off my body. My limbs ached, but I wasn’t bleeding, not that I could see, at least.

  The room, however, was scored with red. Blood covered the floorboards, glittering like ink in the light that had suddenly returned, pooling around each body.

  Oh, Lord, the bodies!

  Every man who’d been in the room was dead. The Master, Allister, all the uninitiated. Their bodies lay in the most impossible of angles, their flesh torn at the most vicious places.

  Lord Grey lay in the middle of the circle, immobile.

  “Sir,” I whispered and scrambled toward him. “Sir!”

  But I was being pulled backward even as my hands dug into the boards to hold on to this moment. I needed to see what was going to happen to him, what would happen to all these people, but it was already rushing away from me, the room changing.

  I gasped as Rosewood’s sitting room appeared before me, Lord Grey looking thinner than ever, his eyes unrecognizable as he paced back and forth.

  “You need help, August,” his father said. “You need to sleep. To see a doctor. You haven’t rested for a moment since you’ve returned. What happened in London, son?”

  “Leave me alone! Just leave me be!”

  The memories shifted faster now, faster than I could grasp.

  Lord Grey pacing for hours in his chambers, his hands trembling with energy, his eyes half-mad with thoughts too dark to begin to guess at; Ms. Simple appearing, pushing plates of food toward him, picking them up untouched hours later; Lady Grey, the woman I’d seen in lavender, coughing her way to the grave as her son looked on from the pool of shadows in which he lived; Lord Grey ripping a letter to shreds while his father watched, the only visible words left, Lilly Bellingham; Lord Grey turning to books, thick tomes of unfamiliar symbols opening up before him, his hands landing on pages at random, calling out words as if they were his salvation; creatures rising from nothing, from air, objects appearing and disappearing, fires started and snuffed out with a single glance from feverish eyes.

  Just as I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand any more, the flashes stopped.

  Lord Grey sat in his room with a book opened before him.

  “Sir, please,” I said just as he opened his own mouth. A string of complicated, twisted syllables left his lips.

  I knew what had happened as soon as the cold entered the room. I recognized the chill, the kind that invaded every piece of flesh it touched. It was the same chill I’d been fighting since I’d stepped foot in Rosewood Manor.

  It had no real shape, shifting between male and female, animal and human, visible and invisible without care. Lord Grey watched it with a thin smile on his face.

  “Do you think you’re strong enough to kill me?” he asked. “I welcome your attempts.” He opened his thin arms and closed his eyes. “No? Well, that is a shame.” He brought his arms down as he had in the order’s room, and I braced myself for another disaster.

  Nothing happened.

  The creature laughed. I gasped at the familiar sound, feeling the hairs on my arms prickling with fear.

  “Oh, August, my boy, you think I’ll make it so simple for you? No. You did not pay attention in class, it seems. Your skills are not enough. They will never be enough.”

  With that, the creature lunged at him and lifted him off the floor.

  “And do you know why, dear August?” It growled softly. “Because I am a part of you. I will feed off you until the day you die, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

  It released its grip and Lord Grey crashed to the floor.

  I gasped as the round mirror disappeared from before me.

  “Take a moment, Anne. It was a lot of information for you to process, but it’s better to see it all at once. There is just a bit more I’d like you to understand, but I thought it best to let you come back to the present for a moment.”

  Words had abandoned me. My head throbbed with everything I’d seen and felt, with everything the man sitting in front of me had lived through. I opened my mouth to speak, but my mouth was so dry I had to clear it a handful of times before anything but a croak came out.

  “It can’t be true, sir,” I said.

  “I can assure you, it is. All of it.”

  I rubbed a hand across my aching forehead. “Magic exists? Demons and creatures, it’s all real, sir?” He nodded. “That’s what haunting this house?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But, sir, you were able to . . . kill the demon the order conjured up.”

  “The term is ‘banish.’”

  “Banish, then, sir. You were able to do so then, why can’t you with this one? Is it because of what the creature said, that it is a part of you, sir?”

  Lord Grey looked away. “Partly. The creature I conjured is a wraith, a powerful being, much more powerful than the demon the order set loose against me. It feeds off my energy, making it impossible for me to banish it on my own. And there is one other thing I need to know before I can attempt to defeat it: who its master is.”

  “But sir, if you called it up, shouldn’t it serve you? Shouldn’t you be its master?”

  Lord Grey’s eyes pierced mine. “That’s the very question I’ve asked myself over and over since all of this began. You see, demons dwell in an in-between space that even magicians know nothing about. They are wild and untrained, but can be called up for short amounts of time to perform specific orders, as the one the Master raised against me was. It was no more than an animal, a large, powerful one, to be sure, but an animal nonetheless. Wraiths, however, roam our world, doing the bidding of their human masters. They are intelligent, familiar with our ways, able to manipulate us with one word. These creatures cannot just appear unbidden. That means someone conjured it before I did, since it is painfully obvious it does not recognize my authority. And yet, it came when I called it. A demon who is already bound to a human will not obey another’s call unless it’s ordered to do so. And since I do not know whom it serves, I cannot fully defeat it. All I would manage to do would be to cast it out for a while, but it would return, twice as strong.”

  “Do you have no suspicions as to who could have conjured it, sir?”

  “Of course. The Master is my first choice; he was powerful enough to perform the conjuration, but as soon as he breathed his last in that room with the rest of the Brothers, his bond with the wraith would have cracked in two. Besides, Anne, you must remember that I called its name at random. No one sent it here. Its master could be anywhere in the world.”

  I frowned. This was all so confusing. Taking a breath, I steered Lord Grey back to the past, to what he did know. “And your father, sir? What happened to him?”

  “He drowned. In the very fountain where you almost lost your life, Anne. He wasn’t supposed to touch it, no human was, and he knew it all too well. The fountain was a kind of truce the wraith established with me, its home, of sorts. It promised not to harm the people I cared about, drawing its energy only from me and the fountain, as long as no one touched the black monstrosity.�
�� He sighed. “I did my best to warn them all, to keep them safe. You saw the symbols on the hall stones, all of them stamped there by my magic to offer what little protection I could grant. The mirror in the dining room, the same. But all my efforts were like holding a cloth napkin to stave off a thunderstorm. The wraith broke its promise and attacked my father as he sat in a drunken stupor, clawed at him in a frenzy of blades until it forced him out of the manor and into the surrounding woods.”

  My heart grew a layer of ice. “Sir, where was your father sitting when the attack began?”

  “In the armchair in the sitting room, why?”

  “I think I saw the marks.”

  He stopped moving. “You saw the claw marks.”

  I nodded. “As I was cleaning, sir.”

  His shoulders twitched in a shiver. “Yes, of course. That is why I keep the sheets on the furniture. Unpleasant, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is, sir.”

  “My father found himself at the foot of the fountain.” Lord Grey’s voice had thinned and paled. “Who knows what happened? Perhaps he staggered and reached for support, perhaps he was pushed. I found him later that day, bloated with water, his eyes reflecting the black marble underneath their dead gaze. That was almost six years ago.”

  I swallowed. “Sir, please forgive my presumption, but why have you all remained here? Surely leaving would have ended the nightmare,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No, I cannot leave. I am not allowed off the grounds.”

  “But Ms. Simple, Mr. Keery, and Dora? Why can’t they leave?”

  “The wraith does not allow the women off the grounds. They know too much already. Mr. Keery, though . . . you’ve seen what he’s like. He is not a free man. The creature has sunk its claws deeply into him.”

  “But sir, how can it prevent you all from leaving?”

  He sighed in irritation. “I’m not lying to you, Anne. You’ve felt it yourself when it attacked you on the stairs. If the creature wanted to stop us, to kill us even, it would.”

  “But to live in this fear . . .”

  I couldn’t even imagine waking to the seeping cold day after day for years. I’d only been in the manor a few weeks, and I feared I would never feel warm again.

  “It was never quite this horrible. We had to watch our words and remain in the house, but for the most part, the five of us managed. That’s why I wrote to Lady Caldwell to request a maid. She was the only one I still had a tepid contact with in the outside world. Things had quieted down into a sort of routine, so I could consider hiring someone to help Ms. Simple and Dora. I was wrong, as I tend to be when it comes to this creature.

  “The day the letter arrived announcing your appointment, the cook was dragged from her bed and clawed to unconsciousness. I should have realized the danger, I should have sent a note immediately to prevent you from coming, but I didn’t. I sent the coach three weeks later instead, to scoop you out of safety and into this frozen nightmare.”

  I looked at Lord Grey’s face, at the youth and strength that lay hidden beneath layers of ashen worry and pale guilt.

  “Sir, you couldn’t have known.”

  His lips curled. “Right. That the wraith allowed the coach to fetch you should have been warning enough. It wanted you here, within its reach.”

  There was a moment of heavy silence before a thought made me speak.

  “Sir, do you think it would have behaved this way with anyone who had taken my place, or is it me in particular who’s causing all these tantrums?”

  A genuine smile filled his face. “Tantrums. I like that, that’s exactly what they are.” He placed a hand in one of his pockets and brought out the smoky crystal I’d retrieved from under the bookshelf. He raised it to my eyes.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “A crystal, sir.”

  “Do you know what it’s for?”

  “No, sir.”

  He shifted it, so the light from one of the lamps could play against its surface.

  “This is a type of container. It stored energy so it could be accessed in a hurry. A last resort for an exhausted magician. I have two or three of these lying about, but I’d lost sight of this one until you found it . . . and broke it.”

  “Sir, honest, I didn’t—”

  “You didn’t mean to do it, Anne, but you did. Just by touching it.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “It’s not an easy thing to explain. I’d never encountered it myself, although, I have heard about it. I began to suspect when the mirror in the dining room reacted with such violence to your touch.”

  “What? What did you suspect?”

  “That you were not normal. That there was a seed of power in you, waiting to crack through its casing. And then the crystal proved it. Let me explain: a regular person would have picked it up without damage to herself or to the crystal, and neither of them would have been the worse for wear. If a magician held it, her energy would substitute the one already inside, but the crystal would not have been damaged. When you touched it, however, you erased the energy that slept inside it. You smothered it, like an errant fire. The crystal is worthless now.”

  Somewhere deep inside me, a chime rang, a note of dawning comprehension. I closed my eyes and listened.

  “Anne,” Lord Grey continued, “you are something different. A rare being, even rarer than a magician. You are the opposite—you are a Grounder.”

  I inhaled deeply. “A what, sir?”

  “A Grounder. You harness energy and neutralize it. I think you have an inkling of what I’m talking about.”

  “But, sir, that’s absurd. I’ve never done anything special, nothing that was not normal.”

  He leaned forward, his hands on the chair in front of him, and held my eyes. “Nothing strange has ever happened to you?”

  I opened my mouth to assure him of that, but a vision of black feathers on snow, of translucent wings collapsing in shimmering heaps filled my eyes.

  “Some birds . . . fell . . . around me. And moths.” I gripped my trembling hands together.

  “Ah,” Lord Grey said. “You erased their power to fly.”

  “But I did nothing to cause it! I didn’t even realize what was happening!”

  “It doesn’t matter. Your power is untrained, like mine was, and it strikes out as it wishes, with or without your consent.”

  “But that happened recently, I’d never experienced it before.”

  “Our powers develop as they like, when they like. It’s possible that yours lay curled inside you, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Waiting until you were ready to accept them and use them as you should.”

  And the right moment had been while I cleared snow in Caldwell House’s courtyard? No, perhaps whatever abilities I possessed had known I’d be sent here, to Rosewood. The thought made my stomach churn.

  “What you are is also why my skin burns your own, you know. We are true opposites.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I don’t know what to do with any of it, sir.”

  “You’ll learn to wield the power soon enough.”

  “I don’t want to learn. I want to leave it alone.”

  “Anne, have you heard nothing of what I’ve shared with you?”

  I huffed. “I’ve heard plenty. I think you are not the best example to follow.”

  My eyes widened as the words left my mouth. Bugger.

  Lord Grey turned his head and eyed me like a suspicious lizard.

  “Hmm. Good thing I need you.”

  My voice was dry. “Need me, sir? Why?”

  “You’re going to help me banish this wraith.”

  sixteen

  He refused to say anything else on the subject.

  “I’m exhausted, Anne, and by the looks of those charming bruises under your eyes, I suspect you are also. I think we should both try to get some rest.”

  I stood. A quake of dizziness shook me, and I grabbed on to the chair behind me. Lord Grey watched me with narr
owed eyes, but did not attempt to help me. It was irritating to admit he was right; if I didn’t sink down into sleep I would not make it through whatever the day’s long hours held in store.

  “Go rest, Anne. The last thing I need is you collapsing.”

  “Yes, sir. Is my room safe? I’ve been bolting the door at night, but I’m not sure that’s enough.”

  “No, it’s not enough, but I doubt anything will bother you. The creature expended a large amount of energy bullying me around last night, and it has probably retreated to its watery bed to regain its powers. You’ll be safe, Anne,” he said as I stepped over the room’s threshold. “But, just in case, if anything happens, scream. Loudly.”

  He clicked the door closed behind me before I could utter another word.

  Everything looked different in the pale morning light. I shook my head, asking myself if I truly believed all Lord Grey had said. My head fought against it. But I had experienced things I couldn’t explain. I had seen and heard things that weren’t there, and I’d been attacked by hands I couldn’t touch, let alone remove. Whether I liked it or not, doubt was falling away, layer by layer.

  As I placed my feet on the main hall’s stone tiles, I traced their intricate designs with my eyes, so delicate, so subtle. I recalled how they had wriggled like worms under my hands.

  “I mean you no harm,” I whispered.

  I passed the dining room, but retraced my steps and entered, turning toward the corner where the mirror hung suspended like a sheet of water. My hands tingled as I neared it, my eyes steady on my own reflection.

  What lay coiled inside me that could make the glass strike out like a cornered animal? Where could it have come from? Not from my mother, or at least, not that I knew about, and certainly not from my father. But Lord Grey had also seemed to have no extending branch of magical ancestors. Perhaps he was right, it was just a talent handed out as randomly as blue eyes or red hair. In all honesty, I could have done without it. So far, all my wondrous power had done was antagonize inanimate objects, almost get me killed twice, and make a wraith long for my quick demise.