The Roses Academy- the Entire Collection

by Tara Brown

  “Henry is the world ending?”

  He nods and holds his hand out farther. He’s offering me sanctuary.

  I point back. “Can I bring Gwen?”

  He nods again. His bowler hat makes me smile now. I call up the staircase, “GWEN!”

  She comes running, bounding down the stairs. “Touch Henry’s hand. We gotta bounce.” She takes it, not knowing I am taking her somewhere she probably won’t want to go. I just can’t lose her. Henry’s travel is delicate, like a butterfly’s form of travel. When we get to the place we’re going I am stunned. Gwen stumbles forward. “What the hell?”

  Henry leads us into the garden city. It is the strangest thing I have ever seen. Em and Maria come running up to me. They’re young again. They hug me, squealing and crying out. They’re pointing to Daddy and Greg and Em’s kids.

  Everyone is young or healthy. I don't know.

  Gwen gapes up at the sunshine. She isn’t burning up. “Lorelei, why am I not burning? I can feel the heat but it’s soothing.”

  Oh God.

  Henry has killed us and taken us to Heaven.

  The city is small. All houses and buildings are white. There are no roads, only pathways and gardens and trees for as far as the eye can see. The breeze is soft and dry. The city is surrounded by a giant meadow. It really is the most spectacular thing I have ever seen.

  Henry smiles at me, whispering in my mind with his. Garden of Eden.

  I turn and look at Maria and Em.

  He smiles sweetly. Couldn't leave them to burn, not leave them again.

  I understand but I don't. How are we here? Why are we here?

  Henry runs his hands down my face, showing me the world. There is a great battle. A battle Lorri clearly never told me about. The battle ends and Lorri stands on some crazy ruins, screaming it looks like. She breaks one of the American Roses necks and turns her into something with wings. Then she turns every one of the Roses from Lydia’s house. They all have wings. Even the one with red hair, the one Marcus ended up falling in love with. She is a siren and he couldn't help himself, apparently. I don't like thinking about it or talking about it.

  I don't know what to say.

  I’m hurt Lorri didn't want me there. I thought we were friends. I see Landry die in the fighting. My heart aches for Gwen. Henry shows me the world, images from everywhere. There is fighting and starving and fires. Disparity and bad things are everywhere.

  When he pulls back, he looks at me as if to say ‘see?’ but I don't. I see a world in need. “I have to go back. I can’t leave them like that. The world isn’t ending, it's changing. I have to fight for the good guys. If I don't have that I have nothing.”

  He holds his hands at my family but I shake my head.

  “I am more than just the girl I once was. I have to fight. I don't know why Lorri didn't want me to fight, why she made you bring me here while all of that was going on, but I need to fight with them.”

  He acts scared. That makes me think I’m probably going to die. But I don't care. I have to try and be part of the solution and be the girl I have become. I am a fighter. I don’t hide and cower anymore. I’m no longer frozen in terror when the icy whispers of the dead graze my lips. Now I embrace the icy and the dead.

  “I have to go back. Take care of our family.”

  He closes his eyes.

  Gwen takes my hand in hers. “We both go back. As much as the sun feels amazing, I can’t hide here while the world dies.”

  She is going to know Landry is dead in a moment. I hate that.

  I don't know how much time passed while we’ve been here. It feels like a minute but I think it’s been longer. More like months maybe.

  Henry blows flower petals in our faces and suddenly we are standing outside some house I’ve never seen before. The land is special, like Lydia’s. We’re safe on it. The air shimmers with an old magic.

  “Can you tell me what the hell’s going on?” Gwen asks softly. I place my hands on her face and show her everything Henry just showed me. Even Landry.

  Her eyes close and tears leak from them. “No.”

  “I’m so sorry. The fight just got real, Gwen.”

  “Horribly real.” She sobs and steps back. “I need a minute.”

  “Stay on this property, it’s blessed. I can feel it.”

  She nods and turns, walking to the tree line.

  I turn and go into the house to face whatever may come in the final days of the world.

  When I get inside I see him first. He looks like shit. Scary shit. He’s in a robe and he looks like he smells real bad. His eyes flicker to me, standing in the doorway. He gazes down at his robe and nods. “You can’t call first, love? Let a man get some pants on.”

  A chubby kid on the couch, playing Xbox mutters, “Dude, you don't even own pants, I don't think.”

  “NO ONE ASKED YOU, DANNY!” Marcus snaps at the little boy.

  “Don’t yell at children.” I walk over and grab him by the arm, dragging Marcus, in his stinky robe and all, down the hall. I push him to the first bathroom I find and haul him into the shower. I turn it on and tear the robe off.

  He stands under the water, filled with misery. I can smell it on him. Finally, he speaks, “I miss you so much I think I see you sometimes and then I realize it’s not real, and my heart breaks all over again.” His voice is flat.

  “Is that how you ended up with the redhead? You thought she was me and fell on her?”

  “She made me feel. It was the only way to feel the full loss of you.”

  I reach in and slap him hard across the cheek.

  He leans against the wall of the shower and closes his eyes. “If you have figured out how to kill me, can you just do it and end the misery I am stuck in?”

  “No. You have a heart now. Henry showed me. You told me when I was ready to love to let you know. Well, I’m ready.” I step into the shower with him and lay my head on his chest. “Marcus, we are a match. We are epic. We can do this all wrong a thousand times, but we only have to do it right once to make it.”

  He kisses my head and shows me everything. I see it all. I see the way he got addicted to her and she made him feel. It makes me gag.

  I see the way he used her to feel me.

  But for every image of her there are two of me. I see him creeping and stalking me, a thousand images of him being a complete idiot. But then I see the ones I need to. I see the images of me that make him act like the idiot. He sees me laughing and kissing someone else. He sees me riding in a car with another man. He sees me being happy without him. Each moment drives him crazier.

  I wrap myself around him and shake my head. “Want to try at getting it right this one time before we die with the rest of the world?”

  He nods and kisses my head, trembling and clinging to me as he whispers, “Please be real. Just let this one be real and not a cruel joke.”

  I lift my face and rub my hand on the scruff of his cheeks. “If it is a cruel joke then I am being fooled too, so it doesn't matter. We’re together.”

  He sniffles and lets the water wash his one tear away. “I don't deserve it but I am going to ask anyway. Please don't leave me again.”

  I cup his face and press my lips into his. “Burn the robe and we will talk.”

  “Deal.”

  I close my eyes and let the water wash us both clean. “We have done it wrong a thousand times and I have a bad feeling we are out of times to try. So we are either going to get it right or die trying.”

  He kisses my head again. “I can’t think of a better way to die than trying to make this one the one that counts.”

  They are magical words, the kind that bring my heart back to life. We cling to each other and let the water wash away the sins. I forgive the ones the water can’t get because it doesn't matter. What matters is that in the end I am able to say I was enough and he was enough and our love was more.

  That's all I want. I want more.

  The End

  Volume Ei
ght

  Prologue

  A lost cause

  The Middle East, 2015

  Aimee

  I can’t picture the view, not the way Lorri saw it. I sit on the hilltop and close my eyes, with her voice echoing shitty remarks in my brain, but nope.

  I still can’t see it.

  The lush garden is never going to be there for me. I will never be pure enough to see it. I have enjoyed taking lives. My heart is tainted forever. The fae will never trust me. Not with the stench of death lingering on my skin.

  Nope. It will always be this desolate place where the sand and wind have eroded the beauty. I’m a little scared the whole world might look like this soon if we don't stop Lillith, but I don't know how. I think she’s winning. Not only because we can’t find her, but also because I feel the beauty in the world slipping away. I don't remember when it was, but not so long ago I was in a city that was destroyed. Bombs and sickness had ruined it. The images are hazy in my head.

  I don't even remember which city it was.

  But it isn’t only the outside world leaving me. The beauty that might have once existed inside me is also fading. I sense the closing off of my heart. I don't know when it started or how. I just know one day I wasn't there. I was a shell of a person, detached and empty. Now I’m stuck this way. Hollow.

  Nothing thrills me anymore. Apart from killing, that's always managed to make me happy in a sick and twisted sort of way. Well, killing and Blake. They still make me smile when nothing else touches me. I have seen nearly every mile of this world but the beauty and adventure doesn't register. Traveling this much is a feat I had once assumed would take me ten lifetimes. Those were all lifetimes I had anticipated and planned for.

  Oh, the plans I had—Doctors Without Borders or the UN. Of course, I sort of always messed around with the possibility I would end up being a GP or something ordinary.

  I have prepared for a world that soon will no longer exist, and prepared myself to be a person I can never be. I will never heal anyone or contribute anything to this world because now, instead, I kill and take away, even from the people I once loved.

  I don't remember when it got this way.

  I suppose some of it was when Henry left us. Looking back now, I think I noticed then that things started to decline, our moods and our motivations. I don't remember when he left. But he did. One day he was gone, and I assumed it meant we had lost the war with Lillith, a war we still haven’t started fighting. Lorelei said he went back to the garden to be with his family. The garden that is apparently right here, in this very spot. But all I see is a blood brothel and sand.

  I wish the fae would let me sneak a peek so I could know if Lillith is hiding in there. She is either here in the desert that is somehow secretly the Garden of Eden, or in Ireland. I can’t get to either place. In Ireland, all I see is the castle where life was lost, mine particularly.

  During everything I went through in becoming one of the Roses, I still managed to be me. But that died at the castle. That ended when Lorri killed me and made me this.

  I think we need Henry back.

  I think he’s the answer to where Lillith is.

  I have a deep hope that if we find her and we end it all, we can somehow go back. We can find our way back to being normal.

  My red boots fill my view when I look down the mountain pass. They bring a sad smile to my lips every time I put them on. Sisterhood of the Bloody Boots.

  Damn, I miss her.

  I miss them all.

  I miss every face that has become part of the wallpaper of the dead in my mind. Lydia and Annabelle hurt the most, apart from one face. That one stands out in the crowd. Mostly because he left me with everything and nothing. He gave me his entire heart and soul and left before I could use his gift.

  My eyes drift to the sunny sky, and I wonder if he sees me gazing up at him. I don't look for God or any other person in the world, just him. If I could go back, I would change everything. I regret everything. I would have made Dorian tell me how he felt when there was still a chance for us.

  His death and the image of taking Ari’s baby from her—they are still the worst moments, even after everything else. They will burn in my mind for the rest of my existence.

  I pull out the one thing I should have given Ari in the end. Dorian might have left it behind for me to give to her. Maybe it was his dying wish, but Momma Holt got it wrong when she said it was for me.

  I should have given Ari the feather but I didn't.

  I couldn't.

  It was mine; he left it for me. Even though I’ve told myself a hundred times not to keep it because it’s morally wrong and creepy on a whole level I don’t like to think about. Sniffing my mom’s things in a zippy bag when she was dead was one kind of crazy. But running a feather from a dead guy’s wings across my lips is another. And not just any dead guy, but the father of my closest friend. It’s all a mess, and I’m convinced now it won’t ever be anything but a mess.

  We are a mess. None of us has a hope of saving the world.

  Redeemers . . .

  Lorri went and made us into avenging angels who can’t ever die, but she forgot to mention the part where we would live on and suffer. It is the cruelest fate.

  No matter how many times I tell myself not to dwell on Dorian, I do. And when his feather touches my lips and I close my eyes, I swear I feel him in the air. His cocky attitude and sarcastic mouth taunt me. I insist I hear his accent and see his obsidian eyes. I smell that sweet musk and I taste the kisses we shared. Every one of those felt wrong then, betraying someone by kissing him.

  I eye the white feather and hate myself but not for the reason I should. I should hate that I kissed him at all or even have the damned feather. But instead, I hate that I never melted into just one of those kisses, just once. I hate that my heart’s palpitations are always false alarms that he has come back for me when I hear a voice similar to his or see the back of a man I swear is him.

  I hate that my heart breaks all over again every time I am wrong and he hasn't made it back here.

  Most of all, I hate that I believe he somehow will come back for me. If ever there was a man capable, it is he, and I refuse to believe he has left me forever.

  In the end, you see things the clearest. The world is in trouble and if I had those last minutes with him, I wouldn't have wasted them like I did. I wouldn't have wasted a single moment with him.

  The wind rustles around me, bringing someone with it. Dread fills me, but thankfully, when the air calms I can tell it’s only Blake. He lands with a melancholy sigh, resembling the sigh resting upon my own lips.

  “How’s Alise?” I ask as he settles.

  “She’s still working in that coffeehouse. Two of my favorite things in one place—Alise and coffee. It’s like my own brand of hell.” He is still in love with my sister, painfully. We are quite the pair, he and I. He watches her from a distance, always wanting what he can never have again. And I am in love with someone I may never see again. “Five months at the same place. You know what that means?”

  “No.” I shrug. “I guess she has broken her record of maintaining a job. I believe the previous record was that summer we were fifteen. Mom made her get a job at the ice cream shop on the wharf and the record there was seven weeks, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re an ass. It means we’ve been this, whatever the hell we are”—he looks down at his hands—“for a year and a half almost. Seventeen months to be exact.”

  “What?” I shake my head. “No way.” He doesn't respond, but stares out at the desert like he’s lost. So I ask again, “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That's a bit depressing.” His forlorn expression tells me it truly has been seventeen months. I look back at the desert. “Well, that means you’ve been watching her from the shadows for fifteen months then. That’s got to be a record, right?”

  “Please.” He scoffs. “I wish. No. The longest time spent Alise watching to date is all of 2006 u
p until 2012. This is paltry in comparison, but having had her makes it all that much worse. I still taste her.”

  I ignore his comment. I don't like to imagine him and my sister. He still feels like he’s mine and she ruined him somehow. “Why do I think it’s only been weeks since we changed?” I run my fingers over the feather. Blake’s the only other person in the world who knows the story.

  “I don't know. I get that way too and then I go and see Alise and I feel better. I remember things suddenly. Everything gets clearer.” He glances down at my feather with a grimace. “It’s creepy that the feather used to be part of his wings. Is a white feather like a gray hair? Are you snuggled up to a gray hair from an old man?”

  “I don’t know. He only had one.” It takes me a moment to laugh.

  “I still can’t believe you miss him. The impossibly rude and completely untrustworthy Dorian?”

  “Don’t say that. We were wrong about him.” I turn and stare into his eyes. “None of us knew him, apart from Lorri, I suspect. He was a different man than he pretended to be. You never saw it. But when I did, I almost died. His love is something I don't think I will ever comprehend. He knew every single angle of my face, every tear I’ve cried, every-everything. He saw it all. He was watching me and I never even knew. He was watching me before my mom even died, in the other life.” Each time we reference anything, it happened in another life. Ari’s nasty skills at making the world look like a kaleidoscope has clustered the last couple of years into a repetitive decade of hell and loss. “He watched me and he loved me and he never told me because of Aleks. His loyalty speaks volumes of his character.”

  “It’s still super creepy. Mr. Mac was watching girls too. He loved them. Look what happened to them.”

  “You suck.” I laugh, shoving him. “I mean, he was watching over me. He made sure I was safe, always. He was always there but I never knew.”

  “Still creepy.”