Autumn Rose: A Dark Heroine Novel

by Abigail Gibbs

  “Yes, sir,” the boy replied, and the other servant manning the door turned and placed his fingers around the handle.

  “Are you ready?” Edmund repeated, to me this time. I ran a hand through my hair to catch any wisps, and then took Fallon’s outstretched hand.

  “Yes.”

  Together, with Edmund behind, we waited as the doors swung outward.

  The sheer size of the maerdohealle was enough to take any creature’s breath away. The entire Manderley mansion would fit comfortably into its polished marble center; the chimney tops wouldn’t even graze the arched, cathedral-like roof, and only the uppermost windows would be level with the two-tier balconies that ran around as a continuation of the cloister hallways at the room’s edge. The left wall wasn’t a wall at all; below the balconies several tall arches led out onto yet another terraced balcony, which overlooked the grounds we had flown across. Below us was a long staircase that flared at the bottom; opposite, at the far end of the room, there was another staircase descending from the lowest balcony, which split into two small staircases; in the hollow they created there was a raised dais upon which sat a throne, large enough for two people. And on it two people sat.

  On the balconies and between the pillars, under the arches and in the enormous space in the center, people were packed, row upon row, all gazing up at us. A room full of so many mouths should not be able to fall silent, but it did.

  But as we stepped out of the shadows, there was no mistaking the gasps—and the mutterings.

  Fallon squeezed my hand and we rushed down the steps, boots clunking against the veined marble. The crowd at the bottom tripped over their own feet to move back for us, and as we pressed forward, a few of them sank confidently into bows, while others hesitated, gazing around for a cue.

  “That can’t be her!”

  “She is so old—”

  “Spitting image of the late duchess.”

  “Why is she holding his hand?!”

  Child, the court is like a fishbowl. All the big fish and the pretty fish get looked at. But it’s all silly. None of us are fish. We’re all just drowning.

  We walked and walked through the long hall, the crowd obediently parting for their prince and Heroine. For me. As we passed the center point of the room, the people around us started changing: they stood taller and stayed silent. There were ambassadors—dark beings of every sort—and many nobles I recognized, sashes around their shoulders denoting their council membership, other politicians and advisors wearing the same garb, and all of them staring and so obviously judging through narrowed eyes. I couldn’t blame them. They were seeing a short, tattered blonde, wide-eyed and led by another person. Hardly Heroine material.

  Suddenly, familiar faces started appearing. Eaglen, and the duke and duchess of Victoria, and other members of Fallon’s family. I could feel those that hadn’t seen me for some time staring, but they at least had the good manners to turn away when I looked at them.

  Then there was no more crowd.

  The king launched himself forward from the throne with all the determination of a ruler. Then he faltered, and stopped. His mouth opened and closed a few times.

  “Your Majesty,” Fallon just managed to say before he was engulfed in his father’s arms. The two exchanged a few muttered words before Fallon eventually wriggled out, blushing to his eyes and rubbing the back of his head madly.

  “Oh man,” he groaned. “Not you too, Mom,” he complained before the process was repeated.

  I stood to one side, awkward in their family reunion. There were perhaps a hundred people on their knees behind me, among the anxiously upright masses, and here I was, scuffing my boots together.

  Edmund had moved to stand behind me, one hand on my shoulder to hold me in place. The constant pressure stilled me, and it was only after the king and queen had both hugged and kissed their son until he resembled a beet that Edmund let go.

  “Go,” he murmured softly, and shoved me forward. I approached the royal pair like they were my executioners.

  Oh, fates above, years and years of etiquette lessons, don’t fail me now!

  “Erm . . . hi,” I whispered, stopping in front of them. In my head, my grandmother started shrieking like a banshee, and my eyes went very pink.

  Both of them were just as stupefied, and both were very pale, but my timid words snapped them out of it.

  “Forgive me, my lady, so close . . . it was as though I was seeing a ghost for a moment.” The king shook his head and took one of my sweaty hands in both of his.

  I dropped down onto one knee—curtsying would look odd in shorts. “Your Majesties.”

  The king followed me down into a crouch just as fast, and I looked up from the floor to find him smiling, the sort of smile that made crow’s-feet appear around his eyes.

  “No, young Heroine. You do not bow to us, or to anyone, anymore.” He tucked a hand under my upper arm and helped me to my feet. “Come, I shall make this short.”

  He spun me around so I stood beside him, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. I wondered if he was worried I might run. There was really no need. I was paralyzed.

  “Today, the golden rose of our kingdom has returned to us. Gossip travels fast in this court, and I daresay some of you may have heard, even in the short hour since we announced her position, the impressive feats of this young seer. Not only has she found the vamperic Heroine—”

  This triggered a gasp so loud it sounded like a gale had ripped through the hall. They don’t know about Violet Lee, then?

  The king paused and waited for the shock to subside. “Not only that, but just this week this rose risked, and almost lost, her life to save a human under her charge as guardian. A human who was on the brink of death.”

  It wasn’t like that! It was selfish! I wanted to scream, but as I glanced up at the face of my king, I realized what he was doing. He met the eyes of those in the front rows—the ambassadors, the nobles, his advisors, all the people who held power—with a gaze so hard I half expected those his eyes fell upon to turn to stone. It’s a threat! He’s threatening them with my power! Whether he knew the truth of my actions or not, he was exploiting them.

  “Your Heroine was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in upholding the Terra, and showed a compassion for humanity we must hold as an example in these troubled times. Fate has chosen well. So ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to join me in welcoming, and honoring, the Lady Heroine Autumn Rose.”

  And he did something extraordinary: he bowed down onto one knee. On my other side, the queen dropped into a full curtsy and held it. One by one, their children joined them on the marble floor; Fallon, at their end, smirked and then nodded in silent agreement at the scene around him. It was a wave, a wave that sank and within a minute lapped at the very back of the hall.

  I was the only person standing.

  There are really only so many life-changing mad events a girl can take in one week.

  Sadly, I hit the floor before I had totally blacked out. And it hurt.

  This is comfy. Silky, squishy. Somebody was stroking my hair, taking great care to run their fingers between the strands to detangle it. My head was resting on a lap, but it wasn’t Fallon’s. This person was wearing a skirt.

  “Fallon, I think she may be waking up.”

  I felt a gentle pressure on my hand, and knew it was Fallon’s from the imprint of his scars. I squirmed and let myself slowly come around from whatever deep place I had rested in.

  Opening my eyes, I found myself staring at the long, lean, finely bejeweled neck of the queen. She smiled gently down at me and pressed a hand to my arm, stroking it and holding me down as I tried to sit up in shock.

  “No, my lady, stay. You need to rest.”

  I pushed her away. “How long was I out? Violet Lee? What happened? Is she okay?”

  Fallon pushed me back down into his mother’s lap. “She’s fine. Kaspar Varn won’t let her leave the dimension without him, so she’s staying for now but she’s c
ompletely okay.”

  “King Vladimir is holding a council meeting even as we speak,” the queen added.

  I was confused. In my visions I had definitely seen Kaspar Varn turn away. But he had contradicted my direct order to bring Violet to me. Was this the strength of their tied destiny shining through?

  I couldn’t answer any questions of weight. My eyelids were just too heavy.

  At that moment, there was a sharp knock at one of the many doors leading into the room. When granted permission, a councillor entered, distinguished by one of the council’s sashes. “Ma’am, there is news from the second dimension.”

  My heart jumped into my mouth.

  “It’s not just Violet Lee coming, Your Majesty. The entire vamperic court are relocating to Athenea for the winter season.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Autumn

  The next two weeks were pandemonium. In many ways it was a fate-send, because it kept my mind occupied. First there were the Al-Summers apartments to inspect and overhaul. They were beautiful—an exact match of my rooms at Burrator—but I wanted to wipe away as much of my grandmother’s mark as I could. The sheets were replaced with those I had received for my birthday; the heavy beige drapes with white ones; the gold leaf, which had turned almost brown but coated everything, was cleaned.

  Then I was put in charge of Violet Lee’s room, which would be adjacent to my own; the younger vampires were to be put in the same wing, but toward the back of the palace, thankfully. Why they thought I would know what an eighteen-year-old-human-turned-vampire liked in her room, I didn’t know.

  Next came the doctor’s visit, which was the single most humiliating experience of my life. They asked about my migraines; at first I thought they might prescribe something to help me with the vision-induced brain torture, but no. Next thing I knew, I had a contraceptive implant slotted into my arm.

  Council meetings? I was a deer among a wolf pack. The first two meetings I attended, the sole topic was what exactly I was saving the world from. This was worrying, because I didn’t know quite how I was supposed to be saving the world.

  The therapy was . . . odd. The therapist, a Sage who couldn’t stop talking about how she had attended Freud’s lectures, asked me about my childhood incessantly. All I wanted to talk about was the kingdom’s impending doom and figure out a plan for some help controlling my visions.

  And Fallon . . . Fallon spent a lot of time in my room.

  The heels the maids had forced me into hurt the balls of my feet. The whole ordeal of being assembled and coifed that morning had reminded me of being dressed by my grandmother—when I was six. Uncomfortable, stuffy clothing, hair tugged into braids and scalp poked with hairpins—what was wrong with magic?

  And all for a king who had almost murdered my fellow Heroine.

  I wasn’t the only malcontent in the packed entrance to the palace. Councillors yanked at their sashes to straighten them; the youngest Athenean children, lined up like little soldiers in front of their parents, jostled one another and complained to their mothers. Athenea’s ever-eager heir apparent had even stretched to putting down the book he always carried in order to show off his scowl.

  “Public relations isn’t exactly the vampires’ forte, is it?” Fallon muttered beside me, gazing around the room with a carefully perfected neutral look. It was an expression I was working on, following my first dealing-with-media lesson the day before.

  “At least people aren’t staring at us for once,” I whispered back, not bothering to turn and look at my boyfriend.

  “Whoopee, no paparazzi speculating on our sex life. But don’t worry, here, have a bunch of vampires invade your home instead! They haven’t been to Athenea in decades, why do they have to come now?”

  Because of Violet Lee, of course. The bitterness in his voice was hard to miss. Maybe I just wasn’t as tired of the press yet, because I hadn’t been in the limelight so long; Fallon, on the other hand, kept darkly muttering about Amanda.

  “You were fine with the vampires the other weekend,” I pointed out.

  “There were eight of them then, and we were on their territory. This time, there are three hundred and on our home turf!”

  “At least we know Violet Lee isn’t an arrogant bitch like most of them.”

  I was still staring resolutely ahead but I could feel Fallon’s glare. “We have no idea how turning will have affected her. She’s tied to the biggest dick in the land, after all.”

  I smothered a burst of laughter with a fake cough—being around Fallon’s older siblings had definitely corrupted me.

  Fallon glanced my way and then rolled his eyes. “Oh, Lords of Earth, I’m never going to get that image out of my head now . . .”

  He didn’t have time to, because at that moment a manservant slammed down his staff and roared out an announcement.

  “His Majesty King Vladimir of the second dimension and the Lady Heroine Violet Lee.”

  And all the rest.

  I hadn’t seen the king of the vampires since I was a very small child, and I had been terrified then. But now he seemed no less tall or intimidating; his hair was graying and his eyes, which I had always remembered as light and piercing, were very dark and set back in wrinkled hollows. His entourage flooded around him; the room—myself, Violet Lee, and the two kings excluded—sank into a bow.

  The two kings approached each other and Violet shuffled behind her king, her eyes darting left and right and up and down, to the two kings and back to me. Wherever she looked, I could see those eyes, now surrounded by shadows so purple they outshone the eyes themselves. I was taken aback: that was not the telltale ghoulish, slightly yellowing look of a vampire. It was the look of somebody who was ill.

  But I marched along beside Ll’iriad and shook the vamperic king’s hand with a wide smile as though this were the most joyous day. Violet Lee’s cracked lips didn’t move. She didn’t even notice that Ll’iriad was standing two feet in front of her.

  “Autumn,” she croaked in a voice that struggled to even reach a whisper. She stared at me with the wide eyes of somebody seeing a ghost.

  “Violet,” I said softly. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run away. She shuffled closer, her dress swaying around her knobby knees. She looked better in jeans. She didn’t reply, just pushed her bangs across her forehead.

  Next to her, stooped low, was Kaspar Varn. His hands were pushed forward like he was on the verge of launching himself forward to catch her. His eyes were black and angry, regardless of whom he looked at.

  Suddenly there was a commotion at the back of the room and two figures appeared standing in the eave of the arched entrance. Hissing and snarling erupted, as though a pantomime villain had entered.

  It was like a cold blast of wind hitting me in the warm, gently vibrating air, which was so full of magic. They were human. One a man, middle-aged, dressed in a suit. Michael Lee. The other was a girl a little bit younger than myself, as haggard as Violet but with a pink patterned scarf wrapped around her head.

  She glared right at me. “Witch!” she cried. “Look what you did to my sister!”

  Kaspar sprang up instantly and shifted between the girl and Violet’s line of sight. “Lillian Lee,” he muttered apologetically to me. “We should leave, if . . .”

  Lillian Lee? Nobody told me they were bringing her father and her sister!

  “Of course. There’s a little food laid out—”

  Violet moved faster than such a frail frame should be able to, turning to me. “No! I mean . . . I’m not thirsty—I mean, hungry. I’d just like to rest.”

  In all the fuss and gasps that Lillian’s outburst had caused, and the rush to stand up that had followed it, nobody noticed us sandwiched between the two ruling families. Ll’iriad did, and when I glanced at him he gave us a little nod. Knowing there was a small back passage that we could escape through, I went to take Violet’s elbow and steer her through the crowd.

  At first I thought it might be an electric shock, from s
tatic. But the initial twinge of pain continued all the way up my arm and into my shoulder. I wanted to let go of her, but I couldn’t. My hand was glued to hers as my mental walls, supposedly foolproof, crashed and burned. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t probe and no box that didn’t spring open the minute I cast an eye on it. It was a barrage of images and emotions, things I didn’t want to see—personal things—hitting me in wave after wave. The feel of a wrist pressed to her lips, the salty taste of blood, and the pang of reluctant loathing that surfaced when Lord Fabian Ariani passed through my mind. And the most frequent image was of Kaspar Varn. Kaspar Varn and her. Kissing. Holding. Fucking. That was her word. It wasn’t mine. It was her word in my head.

  We both froze in the crowd until Violet slowly ran her hand down my wrist and into my palm, and then tugged me into a tight embrace. She was taller than me, but she stooped so her mouth was near my ear.

  “The dead vamperic queen is behind you. She says we’re connected. She says you can talk to her through me,” she whispered. Her voice shook and, pulling back an inch, I could see her eyes were fixed over my shoulder. I turned slightly. It was an empty spot.

  Though my eyes saw nothing, in my head flickered an image of an empty entrance, in which Violet and I were joined by only one person: a strikingly beautiful woman in an emerald-green dress, the deceased queen of the vampires and Kaspar’s mother . . . and one of the innocents who had died for Violet.

  I thought “Your Majesty,” and immediately Violet had spoken the words.

  “Lady Heroine,” the figure in the image replied. “Violet cannot see me for long. I pray, save her. She is fading . . . you know of the darkness of the mind. Save her. She cannot keep my kind from war without your support.”

  I can’t save myself! I can’t stop a war here! I barely know what enemy I face . . .

  “My lady, you and Violet are one and the same. You have both seen death and been upon the brink of it. You know of the hatred between human and dark being. You both have powers beyond anything that has gone before. Think, think how you are similar. You grow stronger every day, and so can she.”