Autumn Rose: A Dark Heroine Novel (20 page)

The second escort car hovered and didn’t follow us as we swung into the parking lot. I figured they had to wait there to rejoin with Prince Alfie and Lisbeth. Edmund, on the other hand, was backing into one of the few remaining spaces, and Prince Alfie took us right to the turning circle in front of the paved entrance.

Prince Fallon shifted to look at me and I could see that his expression had completely changed. No longer was he visibly embarrassed. That had been replaced with a smug smirk that wasn’t matched by any twinkle in his eyes. I was beginning to feel guilty for not backing him up in the morning room. This was clearly paining him.

Crossing the parking lot was what looked like more than half the school moving en masse toward us, and the prince very quickly hopped over the low side of the car without bothering to open the door, flitting in less than a second to my side. He didn’t open my door, either, but reached in and grabbed my hand, pulling me up and supporting me as I placed my foot on the side and hopped down. I used my free hand to keep my skirt from flaring up. I grabbed my bag, but Lady Elizabeth stopped me before I could move any further.

“It’s been really lovely meeting you. I’m going back home on Tuesday, but I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, so come up to Burrator, okay? I need some girl company, and I also need to get you calling me Lisbeth.” She winked at me and I smiled a little, sheepishly glancing down to the tarmac. “And you look beautiful, Autumn. Don’t fret.”

I wondered if she had seen me fussing over my appearance, but didn’t have time to ask, as the prince tugged on my arm. The students were splitting like ants around the small roundabout and spilling very quickly toward the multiple entrances created by the school blocks. Edmund and his counterpart, the former having thrown his driving gloves into the car and buttoned up his Athenean coat of arms–emblazoned jacket, were strolling toward us, seemingly paying no attention to the sprawl threatening to engulf them. I knew better.

“Have fun at school, kiddos!” Prince Alfie shouted over the sound of the engine, in the voice he reserved for banter with his cousin.

“Everybody is looking,” I muttered faintly as the car started to pull away.

“They will do that. Act like nothing is happening,” the prince said, placing a hand on the small of my back and quickly guiding me into the entrance. Even the teachers, who appeared as one group from the staff room, were staring. I could see Mr. Sylaeia smirking amid them.

“I don’t think they are going to buy that one. I just got out of a car with you,” I hissed, having to lean even closer to him to ensure he heard over the chorus of footsteps, gossiping, and even wolf-whistles.

“The men in black don’t help, either,” he added, tossing his gaze over his shoulder for a brief moment.

We had emerged from the tunneled entrance into the covered area surrounding the quad, and I dived to the right of a pillar while he was forced to the left, breaking his contact with me. He didn’t replace his hand.

In the quad, the students who had arrived early were mainly lounging on the benches, but perked up when we climbed the steps into the tarmac square, gawking at the two Athan flanking our shadows.

“You know, I once watched a film where everybody stares—”

“Yeah, I read those sparkly vampire books,” he interrupted and I cursed my lack of attention toward my barriers around my mind. He knew exactly what film I was talking about.

“You actually read—”

“Of course,” he interrupted again in an even lower voice. His hand had returned to my back and was guiding me into the English block as I heard the main crowd thundering through the entrances. “I thought I could find some good material to insult Kaspar Varn with.”

“Any success?”

“Some. But really I just wish the Varns were as well-behaved as vampires in those books. Then life,” he said, dropping his bag onto our usual desk in Mr. Sylaeia’s room, “would be lovely.”

Instead of sitting opposite me, as he usually did in homeroom, he came and sat down in the chair next to me, which would usually be Tammy’s. I wasn’t sure why, but it made me feel better about the impending arrival of the rest of the group.

Just as Edmund and his colleague had settled into place against the empty desk that clung to the wall, Mr. Sylaeia strode in, laptop bag over his shoulder, grinning from ear to ear.

“Morning,” he said brightly. “Extermino?” he chirped breezily in the direction of the Athan, as though simply inquiring about the weather. He didn’t seem at all surprised or ruffled by their presence, despite the fact I was pretty sure his mind would have been enduring severe harassment from the minute he stepped onto the block.

I saw Edmund frown, but the prince beat him to it. “How do you know about that?”

“My mother. Chief gossiper of London. She heard rumors, so she rang me up in the middle of the night to beg me to come to London ‘for my safety.’ ” He made a set of air quotes with his fingers as he finished his sentence off. “That translates as parading a set of women in front of me so I can pick a wife before my half-Sagean blood makes me look the grand old age of thirty when I’m only thirty-six. The horror!” he finished, rolling his eyes and finding whatever he had been looking for in the bag throughout his rant. He came over with several sheets of paper covered in cursive handwriting. One set was written in blue ink, the other black—I recognized the latter as an essay of mine. He let them float down onto the desk. “Better. Much better. Both of you. Perhaps I should arrange detention for you two again,” he chuckled. “Your hair looks nice, Autumn,” he added and I felt myself flare red, weakly smiling and pretending to read over his comments on my essay.

Returning to his desk, he grabbed his tie from his bag and began winding it around his neck, tying a loose knot with it. He looked such a contrast with the other adult Sage in the room, whose shirts were starched and crisp, fastened with gleaming cuff links and buttons, and completely and utterly not loose. “And by the way, don’t try the tea in the staff room. The milk isn’t soy,” he advised the Athan as the first students arrived through the door. After that, his grin disappeared and he acted as though they weren’t there, for which I was thankful.

There were clearly two questions on the lips of every single person who entered the room, but it wasn’t until Gwen thundered in, flopped down into a chair opposite the prince, and pointed at the two newest additions to the homeroom group, that anyone was brave enough to voice their curiosity.

“Who are they?” she demanded.

“My stalkers,” the prince replied in a disinterested voice, hiding behind his essay.

“I know who they are,” Christy proudly declared, pulling up a fourth chair at the table as Tammy and Tee added a fifth and sixth. Everybody else sat up, intent. “They’re the royal bodyguard. They’re with your lot in
all
the pictures.” With that, she pulled out the latest edition of
Quaintrelle,
opened it up to a middle page, and pointed to the prince’s older brother and heir to the throne, who appeared to be lounging in the stern of a yacht, surrounded by bikini-clad women but utterly absorbed by a book. Sure enough, dotted among the hordes of attractive women were the Athan.

The prince briefly leaned across me to appraise the picture before returning to his essay, rolling his eyes. With a triumphant flick of her ponytail Christy began reading the accompanying text.

Gwen, on the other hand, caught my eye and waggled her index finger in the direction of Edmund and, more precisely, his loosely curled hair, which was pushed back off his forehead. Bringing her hand up to cover one side of her mouth so nobody could read the words off her lips, she whispered—not so quietly—to me, “He’s
really
fit!”

I leaned forward to rest my elbows on the desk, lacing my fingers together. “He’s also five hundred years old.”

The other Athan snorted with laughter and then promptly tried to cover it up by clearing his throat. Gwen opened and closed her mouth a few times like a goldfish, before settling on a disappointed pout. Poor Edmund kept staring dead-ahead, his face utterly expressionless.

“You owe me fifty dollars, Richard,” the prince said, addressing the second man in the same bored voice, but when I leaned back in my seat I could see he was smirking behind the pages.

He actually bet on someone hitting on Edmund?
I couldn’t help but grin, too, at that thought.

Perhaps I was grinning too much, because when I looked up, Christy, Gwen, and Tammy were all looking at me with wide, curious eyes and Gwen’s wagging finger was now directed at the space between the prince and me.

“So,” Christy mouthed. “You two?” Her eyebrows raised and she flicked her ponytail again.

I just frowned at them all and shook my head.

Tammy feigned being insulted and then tried again. “Why are they here?” she mouthed, jolting her head toward Edmund and Richard. I shook my head again. I wasn’t going to give them the answer to that. It would only cause panic.

Gwen, utterly thrilled by this turn of events and its entertainment potential, started making very crude gestures with her hands, exactly like those she had used on Tammy on the first day of school. Christy, sympathetic or sensible, I didn’t know which, rolled up her magazine and swatted at Gwen’s hands. Gwen, disgruntled, snatched the magazine and threw it back at Christy. It landed open in front of her.

Before I could see what the picture was of, the prince had snatched it up, smoothing it back down in front of us. I had to suppress a gasp when I read the headline. It was about Violet Lee and the vamperic Autumnal Equinox ball.

He was scanning the left page, so I scanned the right. I knew exactly what he was looking for and couldn’t breathe until I had finished all three columns. There was an abundance of information about her dress, whom she had danced with, insider “impressions” of her character, but nothing about the Crimson family or what had been inflicted upon her. The gag orders were working just as well for the Varns as they were for the Athenea.

“Ugh! Why are you reading that?” Valerie Danvers asked from the next table, with a wrinkled nose. She looked straight at the prince—she had settled on ignoring my existence since our little “incident.” “Sage like you don’t care about humans like Violet Lee. You just let humans die, like
she
does,” she sneered, jabbing her finger toward me—
I spoke too soon. I exist again.

A lump formed in my throat as everybody turned in their seats toward her, and the prince slowly slid the magazine back across the desk.

“Apologies, Valerie, I didn’t realize you were the paragon of compassion and care,” Fallon said loudly, so the whole class could hear. People laughed cruelly. Mr. Sylaeia, who had half opened the door in preparation for sending her out, closed it again.

“Whatever,” she snapped, picking up an actual book and covering her face with it to read. I glanced back at the prince, who hadn’t moved his penetrating gaze away from her.

When Mr. Sylaeia turned his back, he leaned across the gap between the tables. “Insult her again and I’ll forget that I care about humans,” he threatened in a low voice. Valerie looked like she wanted to spit in his face but huffed and hid behind her book.

When everyone had recovered, Christy returned to
Quaintrelle
and also seemed to be in a mood to discuss dimensional politics—a lot of Kable’s girls had found a sudden calling to the subject recently. After a while, the topic inevitably moved back to Violet Lee.

“I don’t know why she needs all this pity,” Christy said, fingering the outline of a sketched version of Violet’s dress. “I get that if you didn’t know about dark beings, seeing thirty men get killed would be a shock, but the rest of us humans got over it. They were slayers, so who cares? Bit selfish doing a damsel in distress, if you ask me. Just turn already.”

I averted my gaze away from the table. Up until the previous day, I would have largely agreed with Christy’s summary. It
was
being dragged out and people were tiring of it. The horrible thing was it was probably better for people to feel apathy toward the Varns’ hostage rather than any united human front of support. That was the last thing we needed.

But now . . .
now that I knew I had been sharing in Violet Lee’s shame through the medium of my dreams, I just couldn’t bring myself to reply. She didn’t need any more pitying; she was a pitiful enough creature already.

I felt a light pressure on my elbow beneath the edge of the desk. I didn’t need to look to know who it was, and let his hand rest there for the remainder of homeroom. When the bell rang, I experienced the same sensation of disappointment I had felt leaving Burrator.

As the prince packed up his things, I was surprised to see Richard, not Edmund, stir and prepare to leave with him. The prince didn’t question it and I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to, either, in front of the others.

As I was unpacking my things for GCSE English—in other words, Mr. Sylaeia’s book on misogyny to finish up, because I was far ahead of the rest of the class—the prince crossed behind me and placed a hand on my shoulder. He pulled a much wider, much more pronounced version of his mischievous smile, which made dimples appear on his cheeks. He said something in Sagean to me, winked, and then strolled out of the room.

Christy twisted in her seat to watch him go, blowing air through pursed lips to produce a low, appreciative whistle in his wake. I watched him go, too, and would have kept staring at the open door if a face hadn’t suddenly appeared level with mine. There was the slam of a bag on the table in the now-free space, but I didn’t dare look.

“You slept with him, didn’t you?” Gwen growled, half getting up on the table by placing a knee on the desk.

I hastily slid back in my chair. “What? No!”

She slammed her palm against the wood; if my hands had not been clenching the chair very tightly, her long, glossy hair would probably have been cinders—sparks were tripping on my fingers.

“Damn! I wanted to know how big his dick is.” She got down and slumped into her chair, folding her arms. “Tell me when you find out. I think you’ve got a way better chance of sucking on it than we do.”